Corvin had signed a great many things in his life without reading them, and he had always considered this a sign of good breeding. A crown prince did not read his father’s rents. He read the parts that concerned the army and the Assembly of Seats and the price of salt, and he initialled the rest with a flourish, and went out riding, and let the Chancery’s clerks carry the consequences up the stairs for him. It had seemed, at twenty, an entirely reasonable division of labour.
He had put his seal to the renewal notice for the Ormhold lease in his first year as heir. He remembered the day quite clearly. It had been raining, and his father had been in a temper about the Assembly, and the notice had been lying on the desk with its wax already soft and a clerk’s finger marking the place where the seal went. He had pressed the seal, and flourished the initial, and gone out to the stables. He had not once read the reversion clause.
He was reading it now, standing at the lectern in the Great Hall, with the Roll open before him and a square-cut pen in his hand that somebody had dipped for him in the grey ink, and the clause was short, and he had been wrong about it for nearly twenty years.
