Chapter 33: The Kettle

Four days were left on the stay, to the first bell of the fifty-first, and at the second bell of the forty-seventh the Hall came up the stair for its paper. Kael had the left doorpost, and Mira had the right. The paint was cracked into little plates under his hand, and he knew they were there only because the light lay on them. Lord Rhyd's secretary came up the stair in the Hall's grey with two Hall clerks and two Company porters behind him. At the stair's foot the man who sold nothing wrote the hour on the back of his hand. "The Hall regrets the intrusion," said the secretary. He was a narrow man with a clean collar and wet-looking eyes. He held out a folded sheet to the nearer clerk, and the clerk read it in a voice with nothing in it. "A writ of return, on…