Gaunt wanted the silver for tools, and he wanted it before the Clerk had finished writing down the number, which Tallow had been doing since the causeway in the voice of a man reading out a sentence. A hundred and twenty marks. A hundred and twenty. He had heard it so often that the number had begun to sound like the sound a hammer makes when it misses the head and strikes the anvil instead.
He went to the forge the morning after the causeway and stood in front of the tool-rack with his arms folded and the silver in his head, and he thought about what silver was good for.
It was a poor metal for a hammer. Everybody knew that. It was soft, and it bent under the blow, and it did not hold an edge the way steel did. But it was the best metal in the Hold for a file. A file needed a face that would take a fine cut without tearing, and silver had that face. It was the metal the old Lessary silversmiths had used for their own marks, and the silversmiths had known what they were doing. A file cut from silver would bite into the corner of a coin, a very small bite, too fine for any eye to see, and it would take the Crown’s seal off the face of the coin as neatly as a smith takes the scale off a hot bar.
Gaunt had a file in mind. He had had it in mind since the first marks were counted on the trestle. It would be short and pointed, with a handle of ash wood bound in leather, and its edge would be cut at a slant so that it could reach into the lion’s mouth on a Lessary mark and scrape the tail away. He could see it clearly in his head. He could feel the weight of it. He liked it very much.
He went to the Warden’s chair in the Great Hall at the noon sitting and told him so.
“The silver is the Hold’s treasury,” said Idrin. He was sitting with the slate under his chair’s short leg and the Register at his elbow, and he looked very tired, the way he had looked every day since the scales. “It is not a smith’s tool, Gaunt.”
“It is the best metal in the Hold for a file,” said Gaunt. “I have said so. I will say it again in the minutes, if the Clerk will hold his pen still.”
“The Clerk is holding it still,” said Tallow, and was.
“That is an objection to an objection,” said Gaunt. “I have a file in mind. It is short and pointed and bound in leather, and it will take the Crown’s seal off a coin. I am a smith. I have made a great many things in my life that were not needed, and this is the first one I wanted to make for its own sake.”
He had meant to say more. He had a whole speech prepared, with three objections and a sneer for the Lessary silversmiths, and it was going to be his best. But somewhere between for its own sake and the first of his objections he stopped, and looked down at the Hall’s flagstones, and found that his legs had carried him across the room to the nearest bench, and that he was sitting on it, and that he did not want to get up.
He had not meant to sit. He sat on the anvil, in the forge, in the afternoon, more often than was dignified, and he had never once admitted to anybody why. He did not admit it now. But he said, in a voice that was lower and rougher than he would have liked, “The Chancery’s clerks will come back with a coin-weigher. You know that, Warden. They always come back. They come back with a scale that is not the Chamber’s, and a book that is not the Clerk’s, and they count the silver, and they write the count in the Crown’s ink, and then they take it. I do not want the Hold’s silver counted by the Crown. I am afraid of it. There. I have said it. I resent being afraid, and I am afraid.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Then spend it,” said Korrin, from his chair by the door. He had not turned his head from the stair. “Spend it on the south gate’s iron. The gate is the marsh’s way in. The marsh will want the gate closed when the Hunt-wardens come up in grey, and it will want the iron to close it with. Iron is the only thing the gate will eat.”
“Spend it on stone,” said Harrow, from the window. He kept his back to the room. “The south gate is nine rounds of stone, and the stone is what holds. Iron rusts. Stone counts.”
“Keep it in the weigh-house,” said Tallow, “and write it down. That is the only spending a Clerk approves of. A coin in a box is a coin the Hold can account for. A coin in a hand is a rumour. I have a range of one for keeping. I have nothing for spending. I should not like to see the range go any wider.”
“I say flour,” said Pell, from the Kitchen door, with her arms folded and her spoon in one fist. “Flour and salt for the winter. That is all the silver is for. Not one mark more. I will not have the Hold buying iron and stone and files out of a silver purse, when I have three hundred and forty sacks to feed and a feast to cook for a woman who thinks my bread tastes of the marsh.”
“She said it tastes of the marsh,” said Gaunt, with a sneer, “because it does.”
“It does not,” said Pell. “It tastes of the Kitchen. The marsh is in the salt, and the salt is the Hold’s, and so the marsh is the Hold’s too, and you may stop objecting to that as well.”
The Chamber voted. It was a simple vote, a show of hands, and Harrow counted it aloud, and it came out as a vote that Gaunt had not expected and could not, in any honest sense, object to. The silver would be kept in the weigh-house and written down. It would not be spent on iron, or stone, or files. It would be kept, in a box with a lock and a Clerk’s count, until the Chamber agreed what it was for. And the Chamber would make a file of it, which was Gaunt’s own proposal, put forward in the most grudging voice he had ever heard in the Hall, and which the Chamber carried by a vote of nine to nothing, because even the goats seemed to think it a fair compromise.
“A file,” said Idrin, when the vote was counted. “Of the silver. A record. Not a tool.”
“A file of record,” said Tallow, writing. “It is not a tool, Warden. It is a list.”
“Then I shall make the list,” said Gaunt, “and I shall object to every line of it, and I shall cut the file in the forge at dusk, out of the leftover silver, and I shall take the Crown’s lion off the face of the first coin I can get my hands on, and I shall not be asked to explain myself to anybody.”
“You are already explaining yourself,” said Ysra, from the door.
“I am objecting to the explanation,” said Gaunt.
Pell, hearing the argument from the Kitchen doorway, shook her head and called out that the silver should buy flour and salt for the winter and nothing else, and then she said it again, louder, in case anybody had missed it. Everyone agreed with her. It was the first time in the Hold’s history that the whole Chamber had agreed with a cook about anything, and the silence that followed was so complete that Tallow felt obliged to record it twice, once for the minutes and once, he said, for the bread.
That evening Gaunt went to the forge alone. He lit the fire himself and set the bellows going, and when the coals were red and bright he took a piece of the silver from the weigh-house box, a scrap left over from the trestle, and laid it on the anvil. He did not hammer it. He took the file he had already begun, a rough length of Hold iron that he had been working on since the causeway, and set it in the vice, and began to cut the handle.
He cut it by lamplight. He cut it slowly, the way he had not cut anything in months, with a care that was almost gentle. He made the leather grip and bound it tight. He turned the file over and found the heel of the handle and looked at the wood, which was a good grey ash, cut from the Hold’s own yard. And then he stopped.
On the handle, pressed into the grain of the ash by some accident of his own tooling, was a mark. It was small and neat. It was a hook, and a bar, and a short curling tail. He had not put it there. He could remember cutting the wood and binding the grip, and he could remember every stroke of the knife, and the mark had not been made by any of them.
It was the same mark as the one on Bardo Kell’s marks. It was the mark on the marsh’s boats, and on the salt-sacks, and on the second cake the marsh-boy had sent up to the Hold in the reed-mat. Gaunt had seen it that morning on the trestle, under the lamp, when the Clerk had turned each of the worn silver coins over with his tweezers.
“It is a coincidence,” said Gaunt aloud, to the empty forge.
He did not believe it. He had objected to coincidences all his life, and he had never once been able to make one stop.