The widow had a tin cup on a string, and she had stood in the bread queue at Lowgate every morning since the rations were cut, so the cup knew the way to the Kitchen steps better than she did.
It was a good cup. It had been her husband’s, when he was alive to drink from it. He had been a carter on the Lessary Road, a big slow man who had hauled marsh salt for twenty years and never once been late to a ford, and he had walked out one morning in the spring to take a load up toward the causeway and had not come back. The marsh had him, or the Lessaran toll had him, or the fever had him in some toll-house with no name on the door. Nobody in Lowgate had been able to tell her which. She had stopped asking. The cup stayed on its string around her neck, and she used it for the milk and the broth and the water from the Lowgate well, and it was the only thing of his she had kept that did not make her cry to hold.
Lowgate was a long village of lodgers under the Hold’s wall. It had no Writ of its own, only the Writ of Lodging that had been stamped on every one of their papers when they came in through the river gate, and it had no seats in the Great Hall, and it could not vote, and it…
