Idrin set up the Great Hall as a court on the fifth morning, because a court was what he had been raised to need, and because the only other choice was to sit in the gatehouse among the damp and the ledger and wait for something to happen to him. He dragged two oak doors out of the kitchen store, laid them end to end across a pair of trestles, and set a chair at the head. The chair was the only one in the Hold with arms. Jory found it in the north gallery under a sheet, and when he dragged it down the stairs he complained about it the entire way, as if the chair had personally offended him.
“It’s a throne,” Jory said, setting it down at the head of the table with a bump. “You can’t sit in a throne in the middle of a ruin. It’ll think you’re getting above yourself.”
“It is not a throne. It is a chair for the presiding officer of a chamber that does not yet exist.”
“That’s a throne with a long name.”
Idrin sat in it. It was too high for the table and too deep for his back, and the arms were set at the wrong angle for his elbows, so that he had to sit very straight to keep from slumping against them. He found that he liked the discomfort. It reminded him of the schoolroom at Sallowmere, where the masters had made him sit upright for three hours a day and had told him that a prince who slumped was a prince who had begun to lose the argument.
He laid out his things on the oak in the order his tutors had taught him. The nursery book of Royal Forms went on the left, its cover worn and its pages marked with slips of paper that had been coloured red for the Forms of command and blue for the Forms of assent. The writ of exile went on the right, in its waxed case, unopened, because he had read it so many times that he did not need to open it again. The gold-nibbed pen went in the centre. Then he took a fresh sheet of paper from the box he had brought from Lessary, and dipped the pen in the stone inkwell that Pell had found for him, and began.
Jory, sweeping, watched him from the far end of the hall. He had been sweeping the floor since breakfast, in long careful strokes that raised a soft haze of grey dust in the shafts of light from the high windows. He seemed to be sweeping for the pleasure of it. Every so often he stopped, leaned on the broom and looked at Idrin with the expression of a man watching a horse try to climb a stair.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Drafting.”
“You’ve been drafting since breakfast.”
“I have been drafting since yesterday, but I have only been permitted to begin this morning.”
“Who permits you?”
“The nursery,” said Idrin. “The nursery permits all things, and then the tutors enforce them.”
Jory snorted and went back to his sweeping.
The overseers’ grammar was not complicated. That was the first thing Idrin had been taught about it, when he was six and his mother had put the red slip of paper in the book and told him that every command he gave would one day be a sentence in this language. It had the simplicity of a ledger. Every command named a site, a duty and a term, and a command that did not name all three was not a command at all but a suggestion, which a prince could make to a cook but not to a gate. A site was the place the command touched. A duty was what the site must do. A term was how long the duty must last. A Pretender could issue a Writ, and a Writ could name one site only, and it could last for as long as its wording said it would.
He wrote a draft. We find the gate of Ormhold unfit to stand open. We direct that the gate be shut and held shut. This Writ is for the gate and for no other site, and it stands until the gate is opened by the same voice. He read it aloud, very softly, so that Jory would not hear.
The Hall did not respond. It was a large cold room, and it had not responded to anything yet. But when he read the last line, the floor-stones under the chair gave a faint shift, a movement he felt through the soles of his boots and through the legs of the chair, like the slow settling of a ship’s keel. He stopped and sat motionless until it had stopped too.
“Too many words,” he said to himself.
He crossed the draft out with one stroke. He wrote another. The gate is shut. It is shut by our Writ and by no other hand. It shall stay so. That was briefer, and it was a sentence in good order, but the grammar was wrong. It had no term. It was a command with no end, which the nursery book called a sentence of the wall, and it had been written by a man who wanted something to be permanent without wanting to say why. Idrin held the paper up to the window and read it again, and felt the cold of the word permanent run down his spine like water. He crossed it out too.
“The book says a command costs the speaker something,” Jory said from across the hall. He had stopped sweeping and was leaning on the broom again. “What does it cost?”
“It says some small thing.”
“That’s not a price. That’s a shrug.”
“I agree. It is a poor piece of writing. The author did not wish to be specific about the cost, and I suspect that is the only thing in the book that he was specific about.” Idrin frowned at the page. “There is a note in the margin, in a different hand, that says the Register will keep it, the speaker will not know which. I don’t like that note at all.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means the Register takes something from the speaker,” said Idrin, slowly, “for every Writ. And the speaker does not get to choose what it takes.”
Jory was quiet for a moment. Then he said, without any particular emphasis, “You’d better be sure you want the gate badly enough, then.”
Idrin looked up. Jory was watching him steadily across the length of the hall, his face grave, his broom forgotten against his shoulder. It was not a farm-boy’s look, or a squire’s. It was the look of a young man who had been brought up to know exactly what things cost and had decided, against all the evidence, to keep the knowledge to himself.
“I want the gate shut,” said Idrin.
“Badly?”
“Badly enough to pay a fair price for it, I hope.”
“And what’s a fair price for a gate?”
Idrin did not answer that. He turned back to the sheet and wrote the third draft, and this time he took his time. He began with the site, which was the gate. He wrote the duty in the simplest words he knew, which were the ones his mother had used when she wanted a door closed: shut. He wrote the term, and found that the term was harder than the rest. A Writ was for a site, and a term was for the duty, and a gate that was shut for ever was a gate that could not be opened by anyone who needed to pass. He wrote until the gate is opened by a voice of the Hold, and then, because a voice of the Hold did not yet exist in any sense the nursery book could recognise, he crossed out of the Hold and wrote of the Hold’s Warden. He did not have the rank of Warden, and would not for weeks, but the Forms allowed a prince to write a term that anticipated his own rank, and he had decided that the Hold would be the better for an optimist.
At the end he wrote the short sentence he had been dreading, the one that made a Writ into a thing that could be spoken aloud. Let the gate be shut.
He read it under his breath. Then, because he had served a clerk’s term in the Chancery as well as a prince’s schooling, he read the whole Writ aloud in a clear, dry voice to test it. We find the gate of Ormhold unfit to stand open. Let the gate be shut. This Writ is for the gate and for no other site. It stands until the gate is opened by a voice of the Hold’s Warden.
Under the chair, the floor-stones shifted again, a finger’s width, and held.
He read the word gate again. He had not meant to. It came out of his mouth on its own, as a name does when someone has been called across a crowd. He heard it in the air of the Hall, and then he heard something else: a creak, long and dry, from the far end of the room where the great east shutters stood folded back against the wall.
Idrin did not turn round. He knew without looking that the shutters had moved. He could feel them the way he had felt the stones, as a weight that had been pointing one way and had now, with a long dry patience, turned to face him instead. The creak came again, and then again, a little nearer, a little more certain of its direction, like a crowd that has heard its own name called from the front and has begun, politely and without any hurry, to lean in.
Jory had frozen at the far end of the hall. He had stopped sweeping. The broom leaned against his shoulder, and the dust he had raised was hanging in the light between them, not falling.
“Idrin,” he said quietly.
Idrin took a breath and read the Writ a second time, aloud, to the whole of the empty Hall, as a clerk reads a verdict he has been told he must deliver in full. The shutters on the east wall groaned. Then they swung round, all of them, one after another, along the whole length of the wall, until every one of them was turned toward the head of the table where he sat, and the room was lit from behind them with a pale, cold, waiting light, though there was no wind to move them at all.