He chose dawn because the Forms said a command should be given in the hour when the thing commanded was most awake, and because he had not slept. Idrin walked down from the gatehouse with the grey dew soaking through his boots and the sky going from ash to pearl above the marsh, and he stopped under the arch in the place where Jory had been burned, and he took off his hat.
It seemed the correct thing to do. He had been taught that a Writ spoken with the head covered was a Writ spoken in private, and this one was not private. It belonged to the Hold. He laid the hat on the cobbles beside the gate-post and straightened his coat, which was the coat of a Lessaran dress uniform with its braid cut away, and he put his right hand flat against the stone where he had felt the slow turn of the weft that first afternoon. The stone was cool. It was only stone at the edges. But under the flat of his palm it held a faint tremor, as a sleeping dog’s flank holds its breath before a dream.
Jory stood at the foot of the gatehouse steps with a bucket of water in each hand. He had come down to fetch them and had stopped, and he did not put them down, and Idrin could feel him looking.
“Go on,” Jory said quietly.
Idrin opened his mouth and spoke the Writ.
He did not shout it. He had been taught that a prince who shouts is a prince who has lost the argument, and he had decided, in the night, that he would not begin the Hold by losing anything. So he spoke it in the clear dry voice of the Chancery court, every word laid down separately like a coin on a counting-table, and the words went out under the arch and up toward the broken bell-frame and came back to him in the stillness.
“We find the gate of Ormhold unfit to stand open. Let the gate be shut. This Writ is for the gate and for no other site. It stands until the gate is opened by a voice of the Hold’s Warden.”
The chain ran.
It came up off the cobbles where it lay, every link lifting in turn, and it rose over the gate-foot in a long glittering line like a snake lifting its head, and it went up the face of the arch and over the crown, and then it dropped, and drew taut, and sang. It was a single high ringing note, the sound of iron struck very hard and then held. Idrin felt the note through his hand and into his teeth.
Then the doors came up.
He had not seen them since the first afternoon, when he had found the arch with its hinge-pins standing out of the stone like teeth. He had thought the doors were gone. They were not gone. They rose out of the flagstones of the gate-foot, from underneath, out of cracks that had not been there a moment before, two heavy slabs of black oak banded with iron, and they came up in a slow tilting motion and swung in toward the arch on pins that had grown new heads in the dark. They met in the middle of the opening with a sound like a bell struck inside a barrel, deep and hollow, and the whole arch shook with it. Dust came off the crown in a cloud, and then the dust fell away, and the gate was closed.
It was a good gate. Idrin had known nothing about gates, but he could see that. The oak had a grain that ran straight and tight, and the iron bands were set into it evenly, and the seam between the two leaves was so fine that he could not have slid a knife-blade into it. The chain hung across the join, a single straight line, perfectly still.
For a moment, while he stood with his hand on the stone and his hat on the ground, he saw a face.
It was not on the gate, exactly. It was in the grain of the oak, under the fresh varnish of the old wood, in the place where the two leaves met. It was a woman’s face, tired and kind, with the lines of a long illness at the corners of the eyes and the mouth held in a patient, slightly uncertain smile. He knew the mouth at once. He had seen it every day in the long gallery at Sallowmere, painted in oils by a court artist, the portrait that hung between the window and the door, where his mother had sat for the commission with her hands folded in her lap and had told the painter that she wished she looked more like a woman who had nothing to do.
Mother, he thought, and his throat closed on it.
The face was gone before he could say it aloud. The grain of the oak closed over the place where it had been, and the varnish was only varnish again, and Idrin stood under the arch with his palm pressed flat against the closed gate and his heart beating so hard that he could feel it in the stone.
He reached for the name of his horse.
It was a simple thing. He had been reaching for it since he was six years old. He had chosen the name himself, on a summer morning in the paddocks at Sallowmere, from a list his grandfather had written out and he had torn up and rewritten in his own hand. The horse had been a grey gelding with a white star and a bad hind hoof, and he had named it for a river in a poem that his tutor had made him learn, and he had loved it more than he had loved anything else in the world until his brother Corvin had told him, in the Chancery’s cold blue voice, that the Crown would not pay for a horse that belonged to a struck name.
He reached for the name now, and there was nothing there.
There was the shape of the name. He could feel where it sat, a long, clean, rounded word with two syllables that ran together like water over a weir. He could feel the stress on the first. He could feel the warm, faintly absurd affection that had gone with it. But when he tried to say it, his mouth opened on nothing. It was like trying to put his hand on the banister of a stair that had been taken out in the night. He could feel the air where the rail should have been, and the air held him up, and he did not fall, and he did not know, for a long sick moment, where he was.
The horse was in the stable. It had come up the Lessary Road with him, under his saddle, and it was standing now behind the stable door with its head over the half-door, watching the gate. He could see its shape through the planks. He could see the grey and the white star and the set of the ears. He did not know what to call it.
He turned round. He did not feel steady, and he did not want Jory to see that he did not feel steady, so he picked up his hat from the cobbles and put it on and walked back to the gatehouse steps with his back very straight. Jory had not moved. He stood at the bottom of the steps with his two buckets, and he was staring at the gate, and his face was pale in the first grey light.
“You went quiet,” said Jory. “Before you spoke. You went very quiet and I thought you’d gone.”
“I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“You’ve lost something.”
Idrin did not answer that. He climbed the steps. Inside the gatehouse the board on the back wall was as it had always been: the single line in its colourless ink, Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing, and the number 0001 cut into the wood beneath it. But beneath the first line, in the same ink and the same unfaded hand, a new line had come into being in the time it took to walk from the arch to the stair.
Idrin stood in front of it and read it through, slowly, the way he had been taught to read a clause that he had not written himself. Then he took the pen from his coat and copied it into the notebook, because he did not trust the board to stay the same, and because it was the only record he had that the Hold had not yet taken from him. He wrote it in the Register’s own order, line by line, the way the clerks of Lessary had set out every instrument he had ever read:
> ROYAL REGISTER · Entry 0202 > Issuer: Idrin Saelmar, Pretender > Instrument: Writ > Clause: The gate of Ormhold is shut, and it shall stay shut until the gate is opened by a voice of the Hold’s Warden. > Assent: No voices present. The weft assented. > Tithe: None > Seal: None > Memory: One taken. The Register does not say which. > Status: Active
He read it three times. The third time, he understood that the line The Register does not say which was not a reassurance. It was a description of his own future. He would wake some morning and find a small thing gone, and he would not know which thing it was, and he would be expected to go on as though nothing had happened.
“What does it say?” Jory asked from the doorway.
“That the gate is shut,” said Idrin. “And that the Register does not say what it cost.”
“And?”
“And that I’m the one who agreed to it.”
Jory came in and read the board himself, slowly, moving his lips. He was not a clerk and never would be, but he had learned to read on a farm, from the feed-sacks and the tally-stick, and he could follow a plain line. When he came to the word Memory he stopped and looked at Idrin for a moment, and then he looked back at the board, and said nothing at all.
They went out into the grey morning together. Idrin stood at the arch and put his hand on the closed gate again, very gently, as a man puts his hand on the shoulder of someone who has done him a service he does not know how to repay. The oak was warm under his palm. Warm as a living thing is warm, and not as a fire is warm. He understood, standing there, that the Hold had heard him. It had heard every word of his Writ, and had weighed each one, and had taken its price, and then it had chosen to agree.
Jory had come back out with a fresh bucket for the kitchen. He was halfway up the path toward the kitchen block when he looked back at the gate, and then stopped so suddenly that the water slopped over the rim of the pail and ran down his shins. He stared up at the arch. The ivy that grew along the top of the outer wall had been trailing in the wind for three days, sprawling in long untidy ropes down the masonry. Now every leaf on every stem was turned, slowly and without any breeze to move it, to face the gatehouse door, where the new line of ink hung on the board inside.