The Gallows-tax men came down into the reeds without hurry. Their horses picked their way along the sunken edge of the road with the dainty, fastidious steps of animals that did not like the smell of standing water, and the riders sat loose in their saddles and let the animals find their footing. There were seven of them. The captain rode at the front, lean and grey-moustached, with his hooked pole across his saddle-bow and his gloved hands folded on the pommel. He stopped his horse ten paces from the wagon and sat looking at the rails, the rope, the cracked axle, the prince, and the woman with her bloody hand, with the patient interest of a man reading a bill of lading.
“Morning, Exile,” said the captain.
Idrin had got to his feet. He had mud to the knee and blood on his palms, and he did not feel dignified, and he was aware that the captain knew it. “I am Idrin Saelmar.”
“Yes,” said the captain pleasantly. “That’s the name the Chancery struck off its book, Exile. I’m bound to use it, because it’s the one I’ve been given to write on the summons. I don’t think the Chancery intended it as a compliment.” He nodded at the rails. “Those are Crown iron.”
“They are the Hold’s iron, now.”
“They’re the Crown’s iron on the Crown’s road, in a Crown’s wagon, with a Crown’s stamp on the first one.” The captain’s gaze went along the rails, one after another, as though he were counting them. “Nineteen, I make it, and the one on the road makes twenty. The Crown is owed its tenth. That’s the toll on iron moved over a Crown road. It’s the same toll the marsh-men pay at Lantern Ford, and they pay it in salt, and they don’t like it.”
“I refuse the toll,” said Idrin.
He said it in the Forms. He had not planned to. The words came up in his throat in the familiar order, we find the demand unjustified, and we decline to recognise it, and he heard them go out across the reeds in the clear, cold, Chancery voice that he had used to sign his name to nothing, all those years in Sallowmere, and that had always sounded to him like a door being shut very quietly in another room.
The captain did not seem disturbed. He tilted his head, as a man does who has heard a joke he has heard before.
“That’s very fine,” he said. “But the Crown doesn’t need you to recognise anything, Exile. It takes its tenth, and then it takes the rest, and then it writes you down as a man who was carrying stolen property on the Lessary Road. That’s a Writ of its own, and the Chancery loves a Writ.”
Behind Idrin, Korrin had not moved. He stood among the rails at the back of the wagon, where the mud was deepest, and he had a bar of iron in each hand. They were rusted and heavy, the same as the rails, and he held them as easily as if they had been sticks. He did not raise them. He simply stood, with the bars hanging down at his sides and his face as flat as a shut shutter, and watched the riders with the dark steady patience of a Lash who has been waiting for an excuse.
Idrin saw the captain’s eyes go to Korrin, and then to the bars, and then back to the prince. The captain’s mouth curved very slightly at the corner.
“Your Lash doesn’t speak,” said the captain.
“He doesn’t need to.”
“No. I can see he doesn’t.” He sighed, as though the morning were getting tiresome. “Well, Exile, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t care about the iron. I care about the tenth, and the Chancery cares about the tally, and the Crown cares about the paperwork, and none of us wants a fight in a bog on the day the paymaster comes out to count us.”
“So I’ll make you an offer. Pay the tenth in iron, now, from the rails. Keep the rest. I’ll write it down as paid, and you can call the rails a gift from the Crown to the Hold, which the Crown will never admit, and everybody goes home with a clean book.”
“No,” said Idrin.
“No?”
“I’ll make you an offer,” said Idrin. He was surprised at his own voice. It did not sound like the Forms now. It sounded like the voice of a man at a stall in a market, offering a fair price for something he needed and could not afford. “The Hold will give you a receipt. A written one, in its own name, for the rails and for the tenth, and the Hold’s Warden will sign it. And when the wall stands, the Hold will have labour to spare, and the Crown’s men will have a share in it, in shares, paid at the gate. That’s the offer. A receipt and a share.”
He held out the paper. It was the Chancery form, turned over, with the date and the count and his signature on its back. He held it out at arm’s length, toward the captain, in the grey morning light.
The sergeant laughed.
It was a warm, easy laugh, quite unlike the captain’s dry courtesy, and it rang out over the reeds and made the nearest horse throw its head. Several of the riders grinned. One of them said something under his breath that Idrin did not catch, and another laughed again.
“A receipt,” said the captain, delighted. “A receipt from the Warden of the Hold. Signed in the mud, in a pretty hand, with the iron still in the wagon.” He reached out one gloved hand and plucked the paper from Idrin’s fingers. He read it, slowly, lips moving, and when he came to the signature he laughed again, more softly. “The Warden of the Hold. You’re not a Warden. You’re a Pretender with a pen, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do with this, Exile. I’ll take it back to the Crown, and the Crown will frame it, and hang it in the Chancery over the door to show the clerks what a fool looks like.”
He folded the receipt in half and tucked it into his coat. Then he looked up, and his eyes went to Idrin’s coat, to the grey wool over the left pocket, where the pale round mark lay on the cloth.
The laughter died out of his face.
He did not say anything for a moment. He sat his horse in silence, looking at the mark. Then he lifted one hand and beckoned without turning his head, and one of the riders dismounted and came forward with a short hooked pole in his fist.
“Leave the rest,” said the captain. “Take one rail. Just the one, the stamped one, for the Chancery’s wall. And take the wagon’s board off the back, so the Crown can see we’ve been here.”
The rider bent to the rails. He hooked the first rail with the end of his pole, lifted it, and swung it up onto his shoulder with a grunt. Korrin moved. He did not lunge. He simply stepped forward, one pace, into the mud, and the two iron bars in his hands came up a little, and the rider stopped with the rail on his shoulder and turned his head very slowly to look at him.
“Put it down,” said Korrin.
The rider looked at Korrin’s face. He looked at the bars. He put the rail down in the mud at his feet, carefully, the way a man sets down something he has been told not to break.
The captain laughed again, quietly. “The Lash,” he said. “I’ve heard of him. The Lash of the Hold, who killed three men on the causeway with his bare arm, and the Chancery’s own rider at Lantern Ford saw him do it through his glass.” He looked at Korrin with real, cold interest. “You’re not as good as they say, Lash. You’re better.”
“I’m the Lash,” said Korrin. “That’s all I am.”
“Then I’ll take the rail,” said the captain, “some other day.” He turned his horse. “Mister Saelmar will want to think about his receipt, and his share, and whether the Crown will forgive him for the mark on his coat. And the Chancery will want to see that mark very much. It’s in the summons.”
He rode off up the road. His men followed him in a loose, unhurried line, leaving the one stamped rail in the mud at the rider’s feet. None of them looked back. The horses went up the sunken slope slowly, with the same fastidious, unwilling steps they had come down with, and at the top of the ridge the riders paused, all together, and looked back at the wagon. Then they were gone over the rise.
The horses had not wanted to come down. Idrin noticed that now. They had shied at the reeds, and their hooves had skittered on the wet bank, and one of the riders had been thrown half out of his saddle at the bottom of the slope and had cursed and hauled his mount back under him. And now, as the last of the Crown’s men went up over the ridge, Idrin saw that all of them had been sitting with their heads turned away from the marsh, as a man turns his face from a smell he cannot bear.
Korrin let the iron bars fall. They thudded in the mud at his feet.
“The horses can smell the weft under the road,” he said. “It’s come up through the causeway from the Hold, and it’s in the reeds and the water. They know it’s there. They’ve got a nose for it.” He wiped his bloody hand down his thigh, leaving a long red smear. “They’d have been sick if they’d stayed on this bank any longer. Every man on that ridge will be retching by noon.”
Idrin did not answer. He was looking at the place in the mud where the receipt had been, and at the empty space in his own hand, and at the grey coat over his heart. He tried to think what the captain had seen there.
It was a faint round stain in the wool, about the size of a thumbnail, pale against the grey. The rain had not quite taken it away. Idrin put his finger on it, very gently, and found that the cloth beneath was slightly stiff, as though it had been pressed for years by something that was no longer there.
The disc had lain in that pocket for a week before he gave it away. The stain was the mark of a token that had left his coat, but had never quite left the cloth.