Idrin read the Writ of Property a second time by the gatehouse lamp, slowly, with his right hand flat on the table and the Seal’s ache in his left arm like a cord drawn too tight.
He had read it once for the Chamber, aloud, in the Great Hall, in his plainest Register voice. He had read it once for the herald, at the arch, with the Watch standing round him in the cold. Now he read it for himself, alone, at the gatehouse table at the end of a long day, with the Hold quiet beyond the shutters and the clerks’ lamps gone out in the passages one by one. He read it the way Tallow read a clause, line by line, for the thing it did not say.
It was a short document. The Chancery was not fond of length in its Writs. It asked for the lease to be renewed, and the Hold to be surrendered, and the weft and the labour upon the land to be delivered at the arch by a day that had already passed. It named the Mantle as a Specimen, Weft, one. It named the lodgers as the difference between the Crown’s roll and the Register’s. It gave the Hold seven days to answer, and the Hold had answered on the seventh, and the Crown’s marshal was still sitting in the marsh with six hundred foot, waiting for the water to fall.
