The Great Hall held the cold as a well holds water, all the way down to the flagstones, and at the candle-clock on the fifth week of frost the Chamber sat in it with its breath showing. Tallow had the minutes’ chair at the end of the long table. He had a stub of pencil behind one ear, a pot of Ink at his elbow, and a ruled sheet on which he had already written the date, the hour, and the names of everyone present. The list ran longer than the Chamber’s nine seats, because the prince and the factor were not Hands, and because Morrow was never present in any sense the minutes could use.
Mott sat at the visitors’ end, in a chair that Velvet had had brought in from the receiving-hall for her, and she had not taken her gloves off. Beside her sat the lord of Thornwick’s clerk, a young man with a bad cough and a clean ledger on his knees. Vale himself was not there. He had sent word that he would be at the lodgers’ rail when the Writ allowed him, and that until then he would not presume.
“The matter before the Chamber,” said Idrin, from the prince’s chair at the head of the table, “is the Charter of Lending, which was made in the autumn, by the Chamber’s own Full assent, and which lent the Mason’s spare Form to a lord of Thornwick for one season. The Form has been returned…
