Ferris Brand had left the Crown’s copy of the lease with the Writ, under its grey cover, and Idrin had lent it to the Chamber’s reader for the morning. The reader had been sent back to Sallowmere with a polite note, so the copy now lay on the gatehouse table where anyone could reach it, and Gaunt had taken the chair nearest it, because he had decided that a thing left lying about the gatehouse was his to object to.
He sat with his splinted arm on a folded cushion across his knees. The splint had been tied too tight by Sella’s assistant before she died, and it had been loosened twice since, and the arm beneath it was healing in a way that Gaunt described to anyone who would listen as crooked and to himself as his own business. He read with his right hand. He read as a man reads a bad joint of timber, turning each page to the light, feeling for the grain, waiting for it to split.
Sella had set the arm herself, in the autumn, in her cold room off the Mound, and she had told him the diagnosis before she touched him. The bone was snapped clean through below the elbow. It would knit, she said, but it would knit crooked, and he would be unbearable for a year about the crook. Then she had set it, and then she had given him the comfort, which was a cup of hot water with…
