Harrow counted the Great Hall’s beams before the Charter was read, because a Chamber that was about to vote on a boy’s citizenship ought to know how much weight its roof could take.
There were twenty-two of them, oak, hand-adzed, each one a little darker than the last where the lamp-smoke had reached it over two hundred years. He had cut the first of them himself, in the Hold’s second summer, from a tree left rotting at the foot of the Garrison Mound. The sap had stuck to his fingers like honey.
He counted them again, aloud, under his breath. Twenty-two.
“Harrow,” said Pell, from the bench beside him. “The roof is not going to fall in on the boy.”
“I am making sure.”
“You are making sure of the roof the way Gaunt makes sure of his temper. Stop it.”
He stopped. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the Register on its brass stand at the Chamber’s head, where Tallow stood with the Charter open in front of him and his spectacles still missing from his nose. He had asked Ysra to read the ink for him, and she had refused, because she said she could count the lines of a Charter and did not want to be seen reading one. So Tallow held the sheet close to the lamp, very close, with his nose almost touching the vellum, and read it by feel and memory and the stubborn force of his own voice.
