Tamsin stood up in the Great Hall in the middle of the sitting, and the Hall went quiet around her, because the last Hand to rise from a seat during a Reading had been Harrow, and the Hall had not yet decided whether Harrow had been brave or merely stubborn.
She did not mind. She had come to the sitting with her hair tied up in a clean cloth and her boots blacked and her hands folded in front of her, the way a Herder came to a market where she meant to sell her beasts. She had not expected to stand up. But the names had been coming for an hour, one after another in the grey light from the high windows, and she had listened to every one of them, and at the end of the hour she had found that she could not sit still any longer under the weight of them.
“I would like to walk,” said Tamsin.
She said it to the Chamber, softly, the way she spoke to the Chamber always. Then, because she was tired and because the Hall had been listening to her for a long time and had never once been asked to listen to her in full sentences, she added the rest of it.
