Korrin went back to the stable at dawn, because he had been told that the nailed case had been speaking all night to the horses, and that the horses had stopped eating.
The stable-boy had told him. The boy was a Lowgate lad of about fourteen, with a broken front tooth and a voice that dropped and cracked at the ends of its sentences, and he had come up to the Watch-room door in the grey before the bell with a face like a sheet and a bucket of oats in each hand. He had not put the buckets down. He had only said, in a whisper that carried all the way down the passage, that the grey mare had lain down in her stall and would not get up, and that the bay had been pulling at its halter all night, and that the Lessaran box had been talking to them in a voice like a priest, and they could not eat for listening.
Korrin had put on his boots. He had not bothered with his coat. He had walked down through the yard in the first light with the cold coming up off the flags and the smell of the mist on the wall, and he had stood now for a while in front of the fourth stall without going in, with his arms folded and his jaw set and the Forge iron still shining in the boards where Gaunt had driven the pins.
