The commission rode up the Lessary Road at dawn under a white truce flag. Idrin watched it come from the north wall above the gate, with the cold coming up off the marsh into his face and the lodgers’ hearths gone to ash along the bank below him. He had not slept. He had sat up in the gatehouse with the Register’s copy open on the table and the Chancellor’s letter beside it, reading the same three lines over and over until they stopped meaning anything, and then he had gone out to the wall because the stone would not let him stay indoors.
There were two dozen of them. They came round the bend from the south in a long grey column, riding two abreast, with the Chancery’s wax at every throat and the morning sun on their helms and their lances carried upright, the pennants stiff in the still air. Behind them came a closed carriage on four heavy wheels, black and polished, with a driver in grey on the box and the Assembly’s seal painted small on its door. The Hunt-Wardens stood back from the road as the column came up. They did not raise their bows. They did not so much as glance at the column. They stood in their rows along the north bank, grey on grey, with their boots in the mud, and let the commission pass between them like a procession at a funeral that they had been told was not theirs.
