The Hold learned to be shut. It did not learn quickly. A place that had been open to the marsh for two hundred years did not forget its habits in a single evening, and the lodgers came to the foot of the wall at dusk for a week after the gate was hung, to stand and look at it, as though they expected it to change its mind. They brought their children and their goats and their spare blankets, and they stood in the lane between the huts with their breath going up in the cold, and they watched the ash-and-oak bar come down across the arch with a sound that they felt in their teeth before they heard it.
Idrin walked the wall at the same hour each evening, because Ysra had asked him to, and because the stone under his boots had begun to tell him things. It did not speak in words. It spoke as a well speaks in the dark, by a change in the cold, so that he knew without looking where the water lay. Every few paces along the parapet he felt it. A faint pull in the joints of his knees, a warmth in the heel of his foot, a sense that somewhere beneath him, in the bones of the wall, a man was standing motionless with his hand on a bar and his ear turned toward the road.
