The Hold had one horse that was not Idrin’s grey, and it was a heavy brown gelding with a mouth like a boot and a habit of lying down in the middle of the causeway whenever it was asked to cross running water. Its name was Dunstan, Jory had told him on the first day, though Jory was not there to say it now and Idrin had no intention of asking the animal anything. He saddled it himself, in the grey light before the sun, with the cinch half-rotten and the stirrup-leather patched with a strip of sack. Korrin watched him do it from the foot of the stable steps with his chained wrists held loosely in front of him.
“You’ll drop the saddle,” he said.
“I won’t drop the saddle.”
“You’ll drop the saddle, and the horse will lie down, and then we’ll both be lying in a ditch at the side of the Lessary Road with the Gallows-tax men coming up behind us. I’ve seen it done.” He watched him tighten the girth with the flat calm of a soldier who has seen a great many things done badly. “Take the chain off me first.”
He had been thinking about the chain all morning. Korrin had been held to the cellar pillar since the causeway, and he had said nothing about it, except to remark, without apparent interest, that a Lash kept on a pillar for a month would forget how to use his arm.
“The cuffs are the weft’s,” said Idrin. “I can’t take them off.”
“You can ask the stone.”
“I asked the stone for the causeway and it let you go for a quarter of a minute, and then it took the arm again.”
“I asked it nothing,” said Korrin. “I stood on a causeway and killed three men, and it stopped my arm, and I didn’t ask it anything at all.” He shifted his weight, and the cuffs clinked. “I don’t need a stone’s leave to ride. You’re the Warden, or the Pretender, or whatever the book says you are. You can order the chain off my wrists, and the stone will hear you, because it hears everything you say, and it hasn’t been the same since you came.”
Idrin looked at him. He met Idrin’s eyes steadily. There was nothing in his face but the same flat, sullen, unforgiving calm, and beneath it something that might have been pride, or might have been a very dry sort of humour.
He spoke to the cuffs, in a plain, clear voice, the voice he had learned from the clerk. “The Lash is to be let out for the Hold’s business on the Lessary Road. Her chain is to be taken off for the length of the ride and put on again at her return. That is the Hold’s word.”
The cuffs loosened. They did not fall. They drew back from his wrists, slowly, as the weft had drawn back from his sword-arm on the causeway, and sank into the stone of the stable step, and were gone. Korrin rubbed his wrists one at a time, slowly, and looked down at them with an odd expression.
“Good,” he said. “Now get the saddle straight.”
They rode out under the arch with the sun just coming up over the marsh, a grey horse and a brown one in the cold light, and the chain across the gate lifted for them as they passed and settled behind. Korrin did not turn back. He rode with his seat loose and his hands low on the reins, watching the road ahead with the steady attention of a soldier who has been told the enemy is not yet in sight and does not believe it.
The Lessary Road ran down the long slope from the Hold into the reeds, and then out along a causeway of its own, two leagues south-west, to a crossing over a smaller channel of the Sallow. The Crown had begun a bridge there, twenty years before, and had stopped. The piers stood up out of the water like broken teeth, and beside them the road ran on across the reeds on a bank of packed earth that had sunk in the middle and was now black with standing water. It was a bad road. He thought about it now, and about the bridge, and about the Crown that had stopped in the middle of a sentence.
The wagon was where Korrin had said it would be. It stood at the side of the road, half in the reeds, its near-side wheel sunk to the hub in black mud and its shafts tilted up at an angle like a dead horse’s legs. The team had been cut loose and was gone. The load in the bed was a stack of iron rails, long, heavy, dull grey with rust along their edges, each one as thick as a man’s wrist and as long as a cart-bed. There were perhaps twenty of them. The top layer had been roped against the sides, and the rope had rotted.
“Bridge rails,” said Korrin, with satisfaction. He swung down from his horse and walked round the wagon with his hand on his hip, looking at the mud. “The Crown’s own. They’re going to the piers at Lantern Ford, I’d guess, if they ever finish the thing. And they’ve got one wheel in the bog and the axle cracked clean through, and the drivers have run off into the reeds because they’re too frightened of the marsh to come back for their wages.”
“We can’t take twenty rails on one horse.”
“We can take four,” said Korrin, “and we’ll come back with the cart for the rest, if the Hold has a cart, which I doubt. Or we can take them all, one by one, on our backs, and be dead by evening.” He crouched by the wheel and put his palm on the mud. “The iron’s good. You can feel it through the wood. That’s Crown iron, and the Crown’s been paying good money for it, and it’s been sitting in a bog for a month with nobody to pay the carters.”
Idrin took out his notebook. He opened it on his knee, and then, because he had no other paper, he took a Chancery form from the saddlebag, a blank sheet printed with the Lessary arms and a line for the signatory, and turned it over. On the back he wrote the date, and the number of the rails, and Received by the Hold of Ormhold, in the Warden’s name, for the Hold’s use, under the Hold’s word. He stopped. He looked at the last phrase, and then he signed it. He wrote Idrin Saelmar, Warden, in a firm clear hand.
He was not the Warden, and would not be for weeks. He knew it while he wrote. He wrote it anyway, because the Hold was going to need a name on its receipts.
Korrin, watching him from the wheel, shook his head slowly.
“You’re an idiot,” he said.
“I know.”
“You’re a Lessary idiot, which is the worst kind, because you think a piece of paper makes the iron yours.” He stood up and dusted the mud off his hands. “Come on. Give me the first rail. We’ll have the four of them on the horse before the sun’s clear the marsh, and you’ll have written your receipt for the next six, and the Crown can come and read it when it’s dry.”
He braced his knees against the weight. It was harder than he had expected. The rails were long and dense and surprisingly cold to the touch, even in the morning sun, and they had a weight to them that made his shoulders burn within a few strides. Korrin took the heavy end without a word and walked backward through the mud with it, and Idrin took the light end, and between them they worked the first rail up over the side of the bed and onto the packed earth of the road. Then the second. Then the third.
They were three rails into the work when the shout came from the causeway.
It was a single hoarse cry, from somewhere along the road to the south, and then another, sharper, answering it. Korrin straightened up with the third rail still in his arms and turned his head, very slowly, toward the sound. His face did not change, but his whole body went still in the way that a dog’s does when it smells something across a field.
“The road’s watched,” he said.
Idrin looked up.
There were riders on the ridge beyond the reeds. Six of them, perhaps seven, sitting their horses in a line against the grey morning sky. They wore long coats of grey wool with red cuffs and red collars, and each one carried a short hooked pole at his saddle-bow, the kind a tax-man uses to pull down a load. The badge on their coats was a red rope knotted in a noose. Idrin knew it at once. He had seen it on the gallows at Sallowmere, painted on the great timber beam above the square, where the Crown hanged the men it could not tax.
“Gallows-tax,” said Korrin. “They’re not looking at us. They’re looking at the rails.”
The wagon’s axle gave a sharp crack, like a branch snapping in the wind. The cart lurched sideways in the mud, and the rails in the bed shifted and groaned, and Korrin dropped the third rail and threw himself across the mud at the wheel. He got his arms under the sunken hub. He heaved. The wheel did not move. He set his bare feet into the black ooze, braced his shoulder against the wooden spokes, and heaved again, and the cracked axle shrieked as the iron tried to come up out of the bog.
“Get the rails off!” he shouted. “Idrin! Now! Before they’re on us!”
He did not think. He went to the bed of the wagon and began to lift the rails out one by one, hauling them over the sides and dropping them into the reeds. They were heavy. His palms were torn by the rope-ends, and his shoulders screamed under the weight, and the riders on the ridge were coming down now, slowly, at a walk, their hooked poles swinging loosely from their saddles.
Korrin got the wheel free with a grunt and a wrench that threw him onto his back in the mud. He sat up at once. His hands were black with ooze to the wrist, and there was a long bloody scrape across one palm where a splinter of the axle had caught him. He ignored it. He reached for the nearest of the rails that Idrin had dropped, grasped it in both hands, and lifted it clear of the reeds with a single hard effort, and turned it over in the morning light.
There was a stamp on its end, a clear pressed mark in the rust. The lion of Lessary, with a broken chain in its jaws.
“Good Crown iron,” said Korrin, with a kind of fierce contempt. “The first one’s stamped clean. That’s a Crown that paid for its rails. And it can’t even finish its own bridge.” He threw the rail down on the road beside him, and it rang like a bell on the packed earth. “A Crown that can’t finish its own bridge doesn’t deserve its iron.”
Idrin stood in the mud with his hands bleeding and his coat dragging, and looked at Korrin, and at the rails, and at the riders coming down off the ridge with their poles swinging. Then he bent and took the next rail in both hands, and lifted.
He had never been told to lift anything by someone angrier than he was. He lifted.
The riders gave the rails no heed. They were looking at him. They came down the slope in a loose line and reined in at the edge of the road, perhaps twenty paces off, and sat their horses in silence for a moment, studying the scene: the cart with its broken axle, the prince in the mud, the Lash with his bloody hand, the rails scattered in the reeds. Their captain was a lean man with a grey moustache and a bored, patient look.
The captain’s eyes went over the prince’s face, and then to his coat. They stopped there.
Idrin looked down. On the grey wool of his coat, just over the left pocket, where the disc had lain for a week against his ribs and had left its faint round mark on the cloth, there was a pale stain, the size of a thumbnail, that the rain had not quite washed away.
The captain lifted one gloved hand, slowly, and pointed at the mark. He said a single word, quite clearly, in the flat Lessary accent of a man who has been paid to say it.
It sounded like property.