The courier came up the Lessary Road at mid-morning, on a grey horse with a white blaze and a Chancery pennant tied to its bridle, and he stopped at the causeway’s foot as if he had been told to stop there by someone who had counted the paces. He was a young man in a dark blue coat, with a leather satchel strapped across his chest and a face that had been trained to show nothing at all. He did not come on. He sat his horse at the edge of the first causeway stone, a hand’s breadth outside the reach-marker that Harrow had set in the mud the spring before, and he waited, with the patience of a messenger who knows that a gate will eventually be opened to him if he is not in a hurry.
Idrin watched him from the wall. Harrow was beside him, counting the horse’s hooves on the stone.
“He is one pace inside the marker,” said Harrow.
“He is one pace outside the Crown’s line,” said Idrin. “The Crown’s line is the wall-foot. The Chancery has always drawn it there. I suppose the courier does not know about the reach.”
“The courier does not need to know,” said Harrow. “The horse does.”
The courier did not come up to the gate. He held up the packet instead, sealed in red, and waved it once, and when Korrin came along the wall-walk with his bow across his shoulders and his eyes narrowed, he called across the water in a clear, careful voice that he had a letter for the Hold, and that he would not come nearer until the Hold had opened the wicket to receive it. Korrin said something short and rude under his breath. Then he looked at Idrin, and Idrin nodded, and Korrin sent Tallow down the stair to the wicket, because Tallow was the only Hand who would take a Chancery packet from a Chancery hand without first calling it a bad name.
Tallow took it through the wicket. He stood on the inside of the gate with the iron door held open a crack, and he looked at the courier’s gloved fingers, and then at the packet, and then he took it, and said, in the flat, polite voice of a clerk who has been told he is not allowed to be surprised, “The Hold receives this letter, and records its arrival. The Hold does not yet say that it has read it.”
“The Crown’s envoy will be glad to hear it,” said the courier, and turned his horse around, and went away down the causeway at a walk.
Tallow came back up the stair with the packet in both hands. He held it as if it might spill. When he reached the gatehouse table he laid it down in front of the Warden, face up, with the red wax to the light, and then he stood back, and looked at it as though it were a dog that had brought him a bone he had not asked for.
Idrin broke the seal.
The letter was short, and the hand was a woman’s, very clear and very upright, with a lawyer’s habit of putting a full stop after every line. It was addressed to the Warden of the Hold of Ormhold. It was signed Ossane Tiller, Envoy of the Crown of Lessary, in the Assembly’s name. Idrin read it aloud, because the Chamber had gathered on the stair above him and he did not think a Chancery letter should be read to himself alone.
“Lord Warden,” he read. “I write to ask whether you will receive me in person, at the Hold, at a time that suits your Chamber, to discuss the status of the thing held at Ormhold, which the Crown has entered in its rolls as property. I am aware that the Hold does not consider itself a property. I am also aware that the Crown does not consider the Hold a subject. I write because one of us must eventually be correct, and I would prefer that it were a matter of law, and not of weather.”
“The weather,” said Harrow, from the stair, “will be fine.”
Idrin went on. “The Crown is willing to recognise the Hold as a holding of the Warden under Lessary’s law, and to recognise the Warden in the Assembly of Seats at Sallowmere, should the Hold name its tenant and that tenant sign the Crown’s lease. I do not wish to press this point in writing. I wish to say it to your face, and to hear whether your face agrees.”
He stopped, and read the rest in silence, and then read the signature again.
“Read it again,” said Pell, from the stair-foot, where she had come with her spoon still in her hand. “The part about the face.”
Idrin read it again. Harrow counted the paragraphs aloud on his fingers and got four, and then, because the last one was longer than the others, he got five, and then he said the fifth paragraph was only a clause that had lost its way.
“Polite,” said Pell, when the letter was done. She tapped the spoon against her palm. “It is very polite, boy. Politeness is a cart with teeth. Whoever wrote it knew exactly how much the Hold wants a seat in Sallowmere, and she has put the seat right where you can see it, like a tasty bone on a shelf.”
“The Crown has never once been polite to anyone in its life,” said Gaunt, from the bench. He had come down from the forge with soot on his forearms and a look of deep, unshakeable outrage. “It has been courteous, which is a different thing. It is courteous to a dog it is about to kick. I object to the paper.”
“The paper is very good paper,” said Tallow.
“It should not be this good.”
Idrin turned the sheet over. The back of it was blank, but the paper had a faint pattern pressed into its fibres, like a watermark, which he could just see when he held it to the window. It was a crown with three points, the same crown as the one on the Seal over his heart, though this one was set in the paper rather than in wax. He held it up for the room to see. Nobody spoke.
“The Chancery draft of the Writ of Vermin,” said Tallow slowly, looking at the page over the Warden’s shoulder. “I have seen the hand. It is in the Crown’s old register, the one they copied into the back leaves of ours. The Writ is drafted in a hand very like this one. The same loops on the capitals. The same long tail on the letter s.”
“Then she has been reading our book,” said Idrin.
“She has been reading the Crown’s book,” said Tallow, “which is not the same thing, Warden, and I should be careful about saying it is.” He leaned closer, very carefully, so as not to touch the paper with his breath, and looked at the letter’s capitals with his nose a finger’s width from the page. Then he straightened, and his face changed. “No,” he said. “They are not alike at all. I have been fooled by a hand that wanted me to think so. It is a clever hand. It has been trained to look like the old hand, and the old hand was trained to look like the Chancery’s hand, and at the bottom of it there is nothing but a woman who knows how to copy a signature.”
“Is that a comfort?” asked Idrin.
“It is a margin,” said Tallow, “and it is wide, and I do not trust it.”
They read the rest of the letter together. It was not long. It promised nothing that could be written down in a Charter, and it offered a great deal that could be read aloud, and it was written with the courtesy of someone who has never once in her life raised her voice in a court and expects, by the end of a case, to be the only person in the room who can still hear herself think. Idrin found that he liked her for it, and he did not know whether to be ashamed of that.
Harrow counted the paragraphs again on his fingers, and then the words of the last one, and said there were nineteen. He said it was an unlucky number for a Crown to use. Pell said it was the first unlucky thing she had heard from the Crown, and that she would take it as a gift.
The last line was underscored twice, in dark ink, with a steady pressure that had torn the paper a little at the end.
I shall come in person before the next full moon, and I shall bring with me the Crown’s own copy of the lease, with its tenant’s line left blank, as the Crown has always kept it.
Idrin read the line aloud, and the stair above him went quiet.
“Blank,” said Pell, at last. She put down her spoon. For the first time since the courier had come up the causeway, she did not sound amused. “A lease with its tenant’s line left empty. Who signs a thing like that, boy? Who signs a lease with no one’s name on it?”
“Someone who has been waiting for the tenant to come and fill it in,” said Idrin.
“Then we had better find out who the tenant is,” said Pell, “before she does.”
Nobody answered her. Above them on the stair, Ysra stood with her back to the wall and her eyes on the gatehouse door, counting something in silence, and Idrin saw her lips move on the same number three times before she gave up and looked at the letter again.