The chair was an insult. Gaunt had said so at the First Reading, and at the second sitting, and at every sitting since, and he said so again now, standing in the Forge’s yard in the hot early morning with a plank of Lowgate oak across two trestles and the chair itself propped against the wall like a prisoner awaiting sentence.
“One leg,” said Gaunt. “One leg short. It has been short since the Foundation poured it. Somebody built a witness’s chair in this Hold with one leg shorter than the others and then sat a Reed-House woman in it for three sittings, and nobody in the Chamber has objected but me, and I am objecting now, which is the least the chair can expect.”
Wren, who had come across the yard with a basket of reeds under one arm and her witness’s ledger under the other, looked at the chair and then at him.
“It has held me very well,” she said.
“It has held you because you are light and you sit still,” said Gaunt. “I am not making a bench for the light. I am making it for the Reading. The Reading is not light. It is nine names in a bad week and fifty on a good one, and it goes on until the bell, and a witness who falls through a chair in the middle of a Reading of her own cousin’s name is a disgrace to the Hold’s carpentry.”
