The Chamber had argued with itself for six weeks about the proper way to address a guest, and it had never once agreed. Tallow had written the arguments down in full. There were seventeen separate proposals, a dozen amendments and a single long motion from Gaunt that began with the word Mind and ended, two pages later, with the word Bread, and it had been carried, in the end, by nobody, because the Hands had all begun to speak at once and the minute-board had filled with overlapping lines that Tallow could not separate into a vote.
So when Ossane took her seat in the Great Hall on the morning after the offer, with her clerks behind her and her grey braid pinned up and her gloves folded on the table, the Chamber did what it always did. It answered her all together.
“The Crown can take its paper back to Lessary,” said Korrin, from the door.
“The envoy is sitting in the wrong chair,” said Gaunt, from the bench, in the voice of a man who had been waiting for an opening all morning and had found it.
“The envoy has two clerks,” said Harrow, from the window, and then, because he had counted them again on the way in, “one clerk less than she says she has.”
“The envoy has children,” said Tamsin.
She had come in last, with straw on her skirts and the dog at her heels, and she sat down on the floor by the wall, as she always did, and looked across the room at Ossane with the particular gentle directness she used for a goat that had come into the pen for the first time and was not yet sure of its welcome. “Do you have children?” she asked, in full sentences, quite softly, so that the words went across the Hall without any shouting in them at all. “And are they fed? I should like to know. It is a thing I always ask.”
Ossane looked at her. For a moment the envoy’s composure slipped, very slightly, and Tallow saw a flicker of something under it, quick and unguarded, like a fish turning under dark water.
“I have two,” said Ossane. “A son of nineteen, who is at school in Sallowmere and writes to me in the Chancery’s hand, and a daughter of twelve, who writes to me in her own. They are both fed. I have made sure of it. It is the only thing about my office that I am certain I have done properly.”
“Thank you,” said Tamsin, and nodded, and looked satisfied, and the Chamber, which had been shouting, went quiet for a moment as though it had been struck across the mouth by a kindness it had not expected.
Gaunt, who had sat through the seventeen motions with his arms folded, rose and said that a guest who had been counted by the Hold must now be counted by the Hold’s rules, which he had written himself, and which were, he admitted, mostly objections. Korrin said the envoy could be a guest or a tenant or a mouse, so long as she did not sit in the tenth chair again. Harrow said the envoy had sat in it for four seconds, that he had counted them, and that the chair had not complained. Gaunt said the chair had not been asked.
“The envoy is a tenant,” said Pim.
Everybody turned. He was on the bench beside Gaunt, swinging his legs and looking rather pleased with himself, the way he did when he had seen something nobody else had and was waiting for the grown-ups to catch up. “She is a tenant of the Kitchen,” he said. “She has been paying her bread in lease-words for three days. She says please when she takes the barley, and thank you when she eats it, and she has eaten all of it, every time. That is what a tenant does. It pays in words and it eats the rent.”
“That is not a definition,” said Tallow, writing it down.
“It is a carrier’s definition,” said Pim.
Sella had her ledger open on her knee. She kept her head bent. She ran her pen down a column, and paused, and then spoke, in her dry, level voice, the diagnosis first and the comfort second. “The envoy is tired,” she said. “The diagnosis is that she has walked from the Lantern Ford causeway at dawn and sat through a night of Lessary letters, and has not slept more than four hours in the last three days. The comfort is that she is well fed on the Hold’s bread, which she has not refused, and which I have watched her eat with a great deal of appetite. It is the only bread in the Hold that has ever been eaten by a lawyer without complaint.”
“I have complained about the salt,” said Ossane.
“You have complained about the salt,” said Sella, unmoved, “and then you ate the salt.”
Ysra was at the door. She had been standing there with her back against the frame and her eyes on the passage, and she had said nothing at all, until now. Her voice, when it came, was quiet and perfectly precise.
“You have counted the stairs,” she said to Ossane.
Ossane turned her head. “Yes,” she said. “I have.”
“How many?”
“Ten,” said Ossane. “Ten from the court to the Undercroft’s lower door, and one more to the back room, which is not a stair at all but a step cut into the rock, and which your Crown’s clerk has listed as a seventh landing. I have counted them twice, Ysra. Once with my feet and once with my fingers, on the wall, going down with a lamp that your Clerk lent me. My clerk’s count says nine. The Crown’s count says nine. I have written it in the margin.” She paused. “It is ten.”
There was a long silence in the Hall. Tallow, at the minute-board, heard the dog breathing under the bench, and the faint, steady tick of the candle-clock on its shelf, and the sound of his own pen moving across the page as he wrote the envoy’s words down exactly, without a figure, because they were not his to shorten.
Ysra’s face had gone very pale. Tallow had seen that expression once before, on the morning Ysra had lost her place in the count of the Keystone’s room. She did not say anything. She only stood very straight with her back against the door-frame and her lips pressed together, and her hand, at her side, closed slowly into a fist.
“You have done my counting for me,” said Ysra at last. It was not an accusation. It sounded like a confession.
“I have done the Crown’s counting,” said Ossane, very gently. “Which is a different thing. I am sorry for it. I did not know you had been counting the stairs alone. I thought the Hold kept a Clerk for that.”
“The Hold keeps me,” said Ysra.
Ossane looked at her steadily. Then she turned back to the minute-board, and to the Chamber, and to the Hands sitting round the table in their nine chairs, and she said, in her clear, unhurried voice, “I should like to ask the Hold a question, if I may. Is that permitted?”
“Ask,” said Idrin, from the head of the table.
“Who counts the Chamber?” said Ossane.
There was no answer. Nobody had asked it before. Tallow looked up from his page and found that every Hand in the Hall had turned to look at the tenth chair, grey and unpainted and facing the door at the far end of the table, and that nobody, not even Harrow, had an answer ready.
“The tenth voice,” said Sella at last, dry as a bone, “has its own counsel. We do not count it. We wait for it to count us.”
“Then the Chamber has been counted,” said Ossane, and smiled, and went back to her paper. “By me. I shall write it down.”
Tallow recorded the exchange in the minutes, word for word, with a single line at the bottom of the page that he did not show to anyone but the Warden. The Chamber has, for the first time, been out-counted by someone outside it. The count was correct.
At the end of the sitting, when the Hands were beginning to rise and the candles were burning low, Ossane lifted her head from her paper and said, in a voice that carried quite clearly to the door, “Ysra. The stair again. Please. I should like to be sure.”
Ysra did not answer straight away. She stood with her back to the frame, looking at the envoy, and her face was closed and unreadable. Then, slowly, as though each number cost her a little, she said it. “Ten.”
Tallow looked from the envoy to Ysra and back again. The Chamber had shouted at the envoy for an hour, and not once had it thought to ask the Hold’s own watchman how many steps she had climbed in her life. Nobody had. Ysra had counted the stair every morning for a season and a half, and nobody had ever asked her the number.
Ossane wrote it on her paper. She wrote the figure carefully, in her upright, patient hand, with a small full stop after it. Then, after a moment’s thought, with a faint, unhurried smile, she wrote a second word beside it, in the margin, very neatly, so that Tallow, who was watching from the minute-board, could read it quite plainly from where he stood.
Property.