The Hollowed had pulled back across the Sallow in the night, leaving two dead horses on the causeway and a sheaf of reed-coloured cloaks tangled in the wire of the broken toll-house fence. The river ran high and brown past the ferry’s empty deck. The stable, behind the gatehouse, was quiet for the first time in a fortnight, and that was how Korrin knew the Standing had decided to be loud again.
It had been loud since before the cook had got up. It had started at the fourth stall with a low dry murmur that rose and fell like a clerk reading a list aloud, and by the time the Lash came across the yard with the axe on his shoulder the murmur had become a steady pleasant voice that carried clear across the cobbles to the Mason’s Yard and up the gatehouse wall.
“The Crown’s paper,” it said, in the Lessaran passive, very reasonably, “has been entered in the Hearth as a foreign Standing, under the Chancery’s own seal. It is not the property of the household. It cannot be broken without a Charter.”
Korrin stopped in the middle of the yard. He stood with the axe’s haft in both hands and his weight on his back foot, and he looked at the fourth stall’s broken shutter, where the voice came out of the dark like steam from a grate.
