The safe-conduct came up the river on Bardo’s barge, the second time in a week, under the Chancery’s green pennant gone soft with the wet. Mireille watched it come from the bakehouse window. The smoke lay over the water like a dirty sheet, and the barge came through it slowly, with its poles going in and out of the brown current, and the reeve standing in the stern with one hand raised as if the whole Hold were a bridge that might yet be too low for him.
It was past dusk. The ring was lit. The pots along the Lessary Road and the causeway had been burning since noon, and the glow of them lay under the smoke in a sullen orange band that made the water look as if it had caught fire from below. Mireille could see the Hunt-Wardens moving about their fires in the distance, small and dark, and she could hear, very faintly, the sound of a horn calling a number across the marsh. Then the wind shifted and the sound was gone.
The paper was in the bow. Bardo had carried it there himself, in an oilskin case with a Chancery seal on the flap, and he handed it up to the Watch on the landing without a word, and the Watch brought it up the bank to the bakehouse with the lamp held high in front of it, as though the paper might be dangerous.
