From the north wall the ring looked like a thing that had been drawn with a stick by somebody who knew exactly where every stone was.
Korrin could see the whole of it from the parapet above the Lowgate huts. He could see the Lantern Ford toll on the south-west, a squat grey house with a bar across the causeway and a fire going in its yard. He could see the reeds on the north, flattened in long bands where the marsh-men had walked them down over the winter. And he could see the new posts, running out along the Lessary Road to the east in a line that did not bend, every one of them with a bolt-rack at its foot and a pot of coals beside it. Two hundred and forty men, Ysra had counted, from the Chancery’s own horn-calls. Two hundred and forty men with bows and no nerve.
He had told the Chamber that at noon. He had said it plainly, because it was true and because he was tired of saying things that were not. A line that thin broke at its middle. Put a dozen men through the middle of it and the rest would turn to look at the gap and forget their own arrows. He would go out at dusk, with the Lash’s six, down the Lessary Road and across the causeway at the toll, and he would break the middle before the ring could be lit.
