The lodgers’ petition came before the Chamber at the Turn, which was the first time in the history of the Hold that a paper written by lodgers had been read at the Turn at all. Osk had not expected to be moved by it. He had expected to sit in the gallery with his hat on his knee and his hands folded over the brim, and to watch the Hands argue about his paper the way they argued about everything, loudly and at length, and then to go down the Watch stair afterward and tell the well-house what had been said, with the parts that mattered and the parts that had made the Hands laugh. He had expected it to be one more Turn in a long string of Turns that he had sat through without a voice.
He had not expected the prince’s own hand on the cover.
It was a plain brown cover of marsh-paper, folded double, and Tallow had taken the lodgers’ sheet from Osk’s own hand at the Gatehouse two days earlier and had written the Writ over it in his small exact Ink, with the count of a hundred and twelve in the margin and the lodgers’ names in a column down the side. Then the prince had put his own hand to the cover. It was a plain hand too, the hand of a clerk who had been taught to write by a tutor who was dead. It said, in the top corner, very…
