Venn knelt at the edge of the ring because her knees had decided the matter before she had.
It was not a graceful thing. She was a woman of fifty-some winters, spare and upright, and she had knelt before the altars of three Holds and two monasteries and once, long ago, in the cold of a Corvanne marsh, before a Court official who had wished her to kneel for longer than was needful. She had never before knelt because her body gave way. She went down slowly, with one hand on the lectern’s edge and the bell still in her other hand, and she felt the flagstones take her weight, cold and uneven, through the thin stuff of her habit. She kept her eyes off the Hands and the clerk. She looked at the floor.
She had been certain for most of her life that a body with more than one mind was a door left open to dark. She had come to the Hold with that certainty as a surgeon comes to a bed, with her instruments laid out and her face composed. She had closed doors in three Holds and shut a dozen gates without once being disobeyed. She had closed a grey-coated gatewarden in his own chair, and had watched his hands go still on the wood, and had told herself that she had given him rest.
