Bardo Kell came back up the Sallow in the dark with no lamps lit, which was how a reeve travelled when he had been paid by the other side and had not yet decided what to sell.
He had taken the barge off the Lessary landing at the turn of the tide and let it drift the last mile on the slack water, poling only at the bends, with his nephew asleep in the bow under a sack of salt and his own two hands doing the work that a reeve’s hands were meant to do when there was nobody to shout at. The river was black. The banks were black. The only light in the whole of the Lamentine that night came from the rise above Lantern Ford, and it was not a light a man wanted to steer toward.
He tied at the Hold’s landing and sent the nephew home. Then he walked up the bank to the gate in his wet boots, past the posts, which were quiet now, past the Lowgate huts with their doors shut and their dogs barking at the stink of him, and he sat down on the gatehouse steps and waited for somebody to come down and be annoyed to see him.
