Korrin had been told to keep his imperatives in his mouth, and he had kept them there for the best part of an hour. It was a torture he would not wish on a Lessaran.
The King talked to the Warden about the Crown, and the Crown’s words were long. They went out over the river one after another, each one wrapped in so many clauses that it took a man a full breath to get to its end, and by the time the end came there was no room left in the sentence for anything a Hold could use. Korrin had heard such talk before, in the Assembly’s yard at Sallowmere when he had been a boy running errands for a carter, and he had learned then that a Lessaran who talked for an hour about the Crown was a Lessaran who was counting the time it would take you to get bored. He was not bored. He was keeping his teeth shut. It was harder.
So he read the escort instead.
He read it the way he read a fight, from the ends of the line inward. The archers on the flanks, with their strings wrapped in oilcloth and their faces turned to the water. A man on the far left whose horse kept shifting its weight, which meant the man was tired and the horse knew it. The clerk with the black box, who had not moved his hand from inside his coat since the Warden walked…
