The Sallow Ford ferry had no keeper, and so the Sallow Ford had stopped.
Korrin had not believed it when Osper first told him, at the gate, with his cap in his hands and his mule shifting its feet behind him. A river did not stop because a Hand was missing from a seat. It ran on under the bridge and under the ferry-landing and out past the mill-weir, and it did not care who was on the rope or who was not. But the ferry was a thing the body had made, and the rope across the water was a thing the body had hung there in the first winter, and the seat that worked them had been empty since the Herder went quiet on her trough, and the river had not been crossed by anything with a bottom to it since the Crossing.
So the carts had been stuck on the east bank for a day, with the barley in them, shouting.
Korrin went down to the landing at dusk with two Lowgate men and a lantern. He did not take an axe. He had thought about it on the way down, and had decided that an axe was not what a river needed from him, and that he would have to try the other thing first, which was to be the officer that the Lessarans had been asking for at the causeway. He had been an officer for longer than most of them had been alive. He…
