The gate was hung at dusk. Brannoc knew it as a sluice knows the water: all at once, from the inside, in a rush of pressure that came up through the frame and the footings and the wet stone of the arch and found him where he had been lying, asleep in the bones of the Hold for longer than any Hand could count, with the cold of the marsh pressed against the back of his eyes.
The bar dropped into its brackets with a sound like a bucket going down a well.
He woke.
It was not a waking as a man wakes in a bed. It was a filling. Water came back into him, from the Sallow and the marsh and the ditches under the Lessary Road, and it came through the stone of the posts and the iron of the band and the ash and oak of the bar, and it found the place where he had been waiting, and it settled there, heavy and cold and very clear. He was in the gate-hand’s seat. He knew it by the weight. He knew it by the way the bar sat against his shoulder in the brackets, dense and dry and quiet, as a sleeping animal sits against the flank of its keeper. He was the gate. The gate was shut. The water on the far side of it was the Lessary Road, and beyond the Lessary Road was the rest of the world, and the rest of…
