Idrin brought the gatehouse box to the Ink-room himself.
It was a plain wooden box with a worn lid and a hinge that had been mended twice, and he had seen it on the first day he came to the Hold, when it had held nothing but a pale disc on a square of linen and a clerk’s warning that nobody should touch it. He had lived beside it ever since without once opening it again. Now he carried it down the gatehouse stair in both arms, against his chest, because his left arm would not take the weight by itself, and he set it on the Ink-room table with a care that surprised him.
The disc was already on its linen. Tallow had put it there after the Chamber’s sitting, and had folded the linen twice over it, and had written the figure on a slip and pinned the slip to the lid’s inside edge so that anyone who opened the box would be able to read what they were not supposed to take. The slip said one, held. Beneath it, in smaller letters, Tallow had written (see Osk, on the box’s wall; referred to the Reading), because Osk’s request had been put to the Chamber the evening before, and the Chamber had decided, by the usual method of nobody objecting except Gaunt, that it was a question for the Reading and not for the Ink-room.
