Under the Charter’s first posterngate hours, Lowgate stopped being a scatter of lean-tos below the wall and became a village, and Wren was the one who counted it.
She stood at the top of the crescent with her good arm hooked over a post and the other one, the scarred one, tucked into the front of her coat where the cold could not get at it. The shoulder still ached when the wind came off the reeds. It had ached since the causeway at Lantern Ford, when a Hunt-Warden’s bolt had gone through the meat above the blade and left her lying in the water with her face in the mud and a sound in her ears like a bell under a lake. Harrow had dug the well that spring. The shoulder had been mending ever since, the way things mend in the marsh: slowly, with a lot of complaint from the people around it.
Twenty-two hearths sat in a curve under the north wall. Each had a reed-thatch roof and a wattle wall daubed with the grey clay from the lower meadow, and each had a doorway with a hide over it, and a cook-stone out front, and a goat or a child or a bucket beside the stone. Wren had counted them every morning for a week, because it was a thing she could do with one hand, and because she had found that she liked counting people better than she liked counting walls. Walls were only stone…
