Chapter 179

The girl from Coldwater came on the first Thursday in August, which was a stool day.

There is a stool day every month now. He had stood up off Nana’s stool on the last evening of his penance and left it where it was, by the range, and the King of Vaelmoor sat on it one Thursday a month and heard anyone who walked in at the kitchen door.

I was at the end of the long table with the petition book, copying the morning’s matters fairly.

She came in with the carter’s wife who had found her on the road, and stood at the end of the line.

***

She was perhaps twelve. Thin, in a man’s coat cut down, with her boots gone through at both toes. She had walked from Coldwater, eight days by road on a horse, because somebody in the market there had told her that the King of Vaelmoor sat on a stool in a kitchen, and she had not believed it.

When it was her turn she stood in front of the stool and looked at him, and then at the stool, and then at him again.

“Yo