Ossane rode up to the Hold’s river gate on a borrowed grey, and she did not dismount until the bar had been lifted, because it was the Hold’s custom and she had learned it on her first visit.
It had taken her four days on the Lessary Road, with two changes of horse at the posting-houses and one night in a barn at Thornwick, where the lord’s men had watched her go in and watched her come out again without asking her a single question. She had not been unhappy about that. A woman who arrived at a gate with a Chancery pass and a green-bound paper was a woman whom the gate would have to count, and she would rather be counted by the Hold than by a Thornwick steward with a list.
The river was high. The Sallow ran brown and loud beside the road, carrying foam and reeds and the odd drowned bough past the posts that the Hunt-Wardens had left standing on the bank. The posts were all down now. Their stumps stood in the wet chalk like broken teeth, and the bolt-racks were gone, and the ring of pots had left nothing behind on the marsh but a long pale scar of ash where the coals had been banked. Ossane looked at the scar as she rode. She did not like it. It was the kind of thing that a Chancery clerk would describe, in his report, as the site had been cleared.
