The Chancery closed its first sitting without a finding, which Idrin had expected, and it closed it with a bow, which he had not.
Master Dorr rose from the Chancery’s bench at the twelfth hour after noon, when the last candle in the Great Hall had burned down to a finger’s width of wax and the smoke from the iron rings hung in the upper air like a grey shelf. He had the blue-black ledger under one arm and the black-lacquered box in his other hand. He had the face of neither a man who had won a commission nor one who had lost it. He looked like a clerk at the end of a long column who has added the figures twice and has not yet decided whether to trust the answer. He stood at the foot of the Chancery’s table, facing the Chamber’s table and the prince’s chair, and he read the commission’s close aloud, in the same quiet voice in which he had read everything else for three days.
“The Chancery has heard the Hands of Ormhold, and the witnesses named in its schedule, and the Crown’s question, whether the Mantle of Ormhold is a subject of the Crown of Lessary or its property, is not answered by this sitting.” He turned the page. “The quarter-day stands, sixty days from the summons, by the Lessaran count. On that day the Chancery will give its finding in writing at Sallowmere. The commission will return to the Hold for…
