Before stepping down from the staging cart, Len paused at the tailboard, his amber eyes scanning the dark row of stone pillars of the country bank thirty paces across the square.
The hunter was still there.
It stood between the second and third fluted limestone columns, partially obscured by the deep shadow of the stone roofed porch. To an ordinary observer in the crowd, it was nothing more than an indistinct dark shape among the stone-built carvings. But Len’s Road Sense picked up the subtle, unnatural absence of physical shaking through the cobblestones.
Every living man in the square was moving: shifting weight from cold feet. He shivered against the damp draft, coughing from sulfur irritation, breathing in rhythmic plumes of white water drops.
The figure beneath the row of stone pillars didn’t move. It didn’t shift its weight. It didn’t breathe. It stood in the total, frozen balance of a gearwork whose springs were wound to maximum tension.
It had witnessed the entire assembly. It had heard Cira’s letter read aloud. It had seen Captain Vane drop his speaking trumpet and walk away into the fog.
It didn’t look defeated. If anything, its stance was more relaxed, more patient than it had been when it confronted Len at the boundary toll four days ago.
