The gatepost at the Lamentine bar had cracked along its keystone since the frost. Harrow had seen the fault on the first morning of the thaw, a dark line running down the face of the block from the top of the arch to the bracket where the iron bar rested, and he had known at once that the stone would not last another winter. Stone that had cracked in frost did not heal. It only waited for the next frost to finish what the first had begun.
He had not said so to the Hold. He had told Tallow, in the Yard, with his hand flat on the crack, and Tallow had written the range in the minutes, and then the range had gone into the Register’s back leaves beside Piers Hadley’s name. A gatepost was not a Chamber matter, Harrow thought. It was a mason’s. He had come to the bar with the new keystone on the hide sling and the Mason’s copy at the lift, and he had meant to set the block himself, quickly and quietly, before the Lessaran at the step could make a clause of it.
The Lessaran was still on the step. He had been there since the start of the thaw, with his green coat buttoned to the throat and his grey mare grazing in the ditch. He had watched the cracked post every morning for a week. He watched now, with his arms folded and his bright dark eyes going from the…
