The Sovereign came into the kitchen to draft a Royal Form for the price of bread, and Pell let him try, because she was curious and because she liked to see a man fail in her own room.
It was the morning after the Full Writ. The ovens had been lit before the candle-clock, and the long bench was already dusted with flour, and the bread for the Great Hall was cooling in its rows on the sill. Pell had been up since the bells. She had not slept well either, but she had decided that a cook who spent the night thinking about the Chamber would only burn the loaves, and so she had stopped thinking about it at the midnight bell and had started thinking about yeast. Yeast was honest. It did what it did. It did not ask you to have a view.
Idrin sat at the end of the bench with a sheet of the Chancery’s grey paper in front of him, which he had got from somewhere she did not want to know about, and a pen that Tallow had cut and that had a split at the nib. His left hand lay flat on the wood beside the paper. His right hand held the pen. He had not yet written anything, and he was looking at the paper as a man looks at a stair he has been told is safe.
