The letter came up the causeway under a white flag on the nineteenth day of the siege, carried by a Lessaran rider who did not dismount and did not glance at the wall, and Tallow took it from the gate-warden’s hand as though it were a live coal.
It was a thick sheet, folded twice, in a heavy cream paper that had been bought by someone who could afford to be careless with it. The seal was Lessary’s crown and wheat, pressed into red wax, and it had cracked along the left arm of the crown, a fine hairline running from the tip of the arm down to the wheat. The address was written in a plain hand, with no flourish on the capitals, as a man might write a note to a tradesman about a broken gutter.
To the Tenant of a Thing at Ormhold.
Tallow did not open it at the gate. He carried it down the stair to the Great Hall, past the Chamber’s empty benches and the Register’s brass stand, and he laid it on the table where the Dovereach copy still lay under its linen cover, withdrawn from every Bench record and kept now as an exhibit, the way one keeps a bad coin to show the honest.
