Korrin sat on the Hands’ bench for the whole of the sitting, which he had never once done before. He had stood at the river-gate wall through three Turns of the Chamber and walked out of two more. He had ridden the Lessary Road in the dark, and had slept in the stable, and had gone up the Watch stair at dawn without speaking to anybody, and he had never in his life sat still on a bench for longer than it took to eat a loaf. But the Chancery’s magistrate had asked the Hands to be seated, and the prince had said sit, and so Korrin had sat, and he had been sitting for three hours now with his hands on his knees and his jaw locked and his fists curled up like two stones in a river.
He wanted to break the clerk’s hand.
He did not want to break the magistrate’s. The magistrate had turned out to be the Ink Clerk, which Korrin had not expected, and then had stood up in the Hall and said so in plain words, which Korrin had not expected at all. But it was the clerk with the cough who had been writing down every word for three days, and who had watched the Hands the whole time with a face that gave nothing away, and who had written Keystone in the blue-black Ink on the second day of the Inquest with two small letters wrong. Korrin had seen it. He…
