The page on the desk was the property-dispute file for the upper-ford holding.
It had been on the desk for six months.
Aldric had moved it under other papers four times. He had moved it back to the top of the stack three times. The papers below it had been touched, the papers around it had been handled, the small folded note from the disputing families that had come in with the second courier of the spring had been read twice and answered once with a brief we have not forgotten you, and the file had sat under the inkstand without being opened since the day it arrived.
He opened it.
He read it.
It took him eight minutes. The dispute was a fence-line between a barley-farmer named Hadan and a goat-keeper named Hadan's-cousin-Beorn, and the fence-line was a thing that had been disputed for two generations and become an open argument the previous spring when one of the men had moved a stone marker by the width of a hand at the upper end. The displaced stone marker had broken a small irrigation channel. The irrigation channel mattered. The fence-line, in the strict legal sense, did not matter; both farmers had honest claims to it under the customary practice. What mattered was the channel, and what mattered after the channel was the principle, and the principle was the kind of principle that two cousins did not resolve between themselves without a lord's hand on it.
A lord's hand.
A lord's hand was Aldric.
A lord's hand on a stone marker, at the upper end of an irrigation channel, between two cousins, in a holding of twenty-two souls.
He set the page down.
He stood up.
He went down the corridor to the small administrative hall off the council chamber, which had been an unused store-room when he had inherited the keep and which had, in the slow growth of the realm, become the room where Hadan's-cousin-Beorn's files lived because Hadan's-cousin-Beorn was one of two thousand two hundred and fifty souls who lived in the country, and one of those two thousand two hundred and fifty was now sitting on a problem that had been waiting half a year for the lord's hand because the lord's hand had been on three Nazgûl-sighting reports, two trade negotiations, one counter-intelligence operation, the Brackridge survey commission's preliminary report, the Bree caravan-master's wintering arrangement, the third revision of the southern Greenway compact's harvest-tithe calculation, and the formal welcome of the courier who had brought the Steward's deferred reply on the eastern intelligence-channel proposal.
He went into the administrative hall.
Three stewards were at three tables.
Two were Aldric's, by long habit; they had been at the keep since the second year of the founding. The third was the one Halbarad had recommended to him eight months ago for the small new desk by the eastern window, on the grounds that the small new desk by the eastern window needed a person at it, and that the person Halbarad had in mind would, if Aldric had the patience to watch her for a year, do the work of three.
Her name was Celwyn.
She was forty-one years old. She had grown up in the upper-east farming holding; she had been twelve in the year of the founding, which made her one of the children Aldric had counted, in the original roll, as a small mouth he had been responsible for feeding. Her father had been one of the first ten men of the militia. Her mother had been one of the women who had taught Aldric, in the third winter, how to soak the salt-pork properly so that the brine did not break a man's teeth on the rind. Celwyn had read by the age of seven, which her mother had been told by her own mother was unsuitable but which her father had insisted on, and she had read everything that came through the keep for the last four years. She had begun by helping the senior steward sort the customs returns. She had moved, by the steady accretion of usefulness, into doing more and more of the actual work that the senior steward had been doing.
She was at her desk now.
She had not, on Aldric coming in, stood up. She had been told, three months ago, in a quiet exchange in the corridor outside this hall, that the courtesy of standing up for the lord was wasted in a working room when the lord was coming in to work and not to be greeted. She had nodded once and stopped standing up. The senior steward — the old man, the longest-serving — had been standing up for Aldric for nine years and would, until the day he stopped working, continue to stand up. The middle steward stood up. Celwyn did not.
Aldric set the page on her desk.
He set, on top of it, the small note from the disputing families and the survey-map of the holding and the customary-practice register that had been bound into the file at the back. He set, on top of all of it, the slim folded sheet that the clerk had drafted three weeks ago at his request and which he had been carrying in the inner pocket of his coat without giving to anyone for those three weeks.
Celwyn looked at the four items.
She looked at the slim folded sheet last.
She lifted her eyes.
"My lord."
"Open it."
She opened it.
She read it.
She read it twice — the second reading slower than the first — and she set her finger on the clause that had taken the clerk and Aldric a full evening, two weeks ago in the chamber off the hall, to phrase to Aldric's satisfaction. The clause read:
The bearer of this charter shall have, within the limits of this charter and no further, the authority of the lord on the following matters: property disputes between freeholders within a single region, of contested value not exceeding fifty gold; customary-practice rulings between freeholders within a single region; minor compact-implementation disagreements not involving the body of the compact itself; small civil suits between residents of the keep settlement, of contested value not exceeding twenty gold; and the schedule and conduct of the regular administrative session of the council, in the lord's absence. All other matters remain reserved to the lord's hand.
She read the clause four times.
She lifted her eyes.
"You are giving me Hadan and his cousin."
"I am giving you Hadan and his cousin."
"My lord — they are not a starting case. They are an ending case. They have been waiting six months."
"They have been waiting six months because they were waiting for me. They are not, today, waiting for me. They are waiting for someone who can give them a ruling that holds. That is you. You will ride out to the upper-ford holding next week. You will walk the channel. You will hear both men. You will look at the stone. You will ask Beorn the herdsman, who is Hadan's-cousin-Beorn's neighbour and who has, by the survey-map, the most disinterested view of the channel, what he has seen for three summers. You will return to the keep, and you will draft the ruling, and the ruling will go out under your hand and under the seal of this charter."
"My lord, the seal."
"The seal is being cut this week. The cutter is the dwarven smith Grimgar nominated last winter. The seal will read Senior Steward of Northwatch, by charter of the lord. Until the seal is ready, your hand alone goes on the ruling and the ruling is countersigned by the senior steward beside you."
The old man at the other table — the senior steward, the longest-serving — set his pen down.
He looked at Aldric.
He looked at Celwyn.
He looked back at Aldric, and the small look in his face was the small look of a man who had been carrying for nine years the long bag of work that no one else in the realm had been able to carry and who had, this morning at the second hour, learned that someone else was about to be permitted to carry half of it. He did not, by any movement, register pleasure. He registered, instead, the brief flat tiredness of a man who had had no idea, until that morning, how heavy his bag had been.
"My lord."
"Senior Steward."
"Until the seal is cut, my hand countersigns."
"Until the seal is cut, your hand countersigns."
"And after."
"After the seal, your hand on the matters that are above the charter. Below the charter, Celwyn's hand. Above and below are in the charter. You will hold your own seal and yourself."
"My lord."
He picked up his pen.
He went back to his customs return.
Aldric looked at Celwyn.
She had not, by any movement, made anything of the exchange. She had folded the charter once along its old crease and set it under the slim wooden weight at the corner of her desk. She had drawn the property-dispute file toward her. She had opened it. She had begun reading. The slim wooden weight she had set on top of the charter had a small marking in it that Aldric, in the morning light from the eastern window, could not at this angle read.
He paused at the door.
He turned back.
"Celwyn."
"My lord."
"There is a second dispute under the third pile on your old desk."
"My lord. I have it."
"You have it."
"I retrieved it from your old desk three months ago, my lord, when I read the survey-map of the south-meadow. I have, in the time since, prepared a draft ruling and the disputing parties' positions in proper register form. I will ride to the south-meadow the week following the upper-ford visit. The ruling I have prepared is — I will tell you, my lord, because the charter you have given me is not large enough yet to release me from telling you my prepared rulings — the ruling I have prepared is a half-split, with the smaller half going to the larger holder, on the grounds of the larger holder's prior cultivation of the disputed strip. I had not, until today, expected to be the hand on it. I will revise it under the charter and ride out."
He looked at her a long moment.
"You retrieved it from my desk three months ago."
"My lord."
"Without my asking."
"My lord — the senior steward had asked me, in passing, to make a quiet pass through your office whenever I was in it, to note files that had been on the desk longer than a season. I have been doing that for a year and a half. I have noted, at last count, eighteen such files. The property-dispute file under the third pile was one of them. I am — sorry, my lord — to have done so without your knowledge. I would not have done it under any hand but the senior steward's. I would, by my own preference, not have done it at all. I have done it because it was needed, and I have not, until today, been able to do anything with what I noted."
He stood at the door.
He did not, for a beat, speak.
Then he said: "You have a list of eighteen."
"My lord."
"You will copy that list, in your own hand, and you will bring it to me in the chamber off the hall at the third hour after sunrise tomorrow. We will go through it together. Each item will be assigned a hand. Some will be yours under the charter. Some will need a wider charter, which we will draft. Some will be mine, with a deadline. Some are — I will admit it, in this room and not in any other — likely to be ones I should have closed two years ago. We will close them in proper order."
"My lord."
"Celwyn."
"My lord."
"Until I have your list in my hand, this charter is provisional only by the absence of the seal. You are, from the rising of the next bell, the senior steward of Northwatch in the matters set out on that sheet. The senior steward beside you has a separate seal, separate authority, separate name. You are the second. You are not, by my hand, a clerk of any kind any longer."
"My lord."
"Go to the upper-ford holding next week."
"My lord."
He went out.
In the corridor, he set his hand briefly on the wall, in the small private way he had been doing when something had landed that he wanted to make sure had landed, and stood a beat.
Then he went on to find Halbarad, who would need to be told before the noon meal that the senior steward layer had at last been put in.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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