Rook had been a soldier for nineteen years and a paid guard for two, and in all that time he had never once been asked a question he could not answer in a sentence. He had been asked a great many questions that could not be answered in a sentence. He had simply learned to answer them in one anyway, because a long answer gave a man something to hide in, and a short one left him standing where the other fellow could see him.
So he sat on the witness bench in the Great Hall with his hands on his knees and his leather hat on the bench beside him, and he waited for the magistrate to ask him.
The magistrate asked him at the candle-clock, the third hour after noon, with the light coming in long and grey through the high windows and the Hands watching from their bench along the west wall. Rook knew the Hands, most of them. He had stood at the gate with three of them the summer his company came up the road to pin it, when the Mantle had come out of the arch with its arms full of stones, and he had watched the big grey Form walk past him in the yard, and had felt the back of his neck go cold, the way it did before a fight. He had not expected to feel it again in a room.
