The Chamber had to decide what Wren was, and nobody could decide it until they had agreed on the words. Tallow knew this. It was the first thing a Clerk learned about a body of people who all believed they were right: they would argue for a day about a noun, and then they would argue for another day about whether the noun had been used correctly, and by the time they got to the verb they would have forgotten the subject. So on the morning of the debate he went into the Great Hall an hour before the sitting, and he wrote the four words on the minute-board in his best hand, with a space beneath each one for a definition, and he sat with his back to the wall and his pen in his fist and waited for the others to come in and see them.
They came in one by one. Idrin came first, with the slate under his arm and his face grey from a night of no sleep. Then Harrow, who stopped in the doorway and read the board from left to right, counting the letters in each word under his breath. Pell came next, with her spoon, and Korrin, with his bow across his back and his eyes on the door. Gaunt came in last, objecting to the draught, and he read the board over Tallow’s shoulder with his arms folded and his face set in an expression of heavy, deliberate suspicion.
“Citizen,” Gaunt read aloud. “Subject. Property. Lodger. Four words, Clerk. Who asked you to write four words on the Hall’s board?”
“The Chamber asked me to define the girl,” said Tallow. “I have defined her.”
“You have defined the board,” said Gaunt. “The girl is not on it.”
“She is on it,” said Tallow, “by way of the four words that do not apply to her.”
He began. He began in the flat, precise voice he kept for the minutes, the voice that sounded to the Hands like a bell being tapped by a careful hand, and he went through the four words one at a time, reading out each definition as he wrote it. It was not an easy thing to do in front of the Chamber. He had spent a night over it and he had still not got every clause to sit flat.
“A citizen,” said Tallow, “is a person entered in the Register who keeps a dwelling in the Hold and remains here by assent. The Articles do not yet define it, but the Register’s own usage is clear. A citizen is a person who is in the book, who lives in a house of the Hold’s making, and who says yes when the Hold asks whether she will stay. The Mantle is the first citizen. It is the only one the Register has. It has not left.”
“That is a very long definition for a single word,” said Harrow.
“It is the shortest I can make it,” said Tallow, “without leaving out the assent.”
“Go on,” said Idrin.
“A subject,” said Tallow, “is any person entered under a crown. A subject is counted, taxed and conscripted. The Crown speaks of subjects, not of citizens. The Hold has never had a crown of its own until this summer, and I am not sure the Warden has yet decided whether he wishes to wear one. But the word is the Crown’s, and the Crown’s meaning is plain. A subject belongs to a roll. The girl does not belong to any roll that the Crown has read. The Crown struck her marsh off its rolls in the autumn of her birth. She is therefore not a subject, and I am glad of it, because I do not think she would have been well treated by any crown that could strike a village with a clerk’s pen.”
Pell snorted. “Go on, Clerk, before you make the girl cry, and then Pim will start.”
“Property,” said Tallow, and his voice dropped a little. “Property is a thing a crown has counted and claimed. An unentered creature is property by the Writ of Vermin, which is a Lessary law of the last ten years, and not yet served on this Hold. An entered creature is property if the Crown declares it owned, which the Crown has done, in its own rolls, about the Mantle. The Crown holds the Mantle as property. It holds the marsh as property. It has written both of them down. It has not written the girl down, because it has no entry for her and never has had one.”
“And the fourth word,” said Gaunt.
Tallow turned to the last line on the board, and his pen paused above it for a moment.
“A lodger,” he said, “is a living person who lives within the Hold, or within its March, under a Writ of Lodging. A lodger keeps a separate ledger. A lodger is bound by the Hold’s law. A lodger may be fed from the Kitchen and sheltered under the Hold’s roof. A lodger may not be counted among the citizens, and may not vote in the Chamber. The word is an old one. It is older than the Hold’s roll. It is the word the old Lessary people used for a guest who has stayed too long, and it does not require a vote, because it is not a status. It is a place in a house.”
Gaunt was silent for a moment. Then he unfolded his arms and said, with a sort of furious reluctance, “The Hold has no word for a girl who is neither property nor subject, and who has walked up the causeway on her own two feet in the dark. I object to that. The Hold should not be left without a word.”
“The Hold has the word lodger,” said Tallow. “It is old and it is plain and it does not require a vote. You may object to it, Gaunt. I have several readings for the objection, and the widest of them includes a sneeze.”
“A lodger,” said Korrin from the door, “is a guest with a clause.”
“A lodger is a girl who needs a bed,” said Pell, from the Kitchen end, with great firmness. “That is all she is. I will feed her and I will give her the Kitchen’s blanket, and then the clauses may go and sit in the cellar with the sheep.”
Harrow was counting the four words on the board. He had been doing it all through the definitions, under his breath, and now he turned from the window and looked at Tallow with the same calm, patient face he wore when a wall had come out one stone short.
“Three of them do not apply,” he said.
“Three of them,” said Tallow, “do not apply in a straight line. The fourth applies in a curve.”
“Then tell the Chamber which curve.”
“Lodger,” said Tallow. “The curve is the Writ. A lodger requires a Writ of Lodging, one site, one memory, the Chamber’s assent. The Writ does not make her a citizen. It only names her a living person who may stay under the Hold’s roof, and who has been entered in the lodgers’ ledger, which has not yet been opened, and which I should have to open myself, with a pen the Crown did not give me.”
Ysra had come to the door behind Korrin. She had her back against the frame and her eyes on the passage, and she spoke in her flat, watchful voice. “Who will be her tenant?” she asked.
There was a short silence in the Hall.
“A lodger has a Writ,” said Tallow, carefully. “A lodger’s tenant is the Hold. That is the clause.”
“Then the Hold is the girl’s tenant,” said Ysra, “and the Hold is the Mantle’s tenant, and the Mantle is the Hold’s citizen, and the Crown says the Hold is a tenant of something else. How many tenants does the Hold have, Clerk, before the lease is read?”
“I do not know,” said Tallow. “The range is uncertain.”
Idrin had been standing at the head of the table, with the slate under one arm and his scarred hand resting on the wood, listening to all of it without a word. He had not moved since the four words were read. Now he lifted his head, and looked down the length of the table at the Chamber, and at the minute-board with its four words in Tallow’s neat hand. Then he looked at the girl.
Wren was not in the Hall. She was in the Kitchen, asleep on the bench by the warm oven with her wet skirt drying on the fender and a blanket Pell had found for her pulled up to her chin. But Idrin looked as though she were standing in front of him, all the same, with her bare feet on the flags and her chin up and her marsh-water eyes steady.
“She is her own tenant,” said Idrin.
The Chamber went quiet.
It was not the quiet of a debate that had run out of arguments. It was the quiet of a room that has been handed a new word and has not yet learned where to put it. Tallow could feel the silence press against the minute-board. Harrow had stopped counting. Pell had lowered her spoon. Gaunt had opened his mouth to object and then closed it again, for once in his life without a sound. Ysra’s lips moved, very slightly, on a number she did not say. Korrin, at the door, looked at the Warden for a while with his bow across his back and his hand on its string, and then took his hand away.
“Tenant of her own,” said Tallow, slowly, to himself.
He did not mean to write it. He had written every word the Chamber had said that morning, and every range, and every objection, and he had got them all in order on the page. But his pen moved of its own accord, and he found that he had written the phrase at the foot of the minutes, in the Chamber’s clerk’s hand, in the plain ink he used for the day’s record. Tenant of her own. He stared at it. The ink was still wet. He watched it go dark on the page, and then the line beneath it seemed to darken too, very faintly, by the width of a single stroke, as though something in the Register had leaned closer to read it.
Tallow did not look up. He did not want to see the Warden’s face. He knew, without looking, that the Chamber had been given its word, and that it did not yet know what to do with it, and that the word would have to be argued over for a long time before anybody thought to be frightened of it.
“Entered,” said Tallow, very quietly, to the minute-board, and wrote the Chamber’s assent beside it in his smallest hand.