Teodor read his mother’s letter standing up, at the library shelf in the Great Hall, because the chairs in the Great Hall were built for grown-ups and the table was too high for his elbows. The shelf was the only one in the Hold that held anything written by someone who had not been dead for two centuries. It held the Articles of the Hearth, bound in green cloth and rubbed bare at the corners, and the Charter of Shares, and a book of the Lessaran Writs that Tallow had said was sad to read, and a battered copy of a play about a house that could think, which Teodor had not been allowed to open because Benedek Sly had sent it up with a note that said it was dangerous to children and to Chancellors.
His mother’s letter was on the shelf’s end, under the Charter of Shares, where Teodor had put it after he read it the first time. He read it again. It was in the careful hand she used for the Magistrate’s office, the hand that had never once wandered across a line, and it was short, which meant she had been angry when she wrote it and had decided to be exact instead.
