Osk stood by the door, because a lodger could not sit on the Hall’s benches and could not vote on the Hall’s business, and because the Writ of the Great Hall allowed a lodger to speak once while the Chamber was reading. He had worked out, in two years of listening, that a single word spoken at the right moment could be worth a whole morning’s argument. He had also worked out that most men wasted their one word by saying it too early.
So he stood with the lodgers’ ledger under his arm, its spine cracked from the stream and the Lowgate rain, and he waited.
The first sitting of the final run began at the second bell. Tallow read the Roll from the lectern in his grey, careful voice, and the Hall was fuller than Osk had seen it since the Hollowed had come and gone. Lowgate had come up in a body. Half the lanes were there: the dyers with their hands still stained, the washerwomen with their sleeves rolled, the mill’s boys in clean shirts, a cluster of old men from the fields who had not been inside the Great Hall since the Fair of Lodgers and who sat very upright on the back bench, as if they were waiting to be called in to a magistrate’s court and had decided to show no fear. Osk knew all of them. He had carried water for half of them and taken a tally from the other half…
