Mott took the long table in the Kitchen the next morning, opposite the cook, because the prince had told her that the cook was the only person in the Hold who had never once been asked, and she had decided that the least she could do was ask in a place where the cook was comfortable. The long table stood beneath the single high window at the back of the room, where the light came in grey and milky over the flour-bins. It was scored with knife-marks and burn-rings and the faint ghost of a hundred years of bread. Pell sat at the far end of it with her arms in a bowl of dough up to the elbow, kneading with a steady rhythm that did not stop once for the duration of the offer.
Mott had rehearsed the offer on the Lessary Road and again in the night. It was a good offer. It had been the best offer she had ever drafted, and she had drafted offers for lords and bishops and the Concord’s own magistrates, and she had never once been ashamed of the wording. She was ashamed of it now. She did not know why. The paper was in her coat, folded to a small square, and she could feel its corners against her ribs as she sat down, the way she had felt the Charter there on the road.
