Tobin read the second sitting, because the Hands had agreed that a builder’s name should be read by someone who could say it without any sense of its weight, and Tobin had no sense of weight at all.
It was not that he did not feel the names. He felt them all, every one, the way a carrier feels every stone that goes onto a cart, and he could have told the Chamber how each one had settled on the wood. But a carrier did not stop at the weight. A carrier put the stone down where it was meant to go, and then he took the next one, and the Hall did not need to know how heavy the last one had been. That was the trade, and Tobin had learned it on the stairs, in the dark, before anyone had asked him his age.
He stood on the lectern step with the Roll open at the height of his chest, and read.
“Hob Tennant. Sawyer. He is not sad about it now.”
The Hall was quiet. It was the quiet of forty-six people holding their breath for a trade that had not yet been said, and Tobin did not mind it, because he knew the trade would come.
