The Register table had been carried up from the Undercroft in the first winter, and it still had the stain on its near leg where a Lessaran commissioner had once spilled a cup of wine on it and been told, by a clerk who was afraid of nobody, that the stain was now part of the minutes. Idrin sat at the table’s far end with the lamp drawn close and Corvin’s old letter open between his good hand and his bad one, and Mireille sat opposite with her own letter, the cipher’s last sheet, face down beside the Census.
They had been sitting there since the candle-clock turned. Neither of them had spoken for an hour. The lamp hissed. Through the gatehouse window the midwinter night lay black and clear over the Lessary Road, and the stars were very bright, and the air had the sharp metallic bite that meant the frost would go on hardening until the thaw had nothing left to thaw.
Idrin had read the letter so many times that its folds had worn soft as cloth. It was the first one Corvin had ever written to him, in the first year, on the fine grey paper the Chancery used for its private instruments, with the lion’s seal pressed in the corner and the words in his brother’s own slanting hand. To the Tenant of a Thing at Ormhold. He had read it on the gatehouse step on the day it arrived, when he was nineteen, with…
