Addendum | Why does the crown fit some kings on their accession day, while their names will not go into the wall?

(This piece is a private collation of the Tomb Rites. It does not represent the position of the White Tower Church, and is offered for reference only.)

Every child in the seven realms is taught the same thing: the king is chosen by the gods, and on the day of his accession he puts on the Crown, sits down on the Throne, and the mandate is his.

But turn over a few of the leaves of the Tomb Rites that have found their way out, and this business of the mandate is set down as something a good deal more tangled than the schoolbooks make it.

One saying comes up again and again in the rites: for a new king to be "made", 2 things have to be done. The first is to put on the Crown and sit down on the Throne. The second is to have his own true name cut into the Mute Wall. The first has an hour, a celebrant and an account kept of it; the second has no one presiding over it, and no one can say at which moment it happens.

The first of the two, men have grown very practised at. The moment the kingship stands vacant the Church issues the Seven-Day Coronation Decree, the text signed by the Pontiff's own hand and copied out seven times for the seven realms; before sunset on the seventh day the new king must be sitting on that chair. The accession itself is startlingly short: the Church recites the rites text, the heads of the houses take their ranks, the new king climbs the seven steps and sits down, and the whole of it takes less than a quarter of an hour. The Household ledgers set that day down in detail, down to the number of post-horses for the seven copies of the decree; and there is no column in them called the cutting of the name.

The second of the two is nowhere in the accounts, and only the outcome can be looked up. By the Year 412 of the Royal Era the Ironhold dynasty had passed through 105 reigns; in these 400 years the Church has convened the Extraordinary Synod 17 times, 14 of them over a succession, and on 9 of those 14 the Church went round every one of the houses and named the new king itself.

According to the surviving leaves, not every man who has sat on the Throne has had his name go into the stone. There have been kings who put on the Crown, sat firm on the Throne and were proclaimed by the Church, and whose names never appeared on the Mute Wall. The histories give them much the same footnote: a short reign, a bad end.

The rites do not explain why. They pass it off with one very old line:

The crown is in the hands of men; the name is in the wall. Men can give a crown. They cannot give a name.

On the same matter the seven realms have seven accounts. The official position of the White Tower Church is that the names on the wall are the gods keeping accounts on men's behalf: once the merits and faults of a reign have been taken in, the name goes up. As for the ones that never go up, the oracles of the Pontificate come in only six fixed forms of words, not one of which will carry such a thing, and so the Church never raises it of its own accord. The old people of the Mute March put it more plainly: they say the wall is alive and the names are what it has eaten, and that for those few kings the wall never opened its mouth. The Sangold League takes no part in the argument; their long-range contracts carry only the one line, the Mute Wall clause: should the wall not be there, no penalty is owed along the northern trade line.

The paperwork at Ironhold gives the least trouble of all. In the archives of the Bureau of Military Affairs the Mute Wall is listed under "Northern Border Defence Works", with file number, cost of construction and annual silver for repairs all complete, except that the column for the cost of construction has stood empty since the year the kingdom was founded. The cutting of the name is not an item there at all. Only what has to be done gets a budget.

Two common misunderstandings, cleared up while we are here. Some take the cutting of the name for a rite performed on the day of the accession: the Mute Wall lies 800 kilometres from the capital and a courier needs 5 to 7 days on the road, so the capital on the day of an accession cannot possibly know what has happened on that face of stone. Others take it that the Wallwardens send word. The shift note left at every change of watch has kept a form unchanged for several hundred years; what it counts is beasts and men, and it has no column for the characters on the wall.

The leaves have been scattered badly, and only 19 kings can still be matched to a place in the line. Among those 19 there are several who wore the Crown for an unnaturally long time, outliving the nobles of their own generation by decades. Where the rites come to them the wording turns careful, saying only that they "wore it long", and after that comes a stretch of blank that someone has scraped away with a knife.

All of this can of course be put down to the superstition of court historians. When a king cannot hold his seat, blaming it on the wall not acknowledging him is more decent than admitting he was not equal to the work. Only, for that explanation to hold, one has first to assume that the wall has no opinion at all about who sits down on the chair.

This accession is upon us. The seven-day term is reckoned from the capital, and the Mute March's copy of the decree needs 9 days on the post road; by the time the head of the house in the north opens that sheet of gold leaf, someone will most likely be on the chair already. Whether one more name has appeared on the wall is a thing no one will be able to say until a courier has finished his 5 to 7 days.