Korrin had been waiting for a fight since the first thaw, and now that it was coming he found that he did not want it in the way he had always wanted a fight, which was fast and loud and over by the second breath. He wanted it to be honest. He wanted the men across the water to say what they were going to do before they did it, and he wanted to be able to answer them in the same plain words, and he was starting to understand that the Chancery would never give him that. The Chancery gave you a paper, and the paper gave you a gate, and the gate gave you a warrant, and every one of those things was a little further from a man’s mouth than the last.
He sat his horse at the head of the causeway with his hands on the reins and his fingers spread on the leather, and he counted the men on the north bank, because the Warden had told him to watch the reeds and the reeds were full of men.
Twelve in the first line of tents. Eight on the bow-line below the toll-house, with their bows strung and their heads down. Four by the gate-post at the south end, one of them with a bolt across his knees and a face like wet clay. And the captain, who was coming down the bank now toward the causeway’s stone on foot, with his bow slung across…
