The siege began at dawn, and Idrin understood at once what Bardo had meant by it. Nothing happened.
He had expected a rush. He had lain awake half the night expecting the Hunt-Wardens to come off the rise in a single grey wave, bows up, torches bobbing, the causeway shaking under their boots, and he had gone over in his head the place on the north wall where a man with a shield could stand and hold the ladders off. But there was no rush. The Hunt-Wardens did not come over the causeway. They did not come up the lower ford or along the Lessary Road in a column. They sat in their camps behind the pots with their backs to the fires, and they waited, and the smoke came over the Hold in the hot still morning like a wet blanket that tasted of tar and sweetness and something under both that Idrin could not name.
He walked the court in it. He had been walking it since the second bell, because a Warden who sat at a table while his Hold was ringed with smoke was a Warden the Hold would stop listening to by noon. The court was crowded. Lowgate had come inside the wall in the night, every hearth of it, and the lodgers’ goats had come with them, and the children, and the dogs, and the carts with their bread-sacks and water-skins and bundled bedding. They stood in clumps along the walls, coughing and blinking…
