The widow came up the Lamentine road on foot, at the end of the afternoon, pushing a handcart with her husband’s tools lashed in it under a sack. Ysra saw her from the wall long before she reached the bar. She counted the figure as it came, one woman, one cart, one sack, and then the handcart’s wheels, which were iron-shod and squealed on every rut, and she did not know what the number meant until the woman stopped at the foot of the bar and lifted her head.
“I’ve come to pay my toll,” said Hanne Wenn.
She was a thin woman, not old, in a brown wool dress that had been mended at the elbows and a shawl knotted tight under her chin against the wind. Her hands on the cart’s handles were red and cracked. She gave the gate no glance, nor the nails in the brackets, nor the green-coated Lessaran who was sitting on the bar’s step with his arms folded, watching her with polite interest. She looked at the gatehouse board, where the Tollgate’s brown print sat under its two dates, and she read it slowly, with her lips moving, as a woman reads a notice she has been told is about her.
