Korrin had brought the captain’s warrant back in his coat. He had taken it from the cloth on the causeway while the net was still falling, when the captain’s hands were full of his bow and his mouth was full of oaths, and he had not thought about the paper again until the barge was at the Hold’s landing and the Lash was sitting on the steps with his face in his hands and a wet cloth over one eye. Then he had remembered it, and had dug it out of his coat, and had held it out to Mireille without a word, because she was the only person in the Hold who read Lessaran without moving her lips.
She read it at the gatehouse table, by the light of a single candle. The Warden was upstairs with Sella and the Watch were on the wall and the gatehouse was quiet, apart from the tick of Tallow’s pencil on his board in the back room, where he had been working for an hour on a sum that he would not show anybody until it had been checked three times.
The warrant was written in Dorran Halse’s hand, and she knew it at once, the way one knows a voice in a dark room. The clauses were balanced like a sum. Each order was set against its condition, and each condition against its date, so that the whole thing had the look of a column that had been added twice and…
