The Chancery’s clerk came to the gatehouse door in the early evening of midwinter’s day, with two sealed chests on a handcart and a letter in his coat that he did not offer to read. He was not the young man from the Hard Hands’ hall. Tallow had seen him once before, at the Lessaran commission’s table in the first year, a grey neat man with a grey neat voice and a habit of checking the Crown’s seal twice before he let it out of his hand. He checked it twice now. Then he set the handcart’s brake, and stood back from the door, and waited to be asked in.
Tallow asked him in. He did it at the Register table, under the window, where the last of the winter light was going out of the Lessary Road in long grey bars, and he laid a clean cloth on the wood and set a candle at its corner, because a Register that received silver ought to have a candle to see it by.
“The Chaincrown’s compliments,” said the clerk. He had a pleasant, dry voice that did not rise. “And her regret that she could not come herself. She is at Sallowmere with the Chancery’s accounts. She asked me to say that the Hold will find the letter in order.”
