The sprig had lived past its day. Tallow said that was not supposed to happen, and then he wrote it down, carefully, in the margin of the Hold’s minutes, with a margin of two days either way and a note that the margin was the only honest thing about it. It had come back along the bank on the second night, in the rain. The Watch had found it at the landing among the reeds where the barge had first put in, lying on its side with its jaw broken and its eyes half shut, and it had made no sound at all when they lifted it, except for a faint dry clicking that might have been its joints, or its teeth, or nothing.
They had carried it to the Mason’s Yard in a basket of wet sacking. Harrow had been sitting beside it ever since.
It had been in the yard for a day and a night. It had come into the Hold in the morning and the Mason had sat with it through the noon, and the afternoon, and the long grey hours after the lamps were lit. It breathed in threes most of the time, which Harrow had decided was a kind of stubbornness. It had eleven joints in its jaw, and seven in its one good hand, and he had counted them all twice to be sure, because a count was the only courtesy he had to offer a thing that could not offer him anything…
