They set the table across the causeway’s middle stones, where the Hold’s wall-foot met the Lessary Road’s last rise. It was a plank board on two trestles, scrubbed with sand and river-water, and it had been carried down from the gatehouse by Harrow and Korrin with a grumbling that Idrin could hear from the far end of the causeway. Both parties sat on opposite sides of it. Both parties had a clerk. The Hold’s clerk was Tallow, who sat very upright on a stool with the Register open at a fresh page and a pot of ink beside his left hand. The marsh’s clerk was a thin, quiet young man named Wennick, whom Bardo had introduced in a single word, mine, and who had a stub of charcoal and a wooden tablet and a way of looking at the Warden’s coat as though he were pricing it.
The river ran brown and fast under the causeway’s arches. The mist had burned off. The sun lay low over the reeds, and the marsh was very bright.
“Read them,” said Bardo, and folded his arms.
Tallow read them. He read them from the top, clause by clause, in the flat, measured voice he kept for minutes, and every time he came to a phrase he disagreed with, he stopped, looked up at the marsh-man across the board, and quoted the Charter of Shares at him by its clause number. He did this four times in the first hour. Bardo bore it with the patience of a man who had been quoted at by Lessary tax-clerks for twenty years and had long since learned that the quoting always ended with a signature.
The first clause was the salt. One sack of salt, of the marsh’s own pressing, for one measured load of cut stone, the load to be counted by the Hold’s mason at the quarry gate and again by the marsh’s clerk at the causeway’s end. The second clause was the carrying. The stone was to be carried to the marsh’s edge and no further. The marsh would not come up the causeway to take it, and the Hold would not go down into the reeds. The third clause was the price of the carrying, which Tallow had written as a span, and which Bardo said was a robbery. The fourth was the dead.
“The marsh’s dead are to be buried in the marsh,” said Tallow, and read the clause through in full. “And a share of every twentieth load of stone is set aside for their graves, to be laid on the marsh’s own bank, by the marsh’s own hands. The Hold does not touch the graves. The Hold does not count them. The Hold pays for the stone that is laid over them.”
Bardo unfolded his arms. For a moment he did not say anything. He looked down at the wood of the board, and at his own hands on it, and then he nodded, once, quite slowly.
“Yes,” he said. “That one. Keep that one.”
“It is accepted in principle,” said Idrin.
“It is accepted in marsh,” said Bardo. “There is no difference between the two. Ask the mud.”
Idrin had been listening with his scarred hand resting on the board. He had been waiting for the fourth clause to be settled, the way one waits for a bridge to bear weight before crossing it, and now that it had, he felt something in his chest ease and then tighten again. He took a breath. He had a Royal Form ready. It was the Form for a binding instrument between two parties of unequal standing, and it began with the words Be it known to all who are party to this, and he had said those words in the Lessary court a hundred times and never once meant them.
“Let us put the terms,” he said, “in the Royal Forms.”
Bardo looked at him as if he had asked for the marsh to be drained.
“The marsh does not read them,” he said. “It has never had a reason to. You can write be it known at the top of the page and the mud will still come up through the boots. Read it plain, Warden. Read it the way the Clerk reads the Charter, with the range at the end, and then I will know whether it can be trusted.”
Idrin set the Form aside. He had known he would have to. He felt the warmth come up under his collar, the old Lessary blush of a man who has been corrected in public by a commoner, and under the warmth he found, to his surprise, something very close to relief. “Then I will read it plain,” he said.
“Good,” said Bardo. “Now the Clerk is going to say the range, and you are going to pretend you did not want the Forms, and we will all go home.”
Harrow counted the terms aloud. He had come to the causeway’s end with his hands behind his back and his cap pulled low, and he stood at the board’s edge and repeated each clause after Tallow in a flat, low voice, the way he had repeated the first share-day tally in the granary. He did not object to any of it. He counted the words, one by one, as though they were stones he meant to fix in the wall. When Tallow reached the word twentieth, Harrow stopped, and then began again, and got the count right the second time.
“It is in the stones now,” he said. “It will hold.”
Harrow had begun to hum under the reading, very quietly, a flat low tune with no words in it. Tamsin, behind the trestle, had picked up the second line of it without looking at him.
Pell came down the causeway in the middle of the reading. She had a basket on her arm and a cloth over it, and she came with her chin up and her broad hips swinging, past the Hold’s wall-foot and the first causeway stone and the trestle, to the marsh side of the board. She set the basket down in front of the thin clerk, Wennick, and took the cloth away. Inside was a loaf of the Hold’s own barley bread, still warm, with a crust like a shield.
Wennick looked at it. He looked at Pell. Then, very slowly and without a word, he picked up the loaf and broke off the heel and began to eat.
Pell turned to Bardo. “There,” she said. “Now the clause about the dead can go down easily.”
“That is the first honest bargain I have been offered,” Bardo said, “by a Lessary’s son.”
“I am not a Lessary’s son,” said Idrin.
“That is what I have heard,” said Bardo. He kept his eyes on the table. He was watching his clerk chew, and his mouth had softened, very slightly, at one corner.
Pell sent down a second plate without being asked. It came on a board, with a cloth over the bread and a crock of goat’s butter beside it, and it was carried by the Kitchen’s youngest carrier, who put it on the trestle and ran back up the causeway as though it might bite him. Wennick took the butter with the heel of the loaf. He ate it steadily, and went on reading the clause about the dead with his lips moving, as if he had decided that bread and law could be consumed at the same speed.
They came to the final clause, and it was a short one. Tallow read it with care. “The terms of this board are the Hold’s and the marsh’s, and are binding on the Hold so long as the Hold has stone and on the marsh so long as the marsh has salt.” He stopped. He looked at the page for a while. Then he read the last words of the clause, which were the Hold’s own, written in the Warden’s name. “Signed for the Hold by its Warden, under the Hold’s seal.”
“The seal,” said Wennick.
It was the first thing the thin clerk had said since he had sat down. He had finished the bread. He had brushed the crumbs from his fingers and picked up his charcoal, and he was looking, with a clerk’s careful interest, at the Warden’s coat. He was not looking at the Warden. He was looking at the coat, at the place over the left breast where the cloth lay across the chest.
“Why does the Hold name the Warden’s coat as its seal?” he asked. “I have been told the Hold has a stone with its name cut on it, and a bell, and a gate. I was not told the coat.”
Idrin looked down.
It was a dark grey coat, a dress coat of the Lessary kind that had been worn through at the cuffs and mended at the shoulder by a Kitchen woman with a rough hand. He had worn it every day since he had come to the Hold. He had not thought about it. He thought about it now. Through the wool, very faint, in the bright afternoon light off the river, there was a pale shape. It was the crown-shaped mark of the Seal, sitting over his heart, and it had grown, since the morning, by a single thread’s breadth at the edge.
He put his scarred hand over it without meaning to.
“It is not a seal,” he said quietly. “It is a mark.”
“Then it is the Hold’s mark,” said Wennick, and wrote it down, and Tallow, who had been waiting for exactly that sentence for the whole of the reading, wrote it down too, and drew a dagger beside it.