Ysra counted the withdrawal, which was the first thing the Hunt-Wardens had ever done in the Hold’s sight that was not an attack.
The horns sounded once, at sunrise, from the far end of the causeway. It was not the long call of the morning sitting or the short ones that had been sent round the ring to set the watch. It was a single clean note, very high, and it hung over the marsh for longer than any horn-note Ysra had yet heard, and when it stopped the silence that came after it was so complete that she could hear the water running under the causeway planks two hundred paces away.
She went to the parapet at once. She put her palm on the stone and counted.
The pots were being doused. They went out in order, from the Lantern Ford end of the ring toward the east, one every two breaths, so that the light on the water went down in a slow line, like a tide going out across a sandbank. Ysra could see the Hunt-Wardens moving among them. They were not running. They walked from the stools to the iron stands and back again with buckets, and where they stopped, the coals hissed and went grey, and a thin white breath of steam came off the wet peat and drifted away to the south-west on the morning wind. One pot. Two. Ten. She counted each one as it died, and the smoke that had lain over…
