Gaunt objected to the envoy’s chair before he had even seen it, which was his right, and he objected to it again when he did see it, which was his habit. It was a Lessary folding chair. Somebody had carried it up from the causeway that morning, and it stood now by the Great Hall’s east window in a patch of thin grey light, a thing of dark varnished wood and cross-hinged arms and a seat of stretched canvas, and Gaunt looked at it from the bench with the expression of a man who has been asked to shake hands with a rat.
“It is an insult to the Hall’s joints,” he said. “A folding chair in a Hall built by the Foundation. What did the envoy think she was going to sit on? She has a Lessary arse, not a stool of marsh-reed.”
“Gaunt,” said Korrin, without turning from the door.
“I am objecting.”
“Object quietly, then. The Warden is trying to sleep.”
The Warden was not trying to sleep. He sat in his chair at the head of the table with the slate under its short leg, and he looked as if he had been awake for two nights. But he did not contradict her. He only lifted his scarred hand from the table’s edge and let it fall again, which was his way of saying that the Hall was the Chamber’s and not his, and that he would wait for the Chamber to decide what to do with the envoy’s furniture.
Gaunt got up from the bench. He went to the folding chair and took hold of its cross-hinged arms, and he began to fold it, which was a mistake, because a folding chair does not fold without an effort, and this one had been made by a Lessary joiner who had never once expected it to be used by someone who objected to it. It squeaked. He said so. He tried the other hinge. It squeaked again, louder, and he said that too, and then he unfolded it, because he had realised that it was not going to fold properly and that he had not been asked to fold it in the first place.
“That is the folding,” said Ossane, from the table’s foot. “You are doing it wrongly, Smith. You are doing it the way one folds a cloak. It folds the way one folds a letter.”
Gaunt looked at her. He had not expected her to speak. Ossane sat in the envoy’s chair at the table’s foot, with her gloves folded and her braid over one shoulder and her clerks standing a pace behind her, and she watched him with the calm, faintly weary patience of a woman who had been insulted by professionals for thirty years and had come to think the insults were rather good.
“Show me, then,” said Gaunt.
“I shall not show you,” said Ossane. “I am not the one who is objecting.”
“Then what would you have sat on?” said Gaunt, with a bark of outrage. “If not that? If you will not have the Hall’s own furniture, and you will not have the Lessary folding stool, and you will not have the marsh’s reed, what is left in this Hall that a Lessary woman may decently sit on?”
“The tenth chair,” said Ossane, mildly.
There was a silence in the Hall, quite sudden and complete, like the silence after a dropped plate. Gaunt’s face went very red. Tallow, at the minute-board, dipped his pen and did not write. Sella’s ledger slipped on her knee and she caught it without looking. Harrow turned from the window, slowly, and his hands came out from behind his back for the first time that morning.
“That is the chair of a thing that has not yet been counted,” said Gaunt, slowly, and his voice had gone rough. “A Lessary woman should not be allowed to count it for us.”
“I am not counting it,” said Ossane. “I am only sitting.”
“Then you would sit in the tenth chair,” said Gaunt, “and you would sit in it as a Lessary, which is to say as the Crown’s, which is to say as property, and I will not have it. I object. The chair is a Lessary chair, the envoy is a Lessary envoy, and the whole Hold being made to stand up for her.”
“Nobody is making you stand, Gaunt,” said Pell, from the Kitchen door. “You have been standing since breakfast.”
The Hall was silent for a long while after the envoy’s last word. Then Tamsin, on the floor by the wall, began to hum, very low, the three-note tune she had sung over the nanny, and the dog lifted its head and looked at her. Ysra, at the door, said that the stair was not going to count itself for anybody, and went out into the passage with her hand on her apron pocket.
Ossane stood up from the envoy’s chair. She did it without haste, gathering her gloves and smoothing her coat, and then she crossed the Hall. She did not walk round the table. She walked straight down the length of it, past the nine empty places and the candle-stubs and the bowls of cold barley, until she came to the far end, where the tenth chair stood grey and unpainted in front of the door. The Hands watched her come. None of them moved. Ysra, at the threshold, shifted her weight very slightly, and her hand went to her apron pocket, where the key to the Undercroft lay, and then came away again empty.
Ossane stopped beside the chair. She looked at it a while, the way she had looked at the cobbles of the gate-foot. Then she turned round, and sat down.
It took her weight without a sound.
Gaunt had braced for a creak. He had braced for the crack of a joint, or the dry groan of old wood under a stranger’s weight. He had braced for something that would prove the chair was a Lessary chair after all, and that he had been right to object. He heard nothing. The chair did not creak. It did not shift. It sat beneath the envoy, grey and steady and perfectly indifferent, as though it had been waiting for her all its life and had only been wondering when she would arrive.
“That is the most objectionable thing I have ever seen,” said Gaunt, very quietly.
Harrow was counting. He began at once, in the flat, low voice he used for stones, and his lips moved over each second. “One,” he said. “Two. Three.” He stopped at four. He had not meant to stop there. He was watching the chair’s legs, which were planted on the flagstones, and as he watched, he saw them lift, very slightly, a finger’s width off the floor, and then settle back again.
Ossane had risen. She had stood up out of the tenth chair, quite smoothly, and the chair had not moved to follow her. It stayed where it was. Ossane looked down at it, and then, with a faint, grave courtesy, she asked Harrow to count the chair’s legs for her.
“Four,” said Harrow, stepping forward, with his hand on the grey back. “Four legs, lady. Four and no more. I have counted them since the first winter.”
“Look under the seat,” said Ossane.
Harrow knelt. He was a big man, and he did it slowly, with a grunt, and he put his head close to the chair’s underside and looked up. Idrin saw his face change. It went flat, the way his face went flat when he was reading a joint in a wall that did not match its neighbour.
“There is a fifth,” said Harrow.
He reached under the seat and touched something with his fingertips. It was a carving, small and deep, cut into the wood of the underside where nobody who sat in the chair would ever see it. Harrow traced it with one finger, very slowly. Then he read it aloud, in a low, careful voice, as a mason reads the mark a previous builder has left on a stone.
“It is in the Foundation’s notch-script,” he said. “It is a single word. I cannot say it in Lessary. It is a name, I think. It is the name of nobody.”
Nobody spoke. The dog, which had got up from under the bench at the first sign of trouble, came padding up the length of the Hall, very quietly, and sat down at the chair’s grey foot, and looked up at the envoy with its ears back and its tail still.
Ossane looked at the dog. Then she looked down at the chair. She did not touch it again.
“I have been expected,” she said, in her low, unhurried voice, “for longer than I knew.”
Tallow wrote it down. He wrote the envoy has been expected in the minutes, and then, under it, after a long pause in which his pen did not move, the chair has turned to face her. He had not seen it turn. He had been looking at the envoy, and at the dog, and at the carving under the seat. But when he lifted his eyes from the page, the tenth chair was no longer standing with its back to the table and its face to the door. It had turned, slowly and without a sound, and now it stood square to the envoy’s place, facing the table’s foot, as though it had been waiting all its life for someone to sit at the other end and look back.