The Hunt-Wardens had come up the Lessary side of the Caul after the goats, and they had caught the tail of the line at the foot of the western shelf just as the light was going. Idrin saw their fires before he saw their faces. They made a dull orange smear on the frost below the last bend of the road, where the ground turned from heather to bare stone, and the smoke from them went straight up in the still air until it met the cold and spread out flat.
He went down to them alone, except for Korrin, who came because he would have come anyway and because he did not trust a road he had not walked himself. They left the goat-line above with Tamsin, and the wagons far ahead on the ridge, and the sound of the Hold’s count coming down from the crest in pieces, Harrow’s voice and then Tallow’s and then Ysra’s, going up and down over the stones like a tide that could not decide.
The Wardens did not draw their weapons. Idrin had expected that they would not, and he was still relieved to see it. There were a great many of them, grey-coated and bearded, standing in loose ranks along the verge with their snares coiled over their shoulders and their hounds lying in the heather with their heads on their paws. The hounds lifted their heads as he came near and then put them down again. Someone had built a…
