Idrin wrote the Charter of Names at the Register table in the small hours, in the Royal Forms he had spent his life learning and in the plain Register language he had spent the last month learning from the Hold, and Tallow sat beside him through the whole of it and did not help, except with the numbers.
The lamp had been trimmed twice. The Lowgate men had come up at the third bell with a fresh jug of the Kitchen’s brew, which Pell had sent without a note, and they had set it down at the table’s corner and gone away again without speaking. The Hall above them was dark. The Chamber had gone up at the candle-clock and had not come back down, and Tallow thought they had probably gone to bed, though he suspected that more than one Hand was lying awake listening to the stone. The Mound’s humming had stopped at the fourth bell. Tallow had heard it stop from the gatehouse, through the floor, as a clerk hears a clock he has ceased to notice until it is silent.
Idrin wrote slowly. He used his right hand for every stroke, and the left lay in its sling across his chest with the Seal’s crown pale above the cloth, and the pen moved across the paper with a stiff careful precision that Tallow recognised, after a while, as the hand of a man who was no longer certain of his fingers and was refusing to let…
