"My lord — the Thirteenth Region's matter."
The clerk had been waiting for him to look up.
Aldric had been looking at the page in front of him for the better part of a minute without reading it. The page was the third page of a four-page summary of the dispute that had come in from the upper-thirteenth at the end of the previous week, and the third page contained the names of the seven witnesses who had been called by the two farms and the small fact that the seven witnesses had given, in their separate statements, four distinct versions of where the disputed cart-track ran. He had read the page once at the second hour after dawn. He had attempted to read it a second time at the third hour. He had attempted to read it a third time at this hour.
He looked up.
The clerk was standing at the table the way clerks stood when they had been standing for a quarter-hour.
"How long have you been waiting."
"My lord, fifteen minutes."
"Why did you not knock."
"My lord, you did not seem to be — actively reading."
Aldric registered, with the small flat patient honesty he gave himself at this hour of any day in this last quarter, that the clerk was correct. He had not been actively reading. He had been, in fact, asleep with his eyes open, in the way a man slept with his eyes open when he had not, in fourteen nights, had more than four hours of sleep in any one of them. The asleep-with-eyes-open had a tell. The tell was that the eyes did not move along the page. The clerk had been watching the eyes for fifteen minutes.
"Speak."
"My lord, the matter has been waiting eight days. The Thirteenth has sent up the second courier this morning. The second courier carries the small additional petition that one of the two farms has filed for a hearing date to be set within the week, on the grounds that the harvest is in three weeks and the carting of the harvest cannot, by the season, wait."
"The carting cannot wait."
"My lord — no."
"How many people in the affected holding."
"Forty-three, my lord, between the two farms."
Aldric set the page down.
He looked at the page for a beat without reading it.
"Set the hearing for the day after tomorrow. Lady Tauriel to chair if she is willing. The second steward to take the seat if she is not. The matter is on my desk now and the hearing will be on my desk in two days. I will read the page tonight."
"My lord."
The clerk wrote the order.
The clerk took the small bow of dismissal at the door — Aldric had told him a year ago to stop bowing in the working room, and the clerk had stopped bowing in the working room except on Tuesdays, which the clerk had never explained — and went out.
The council room was empty.
The council had broken half an hour ago. Aldric had not, in the breaking, registered which way the matter on the floor had been settled. He had asked Celwyn, who had been sitting at his left, to send him a clean note on the settlement in the afternoon. Celwyn had inclined her head and made the small flat note on her tablet that she made when she was being asked to do a thing that she would have done anyway.
The council chair was a good chair. It had been one of the first proper chairs the smiths had set into the hall, in the third year of the founding, before the long table the council now sat at had been built. The chair had been moved twice. It was at the head of the long table now. It had a high back and a wooden frame and a thin cushion that the keep women replaced every two years.
He set his elbow on the table.
He set the side of his head against the heel of his hand.
He thought just the one breath and let it go.
Tauriel found him an hour later.
He registered her before he opened his eyes. She had stopped at the door of the council room. She had not come in for a beat — the small beat she used when she was deciding which approach the room required.
"Aldric."
"Tauriel."
He did not open his eyes immediately. He sat up. He set the elbow back on the table the right way. He drew in the slow breath that he had been told, by Arethil at the end of the first month, was the breath a man drew when he had been sleeping in the council chair and did not want the people in the room to know it.
He opened his eyes.
She was at the door.
She had Cael on her shoulder. The boy was three months old. He was, by the look of him, asleep. He had the small steady breathing he had at this hour after his second feeding, which was, by Arethil's count which Aldric was no longer keeping his own count alongside, half an hour from now. Tauriel had walked down the corridor with him to the council room because she had heard, from the steward at the inner stair, that the lord had been in the council chamber alone for an hour and had not come out.
She came in.
She closed the door behind her.
She crossed the floor. She did not, in crossing, give him the small face she gave him in the corridor when she had something to say. She gave him the face she gave him in the upper room when the day was over.
"You fell asleep."
"I fell asleep."
"In the council chair."
"In the council chair."
"How long."
"An hour, perhaps a little less. The clerk woke me. I have set Tara's Thirteenth-region matter for the day after tomorrow."
"You set me to chair."
"You did not chair the south-meadow case last week."
"I did not, because I had Cael at the second hour past noon."
"Last week was last week. This week the hearing is at the third hour after the noon meal, which is not your feeding hour. If you cannot chair, the second steward takes it."
She looked at him.
She set Cael, very carefully, in the broad arm-cradle of the second chair at the head of the table, the chair the council had set there for her at her appointment to the council seat. Cael did not wake. She turned to Aldric.
She put both her hands on the table in front of him.
"Aldric."
"Tauriel."
"You will sleep tonight."
"I have been —"
"You will sleep tonight. Arethil is in the chamber. Arethil will sit with the cradle from the first bell to the sixth bell. The Elven attendant will sit with her from the third to the sixth. I will sleep also. The boy will be fed at the second and at the fifth, and Arethil will bring him to me at the second and at the fifth, and at no other hour. The keep door of the chamber will be closed and the corridor steward will turn anyone who comes to it. You will not, by any of the small clever practices of a sleep-deprived man, set yourself up to attend on a thing in the middle of the night that the keep can do without you for one night. We have arranged it. I have arranged it with Arethil. The arrangement is in place. The arrangement is for tonight."
He looked at her.
He did not, for a beat, say anything.
He had been thinking, in the small flat way of a man too tired to think, that what he had been doing for the last fortnight was the thing being-a-father did. That the lord-work had to take the trim of an hour here and there because the lord was now also a father and the father-hours were not a thing he was going to give up to anyone, including to the system in the corner of his vision and the courier from the upper-thirteenth and the council with its eleven open files. He had been thinking it, for fourteen nights, in the small fatigue between feedings, as if the thinking made the feedings something he was choosing.
The feedings were not, by Arethil's account, a thing he had to do.
He had been making them his because giving them up had felt, in the small private exhaustion of being a new father, like giving up a part of the rest of his life that he had only just acquired.
He registered this.
He did not, often, get to register things on the second pass.
"All right."
"All right."
"One night."
"One night, to begin. If you find tomorrow that you can hold the council chair without falling out of it, we will see whether we need a second."
"All right."
She inclined her head.
She did not, on inclining, lift Cael from the chair-cradle yet. She walked around the table to the seat at his right hand. She sat. She had been on her feet, by Arethil's count, longer than was suitable for the third month after the birth, and Aldric registered the small careful set of her shoulders as she lowered herself into the chair.
"There is a second thing."
"Yes."
"Celwyn."
"I know."
"You know."
"She has been holding a piece of paper at my door for nine days. I have seen her holding it twice. The paper is the expanded authority charter. She does not want to present it to me until I ask her to present it. She told me that, on the morning of the fifth day, in the corridor, in three sentences. I have been not-asking for nine days because I have been telling myself that what I needed to do was sleep better, not delegate further. I have not been sleeping better. I have been delegating to the council a thing that does not belong on the council's table."
"And."
"And I will ask her this afternoon."
"Good."
He looked at the page on the table in front of him. He had not — he registered now — actually read it. He had moved it across the table three times.
"Tauriel."
"Aldric."
"There is a kind of guilt that is not — it is not the kind that goes away when you tell yourself it is misplaced. It is the kind that — sits, in the small thing that does not want to ask, and ages."
"I know it."
"I have been carrying that one."
"I know you have."
"It is — it does not, at the moment, want to be set down."
"You will set it down anyway. You will set it down because the alternative is failing the boy on a hearing you fell asleep in. You will set it down because Celwyn is good and she will, if you let her, take half of what is on this table off it before the week is out."
He nodded.
He stood up. He picked up the page he had not read. He walked around the table — careful past the chair where Cael slept in the long fold of the cushion — and set the page on the small writing-shelf by the door, in the small stack of papers Celwyn would, by long arrangement, find when she next came in.
He went out to find her.
She was in the administration wing.
She was at her desk. She looked up when he came in. She did not, on seeing him, reach for the folded paper she had been holding at his door for nine days. She put her pen down. She waited.
He stopped at her desk.
"Celwyn."
"My lord."
"The authority charter."
"My lord."
"Bring it in. Read it to me. Then sign me."
She took the folded paper out of the inner drawer of her desk — she had moved it from the corridor door to the drawer four days ago, by his reading — and unfolded it. She read it to him. It was three clauses longer than the first charter. The three new clauses gave her authority on small-value civil cases up to a hundred gold instead of fifty, on inter-regional minor disputes that did not touch on military matters, and on the conduct of regional councils in his and Tauriel's absence by formal designation of a regional speaker.
He listened.
He did not, in the listening, find a clause that he would have wished she had written differently.
"Sign me."
She handed him the pen.
He signed.
He set the seal himself.
He gave her back the pen. He stood at her desk a beat with his hand on the edge of it. He did not, in the beat, say anything more. The thing he would have said had already been said upstairs in the council room, and Celwyn did not need to be told the upstairs version. She inclined her head once. She took the signed charter, folded it, set it in the outer drawer where the working copies of her papers lived, and went back to her pen.
He went out.
He went up the stair.
He went into the chamber.
He took off his boots.
He lay down on the bed.
He was asleep, by Tauriel's later count, before the second sunrise-bell.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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