Bardo Kell came up the Lessary Road with four marsh carts and a grin that did not reach his left eye, which was how his cousins had always known he was about to cheat them.
He was not cheating anyone that morning. He was only charging what the iron was worth, and the iron, he had decided somewhere on the causeway, was worth more than it had been the week before. He had seen the Caul board at Lantern Ford. It stood on two posts by the toll-house, a flat sheet of planed pine with a price painted on it in black, in a neat foreign hand that was not Lessaran and not marsh. The price was for iron crossing the Caul. It was twice the price of the same iron on the Lantern Ford road, and it had been written there by a Corvanne factor who had never once in his life been asked to haul a cart through the reeds.
Bardo had read the board, and had spat in the ditch, and had decided that the Hold would pay for the spit.
He came in under the gate-arch with the carts in a line behind him and the marsh mud still drying on their wheels. The gate-wardens had seen him from the wall. Two of them were on the stair, looking down, and one of them was Harrow, who had come out of the Mason’s Yard with his sleeves rolled and a stone in each hand, and who…
