The Writ of Lodging had to be drafted by somebody who understood both the Hold’s law and the Hold’s kitchen, and Idrin had found, to his surprise, that he was the only person in the gatehouse who did. Tallow understood the law. Pell understood the kitchen. Idrin understood the Forms, which was the part of the work he had been trained for and the part he had come to the Hold to get away from, and he sat at the gatehouse table with a fresh sheet of the Register’s paper in front of him and tried to find a way of writing a girl into a house without making her a prisoner in it.
“The lodger keeps a separate ledger,” said Tallow, reading from his board. He had a figure ready for each clause. He gave them one at a time, carefully, with a small frown at the corner of his mouth that meant he disliked giving a range for a thing that ought to be simple. “The separate ledger is kept by the lodger’s own hand, or by the Clerk’s, at the lodger’s choice. It records the lodger’s bread, and the lodger’s bed, and the lodger’s share of the Hold’s work. It is a short book. I should expect it to be shorter than mine.”
“It will be shorter than yours,” said Idrin. “Write it that way.”
“The lodger is bound by the Hold’s law,” read Tallow, and gave the range. “The Hold’s law is the Register and the Chamber. A lodger must keep the Hold’s peace, must not take the Hold’s stone without a count, and must answer to the Chamber for any injury done within the walls. The range on answer is wide. It may mean a day’s labour, or a month’s bread, or the Chamber’s ear for an afternoon. I should prefer the Chamber’s ear.”
“Then write the Chamber’s ear,” said Idrin. “Plainly. No range.”
Tallow looked up at him, surprised, and then bent over the sheet and wrote it. He wrote it in his small, careful, pedantic hand, and for once he did not add a note in the margin. Idrin watched him do it and felt an odd, warm pleasure, the pleasure of a man who has taken a thing out of a clause and found that the clause is still standing.
“The lodger may be fed from the Kitchen,” read Tallow, “at the Kitchen’s table, from the Kitchen’s bread, for as long as the Kitchen has bread to spare. The range is—”
“Pell has bread to spare,” said Idrin. “Write that. It is the Kitchen’s bread. The Kitchen will decide.”
“I should be very surprised if the Kitchen did not decide,” said Tallow, dryly, and wrote it.
He read the last clause without his usual preface. It was the clause that had been troubling both of them since the drafting began, and he knew it, and he read it with his finger on the line and his eyes on the Warden’s face. “The lodger may not be counted among the citizens of the Hold,” said Tallow. “The lodger may not vote in the Chamber. The lodger’s name is not entered in the Register’s roll of citizens, and the lodger’s word does not carry the Hold’s assent. That is the Writ, Warden. It is plain. It is the same as the Writ for the envoy’s guest-room, except that it lasts longer and is written in a better hand.”
Idrin sat quiet.
He had known the clause was coming. He had known it since the moment he had written Wren, of the Reed-Houses in the margin of the Register, and had felt, under his pen, the small cold bump of a word that did not fit where he had put it. A lodger could not be counted. A citizen could. A subject could be counted by a crown, and a property could be counted by a clerk, and a lodger could be counted only by the people who fed her. He thought of the girl on the causeway in the dark, with her bundle over her head and her bare blue feet on the stones. She had counted every one of them. She had counted all the way up to the gate, and nobody had counted her.
“It is law,” he said at last.
“It is the Writ,” said Tallow.
“It is the law,” said Idrin, more quietly, “and I do not yet know what I would change it into. So I shall leave it as it stands, and I shall ask her what she thinks it ought to be.”
Wren was on the Kitchen step.
She sat on the flat stone outside the Kitchen door with her blanket round her shoulders and her knees drawn up and her bare feet tucked under her skirt, where the morning sun came in low across the court. Abel Rusk sat beside her. He had been carried out from the loft that morning by Gaunt and Korrin, on a litter made of an old door, and set down on the step with his splinted shin stretched out before him and his bandaged head propped against the wall. He had been complaining, Pell said, ever since. He had stopped only when the girl sat down beside him, and then he had said nothing, and looked at the sky, and let her offer him a piece of Pell’s bread without comment.
Idrin came out of the gatehouse with the draft in his hand. He stood on the step below them and read it aloud, the whole of it, in the Forms and in plain speech, without a figure. He read the separate ledger, and the Chamber’s ear, and the Kitchen’s bread. He read the last clause, the one about the count, and he did not look up while he read it, because he did not want to see her face.
When he had finished, Wren was silent for a long moment.
“It is correct,” she said at last. “And it is insulting.”
“Which part is insulting?” asked Idrin.
“The part that says I may not be counted,” said Wren. She did not sound angry. She sounded as if she were explaining the weight of a sack to someone who had never lifted one. “I walked the causeway. I walked it in the dark, on my own feet, and I counted every stone, and I came to the gate, and I came inside the arch. I was counted by the marsh before I ever came near the Hold. The Crown’s clerk did not count me. My mother did not. But I counted myself, all the way up, and I did it right. And now the Hold says I may not be counted among its people, because I am only a lodger.” She shook her head. “That is a Crown’s clause. It has been written by somebody who wanted to keep the count short.”
“It was not written by the Crown,” said Idrin. “It was written by me.”
Wren looked up at him. Her marsh-water eyes were steady and clear and not at all unkind.
“Then you should be ashamed of it,” she said, “and you should rewrite it, and I should like to be there when you do.”
“I shall,” said Idrin, and found, to his surprise, that he meant it.
He did not change the clause that morning. He could not. It was law, and the Writ had to be correct before it could be sealed, and a Writ that was sealed with a crooked clause would take a crooked memory. He had learned that much from the Ratification and the envoy’s Writ. So he left the words where they were, in the Register’s clean hand, and turned to go back into the gatehouse and find his pen.
Then Abel Rusk spoke.
He had been listening from the wall with his eyes half closed and his bandaged head resting against the stone. He opened his eyes now. “Spell my name,” he said.
Idrin stopped on the step.
“Spell my name into the Writ,” said Abel. His voice went up at the end, as it always did, asking permission. “I have no Writ, Warden. I have a pot-cart and a board and a bed over the oven, and nobody in this Hold has ever once written my name down. The girl has hers. The boy has the tinker’s first place on his tongue. I should like mine in the book, too. Even if I am only a lodger. Even if I am the second.”
Idrin looked at him for a long moment. Then he went back into the gatehouse and sat down at the table, and dipped his pen, and turned the draft to its last page, beneath the clause about the count.
“How is it spelled?” he asked.
“A, B, E, L,” said Abel, from the step. “R, U, S, K.”
Idrin wrote the letters, one at a time, in his plain, steady hand. He did not hurry. He wrote each letter as clearly as he could, the A and the B and the E, and then the L, and then he paused, and wrote the R, and the U, and the S, and the K. When he had finished he sat looking at the name for a while. It was a small name. It had no crown in it and no Forms and no seal. But he found, as he watched the letters stand up on the page one after another, that the act of spelling a man’s name aloud and then writing it down was a kind of counting, and that it was the only kind of counting he had ever been any good at.
He read it back, very slowly, without stumbling on a single letter.
“Abel Rusk,” said Idrin, and his voice was steady, and for the first time in a week the sound of a name came out of his mouth without a catch in it, because it was not his own.
On the Kitchen step, Abel’s face broke open into a grin, very wide and very bright.
“Then I can be a lodger too,” he said. “Can I? Can a tinker be a lodger as well as a girl?”
“Yes,” said Idrin.
“Then I shall be the second,” said Abel, and he sounded delighted.
“You will be the first,” said Wren, from the step, “to be told you are a second.” She did not look at him. She was looking at the Warden. But there was a faint, sharp, unwilling smile at the corner of her mouth, and Idrin, watching it, thought it was the first real thing he had seen on her face since the gate.