The First Reading was closed, and a hundred and eighty names stood in the Roll in Tallow’s square hand and in the Ink’s grey, each with its trade and its wage marked as paid.
Idrin came into the Ink-room after the last sitting. He came in without knocking, which he had never done before, and stood at the table with his hands clasped behind his back, the way his tutors had taught him to stand before a finished page. The page was the Roll. It lay open on the scarred wood under its four lead weights, and the lamp had been moved close to it, and in its light the names looked smaller than they had sounded in the Hall, as names always did on paper once the voices that gave them weight had gone home.
He read down the first column. He read the lines as a schoolboy reads a list of lessons he has been told to learn by morning, slowly, one after another, with his lips barely moving. Osmer Gale, line one, Harrow’s stone. Tibbald Stroud, line two, the sawyer who never got the planks straight. Brand Callow, carrier, who was paid for every token and never once for the carrying. The lines went down the page in a steady grey column, through the midwinter names and the sittings of the season, to the hundred and eightieth line at the foot of the leaf, which was ruled and filled and had the Ink’s own stroke drawn beneath…
