Gaunt kept his good hand on the Roll because the Roll was iron-bound at its corners, and he had not, in three years, been able to walk past an iron-bound thing without testing it.
He sat on the bench beside the Keystone with his splinted arm across his chest and his right palm flat on the Roll’s cover, as a smith lays his hand on a bar he has just pulled from the fire, to feel how much heat it still carries. The iron was cold. It had been cold since the first Reading and it would stay cold, he thought, until somebody with two good hands took a hammer to it. He did not have two good hands. He had one, and it was a Forge hand, and it knew exactly how much weight a corner would take before it cracked.
Tobin read six more names.
Gaunt heard each one and listened for the trade. He could not help it. He had listened for trades all his life, in the Forge and the marsh and the Undercroft, and he knew the sound of a name that had been given to a man who had worked with his hands, the way he knew the ring of a bar that had been properly folded. The names came out of the boy’s small clear mouth one after another, and each one carried the trade with it, a little weight of work at the end, like a tool hung on a peg.
