A Writ to put a Hand out of its seat was a serious thing, and Idrin had been dreading the day he would be asked to make one. He had read the clause in the Charter a dozen times since the morning of the barrel. He had read it in the Royal Forms and in Tallow’s plain copy and in his own hand, in the margin of the Register, where he had written it out twice to see if the words would change. They did not. The Mantle could hold a Hand in its seat, by its own assent, given in its own voice through the stone. The Warden could not hold a Hand at all. He could only ask. He could ask the body, very formally, in a Writ, whether it would consent, and then he must wait while the weft decided.
He had never waited for anything in his life without a clerk to tell him how long.
The Chamber sat in the Great Hall that afternoon with the candles lit and the windows shuttered against a wind off the marsh. The Hands had come in slowly. They had not argued much. Idrin had noticed that, and he did not like it. When people were not arguing, it was usually because they had already decided what they thought, and had only to wait for the rest of the room to catch up.
“The Chamber will vote on the question,” said Tallow, from the minute-board. He stood with his pen in one hand and the day’s record in the other, and his voice was careful. “The question is whether the Warden shall request the Mantle’s assent to a Writ of Quiet, holding the Hand known as Pim in the Carry seat until the Hold has learned what it owes the tinker. Any Hand may speak to the question. The Warden will then ask the body.”
“Speak to it, then,” said Idrin.
Gaunt spoke first. He was on the bench, with his arms folded and his face set in its heaviest scowl, and he did not wait for the Clerk to finish the sentence. “Hold him,” he said. “Hold the boy until the tinker can stand on his feet and say his own name, and until the Chamber knows what a carrier is worth when he has set a barrel down on a man’s head. I object to a child who thinks a stair is a joke. A child who lets go of a load and then tells the room he is not sorry for the stair. Hold him, Warden. Hold him until he is sorry for something.”
“Hold him,” said Korrin, from the door, without raising his voice. “Until the tinker walks. A Hand that drops a load on a man is a Hand that will drop a load on the wall. Hold him in his seat, or hold him out of it. I do not care which, so long as the Hold is not left with a boy in the Carry seat who thinks the Hold is funny.”
Pell stood up at the Kitchen end. She had her arms folded tight over her apron, and her face had gone the colour it went when she had been crying and did not intend to be seen doing it again. “You will do no such thing,” she said. “The boy will be fed. He will be watched, if you must watch him, and he will be watched in my Kitchen, where I can see him, and where he can carry the bread for the tinker every morning for a month, which is the only penance I know that is any good. Feed him, Warden. Watch him. Do not hold him. He has been held enough.”
“Watch him,” said Tamsin, very softly, from the floor by the wall. She had the dog’s head in her lap. “And sing to him, if he will let you. He does not sing, but he listens to the goats, and the goats are very good at reminding a child that it is not alone.”
“Watch and feed,” said Harrow, from the window.
He had been counting. Idrin had seen his lips move through the whole of the speaking, one number after another, the way they moved when he was checking a course of stone. Now he turned round and said, quite flatly, “Four to hold, and four to watch and feed. Two of the four are the same two. That is four for holding and four for feeding, and the count is even. I counted it again, and it is still even. Nobody is going to win this, Warden, unless somebody can count to five.”
“Then count to five,” said Idrin, a little helplessly.
Harrow shook his head. “I do not count to five,” he said. “I count to nine, and to ten, and to a hundred and sixty-two, which is the number of stones in the south gate’s first course. Five is a number for people who have not built anything.”
Ysra had not spoken. She stood at the door with her back against the frame and her eyes on the passage, and she had been counting under her breath for some time. When Tallow turned to her, she raised her head slowly and said, quite clearly, “I shall not vote.”
“Why?” asked Tallow.
“Because the stair is mine to count,” said Ysra. “And the boy is mine to keep. I have said so to him, in the Undercroft, the week before the barrel. I do not get to hold him in his seat and then count him as if he had been lost. If I vote, I am voting that he is not mine. I will not say it.”
Tallow wrote it in the minutes: Ysra abstains, on the grounds that the stair and the boy are hers. He put a figure beside it, the widest he had given all year, and did not explain it.
Pim sat in the Carry seat through all of this. It was the chair at the far side of the table, close to the stone wall, a plain stool with a worn wooden back where the carrier of the Hold had sat since the first winter, and he sat in it now with his hands folded on his knees and his feet tucked up under him, like a boy at Mass. He did not argue. He had said his piece in the gatehouse, and he seemed to think that once a thing had been said, the rest of it was up to the grown-ups. But he listened to every word. Idrin could see that. His eyes went from one speaker to the next, steadily, and when Ysra said her piece he nodded very slightly, as though she had given him the answer to a sum he had been stuck on.
Idrin studied the boy.
He had been raised to make decisions for other people. He had been trained to it from the cradle, in the Royal Forms and the Lessary court, where a prince was the one who decided what the clerks would count and the soldiers would carry and the servants would be fed. He had learned the habit so well that he had almost forgotten it was a habit at all. It felt like responsibility. It felt, most of the time, like care. But he had been in the Hold long enough to know that it was not always the same thing, and that a Warden who decided for a child in front of the Chamber, without asking the child, was not caring for anybody but himself.
“The Chamber will defer the question,” said Idrin.
Tallow looked up. “Warden?”
“Defer it,” said Idrin. “Until the Writ of Lodging is read. The Hold is about to take a lodger’s ledger for the first time in its history. The girl from the marsh will be entered in the book, and the Hold will have to open a new page to hold her, and the Chamber will need every sheet of paper in the drawer to be in order when it does. It is the wrong moment to decide what to do with a carrier. We shall decide it when the book is open, and the Hold knows what it is writing in it.” He paused. “The Warden asks the Chamber to defer.”
“Deferred,” said Harrow, and counted it as one.
“Deferred,” said Gaunt, grudgingly, from the bench. “The Warden is being reasonable, which I resent. It is not a habit a prince should pick up in a hurry.”
“Deferred,” said Tallow, and wrote it down, and then looked at the line for a long moment, and his face relaxed very slightly, the way a Clerk’s does when he finds a clause that is honest for once. “It is the first honest delay in the Hold’s minutes, Warden. I have never recorded one before. I should like it noted that it was made by the Warden, who was not asked to make it.”
Sella had come round the table. She had been sitting beside the Carry seat all through the vote with her ledger on her knee and her fingers on the boy’s wrist, lightly, the way she took a pulse. Now she laid her palm flat on his forehead, very gently, and then looked down at the open ledger with a frown.
“He is not ill,” she said. “The diagnosis is that he is tired, which is a different thing. The comfort is that he has been tired for a very long time, and nobody has noticed, and now he has said so.” She closed the ledger. “A bone-ledger cannot write that down. It has no column for it.”
Pim had been watching the Warden all this while. When the vote was over, and the Hands had begun to rise and stretch and drift toward the Kitchen and the court, he slid off the Carry seat and came round the table, quite quietly, and stood in front of Idrin with his hands behind his back. He looked up at the Warden’s face with his bright, steady, honest eyes.
“Will I be counted as awake,” he asked, “while the vote is deferred?”
“Yes,” said Idrin. “You will be counted awake. You are awake now. You will stay awake until the Hold decides otherwise.”
Pim considered this with great seriousness. Then he nodded, once, decisively, as a carrier nods when a load has been set down in the right place.
“That is the first sensible thing a Warden has said,” he said, “in a month.”