Bardo Kell brought the salt himself. A reeve who sent a boy with salt got a boy’s price, and Bardo had never in his life been willing to pay a boy’s price for anything, least of all his own dignity. He stood at the head of the landing with his boots planted on the wet planks and his hat pushed back, and he watched his men unload the barge sack by sack, counting under his breath with a little smile, as though the sacks were a set of jokes he had told before and they still got a laugh.
“Forty sacks of salt,” he said, when the last one came up the planks. “Good coarse grey, from the pans on the Sallow Coast. Dry enough to keep till midsummer if your cellars keep the damp off, which they don’t, so eat it fast.”
“Forty,” said Ysra, from the top of the steps. She had come down at the bell without being sent for. She counted the men on the barge, the sacks, the boots, and the number of times Bardo touched his hat, and she said, “Thirty-nine. The last one is damp at the seam.”
“It is damp because it has been wet since Coldharbour, and I am an honest man, Watch, so I shall say it was damp at the start and dry in the middle.” He turned and spread his hands at the Hold, its ash-and-oak gate and its new stone, its banked hearths in the lodgers’ row. “You have done well with the wall. I did not think it would be done before the thaw. I was wrong and I am glad of it. Now, the stone.”
“The stone is short,” said Tallow, who had come down behind Ysra with the board under his arm.
“The stone is short by a little less than you promised,” said Bardo, with a smile that did not change his eyes. “I know. I counted it on the road. I shall want it made up on the next barge, in good Lantern Ford granite, not the crumbling shale you sent me in autumn. A wall should not weep in the first frost. It is bad for the market.”
Korrin came down the steps behind Tallow with his hand on his belt, as he always did when the marsh-men spoke about stone. The belt had no knife on it. The knife was in the forge, under Gaunt’s eye, because Idrin had asked the Watch to take the weapons off the Hands for the duration of the thaw. Bardo saw the hand and the empty belt and the set of Korrin’s shoulders, and he laughed, not unkindly.
“You can reach for it all you like, Lash. It won’t make the granite any heavier.”
“Granite is heavy,” said Korrin, which was the nearest Bardo had ever heard him come to a joke.
They went up the landing together, Bardo in front and the Hands behind him, past the Watch and the lodgers’ children, who had come out to see the barge and stayed to see the salt. Bardo gave the news while he walked, because he always did. He gave it for nothing. That was how a seller gave news to a customer he meant to keep, and Idrin, who was walking at the back with Tallow’s ledger under his arm, had learned to listen to free news with the care he would have given to a bill of sale.
“The Hunt-Wardens are buying bolts at the toll-house,” Bardo said. “Not one bolt. Hundreds. They have a clerk at the Lantern Ford who keeps the tally in a little book with a red cover, and the clerk’s book says two hundred bolts a fortnight since the autumn, and a Chancery warrant for each. I have seen the book. The clerk left it on the bench when he went to be sick over the causeway rail, and I am a reeve, so I read it.”
“What else did it say?” asked Idrin.
“That the clerk counted the marsh-men’s boats for three nights running, and the marsh-men’s children in the same column. Boats and children, in one column, with a single stroke down the middle.” Bardo’s voice did not rise. It never rose. “He wrote down both as if they were a cargo. I know that because I have been counted that way for twenty years, Warden, and so have my cousins. The Crown wrote down a census, and the census was a list of things it had decided it could spare.”
He stopped at the top of the landing, and he took off his hat, and he looked back at the river for a while. Behind the barge the Sallow was still running brown and high with the melt, and the far bank was a long grey smear of reed and mist.
“The Quiet Census struck forty villages in one season,” he said. “I suppose you know that. Your Hall has had the list in its gatehouse since the winter, I am told, although nobody on the Lessary Road has been allowed to see it. Eleven of the forty were marsh-towns. I can name you two, if you want them. Hollin Reach was one. It had a fair with a bell and a bad cart-wheel and a smith who sang to his iron, and it is not on any map that Lessary has printed since. Sallowfen was the other. Sallowfen had a headman with a sour face and a daughter with a laugh you could hear across the water, and Sallowfen is gone from the Crown’s books, so nobody in Lessary can owe it anything.”
His voice did not change on the names, and that was how Idrin knew they mattered to him. Bardo had said Hollin Reach and Sallowfen in the same flat tone he used for the price of stone. He had done it on purpose. A man who could say the names of two dead towns without a catch in his voice had been practising for years.
“Thank you,” Idrin said.
“Don’t thank me, Warden. I am charging you for it. The price is the marsh girl.” Bardo put his hat back on, very precisely, and pulled the brim down over one eye. “Does the Hold still keep her under the lodgers’ writ? Wren of the Reed-Houses. My cousin in Sallowfen has never once been told what a lodger is. She thinks a lodger is a man who has not paid his rent to the river. I should like the girl to explain it to her, when there is a boat going up the Sallow that does not need a Chancery pass.”
“She is in the Hold,” said Idrin. “She is a lodger, under the Writ. She keeps her own book.”
“Good. Then she can explain it in her own book.” Bardo nodded at the Watch, who had come to attention at the top of the steps as if he were the Warden’s escort. “And there is one more thing, which costs me nothing, since I am not sure what it is worth. There is a grey-cloaked woman on the Lessary Road. She has been asking the marsh-men after a lady named Mirelle Ash, who has a ledger in her saddle-roll and a face like someone who knows the sums. The woman does not ask for the lady by any house or title. She asks for the one who counts.”
Idrin said nothing for a moment. Ysra, at his shoulder, said, very quietly, “The woman on the Lessary Road has been seen before. Twice. Once at the ford and once on the wall.”
“She has been seen three times,” said Bardo. “I make it three. I am not a Watch, I don’t have the habit of counting people. I only count what they pay for.”
They reached the Hold’s river gate. The bar was up, and Brannoc’s voice came through the stone of its posts in a low hum that the Hands could hear and the lodgers could feel in their teeth. Bardo stopped under the arch and looked up at the gate-bar with the wary respect a man gives to a machine he does not understand.
“The silver,” he said. “The second delivery. I said the next tide, and it will be the next tide, as soon as the ford is passable. The Hold can pay me in the same coin as its promises, Warden. I am only asking that it be the right coin. Your Chamber’s count is a comfort, but it is not silver, and the Chancery has never once been known to accept a promise in payment for a debt.”
“You will have your silver,” said Idrin.
“I know I will,” said Bardo. “That is why I came up the river myself.”
He turned to go down the steps. Ysra went with him to the landing, as far as the bottom step, and there she stopped and watched him load the empty barge with his own hands, one sack and then another, though he did not need to and his men had already finished the work. She was the only one of the Hands who ever asked Bardo questions, and she asked one now, without looking at him.
“Will the Hunt-Wardens come to the gate before the thaw is over?”
Bardo laughed, a short bark across the water. “They won’t come to the gate in winter, Watch. The gate is shut. It has a bell and a bar and a body in the bar, and any clerk who has read the Chancery’s manuals knows that shut gates are a long way off a cheap victory. They will come when the Hold has stopped expecting them. That is the one thing a Chancery understands perfectly. It waits until you have sat down to your bread.”
“Then the Hold will keep standing,” said Ysra.
“The Hold has been standing for two hundred years without anyone’s permission,” Bardo said, and pushed the barge off the landing with his boot. “It is the only thing about it I have ever admired.”