Anselm Dorr had not expected to be asked to speak. He had prepared, on the road from Sallowmere and again in the Chancery’s record-room the night before, for every kind of question a Hold might put to a magistrate. He had prepared for the question of the Mantle’s subjecthood, and for the question of the Crown’s lease, and for the question of whether a Chancery commission had any right to sit inside a wall that the Crown had not yet recognised. He had prepared answers for all of them, and he had written the answers in blue-black on a sheet of the Chancery’s best paper, and folded the sheet, and put it in his inside pocket beside the small book where he had kept his own copy of the Hold’s first line since the nineteenth night of the Fair.
He had not prepared for the silence in the Great Hall after Tallow said the clause number.
It was a long silence. He had sat through a great many silences in a great many courts, and they had all had a shape to them, a kind of pressure that rose and fell as the room waited for the next thing to be said. This one did not rise or fall. It simply stood, the way the walls stood, and waited for him to fill it.
