Peregrine Aske had been a minor envoy of the Crown for six years and a second son for twenty-eight, and both facts sat on him lightly, as a borrowed coat sits on a man who has never been measured for one.
He had been sent to Ormhold because a grain passage needed ratifying and because Chancellor Halse wanted a man who would count without being noticed to count the Hold’s household on the way. Halse had said it in a corridor in Sallowmere, with his hand on Aske’s shoulder, as a man might say that a horse was good for the road. Aske had taken it as a compliment. It was only later, on the causeway, that he had begun to understand that the Chancellor had sent him because nobody in the Assembly would miss him if he never came back.
He walked Lowgate at dusk with his clerk, Edwin Marle, a young man with a cold and an excellent hand. The houses were not so much built as left standing. Their walls had been patched with stone from other walls, and their roofs had been patched with whatever had come to hand, and in every window there was a lamp, because the living lodgers of the Hold kept their lamps lit at dusk as a town keeps its lamps when it expects an inspection and does not wish to be found in the dark.
