The testimony ran long, and by the ninth hour after noon the Chancery’s clerks were tired, and the Hands were tired, and the candles in their iron rings had burned down to stubs that smoked when the doors opened. Sella had watched the whole of it from the bench at the far end, with the black book under her hand and her grey apron smoothed flat over her knees. She had heard Harrow count the walls, and Gaunt object to the grammar, and Korrin say he distrusted his own fists. She had heard Tallow read the Register’s first line aloud, twice, in the voice he used for things he was afraid of. She had heard the Chancery’s magistrate say the word Lessary eleven times and property twenty-three, and she had counted both, because she could not help it, and because Sella had never been able to watch a body being examined without also taking its measure.
She was called last among the Hands.
She did not get up at once. She sat for the length of a candle-clock tick with her hand on the black book and the cold of the Hall coming up through the bench into her thighs, and she looked at the magistrate across the long table, and she thought about the bone-ledger in its box under the infirmary floor, with its nine hundred and ninety-eight lines filled and its thousandth line blank.
