The second wool-cart came up the Lamentine road four days after the first, and it came in the middle of the morning, with the sun out for once and the marsh steaming gently under it. Korrin heard it from the wall. He knew the sound of a Lessaran wheel from a Coldharbour one by now, because the Lessaran carts had iron tyres and the Coldharbour carts had oak, and the oak sang on the frozen ruts while the iron only groaned.
This cart groaned.
He went down to the bar with his two Hard Hands and stood with his back against the oak crossbar, as he had stood every morning since the factor had come up the road in the dusk. The factor was still inside the Mason’s copy in the Yard. He was counting the Hold’s stones on the east course, Korrin had been told, and he was up to nineteen. Twenty-four bales would take twenty-four days. The second wool-cart did not have twenty-four bales. It had one, and a man who wore a green Lessaran coat with a silver licence-disc at the breast, and a grey mare with a sour face.
The man stopped the cart at the bar and got down without being asked. He was thin and dark, with a clerk’s sharp nose and a clerk’s manner of taking a measure of everything before he spoke. He looked at the lanterns on the posts, the nails in the brackets, the gatehouse board with its brown Lessaran…
