Pell had been trying to get her Walk since the Foundation’s first loaf, and she said so in the Great Hall at the midday bell, standing before the Chamber’s table with flour on her forearms and her apron still tied at the waist.
Everybody at the table laughed. It was the kind of laugh she had come to expect from the Hold, a warm, rolling sound that started at the minute-book and went round the bench like a dish being passed. Korrin, who had been drilling in the yard since the first bell, laughed loudest. Tobin laughed because Korrin did. Idrin, at the head of the table, put his hand over his mouth. Pell waited until they had finished, which took a while, and then she waited a little longer, because she was not joking and they knew it, and the laughter ran out of them one face at a time, the way water runs out of a sieve when it has reached the bottom.
“I am not joking,” said Pell.
“No,” said Idrin quietly. “I can see that.”
“I want to be a citizen,” said Pell. “With a Dwelling in Lowgate, on the stream side, with a stove of my own and a window that opens. I want to bake for the Hold as a living woman, with my own hands, and not as a Feed Form in a copper mould that somebody remembered to set out for me on a shelf.” She looked down the table at Tallow…
