They sat on the broken parapet with the river loud beneath them, the King on one side and the Warden on the other, and Corvin made his offer the way he had always made offers: as if he were selling a horse he did not much care to keep.
The parapet was the last whole piece of wall on the middle span. Its coping had cracked in the frost and then been worn smooth by a century of wind, and it was just wide enough for two men to sit on with their knees almost touching and a gap between them for the rain to fall through. The stone was cold and wet. Idrin felt the damp come up through his coat and into the seat of his breeches, and he did not move. Across the gap his brother had folded his hands on his knee, the way he had folded them at their father’s table when the old King was about to say a thing that was not to be argued with, and the rain ran off his hair and down his face and dripped from his chin onto the wet wool of his coat.
“The Crown will make you Warden of the Marches,” said Corvin.
