The Hard Hands stood at the Great Hall’s door in a line, four Lowgate men with their heads up and their boots blacked, and Korrin stood at the lectern step in front of the Roll and did not sit down.
He had asked for the step. He had asked for it the way he asked for anything, in three words, to the clerk, in the Roll-room with the lamp lit. He had not asked for a chair. A Hand who was read sitting down had given the Roll his weight, and Korrin had never once in his life given anybody his weight unless they had taken it off him with a blow. He would stand for his own line. He would stand for it the way he stood on the drill-yard, with his heels together and his hands behind his back and his eyes on the thing in front of him.
The sitting was sixty names. Tobin read them.
That had been Tallow’s decision, and Korrin had not argued with it. A builder should be read by someone who could say the names without weight, Tallow had said, and Tobin could say a name without any weight at all, not because he did not feel it, but because he had not yet learned how heavy names were supposed to be. He said them clear and high and plain, from the step beside Korrin’s, and he waited after each one for the Mantle’s Writ to fall, as a boy waits at…
