Idrin climbed the Garrison Mound alone, the evening before the Oath, because he did not want the Chamber on the path behind him and did not want a clerk counting his steps.
He went up slowly. The track ran between the gorse in long grey loops, and the gorse was just beginning to show a faint yellow at the tips of its spines, the first sign of the spring that was coming up the marsh. The wind had dropped at dusk. The light lay flat and pale over the water below, and the causeway at Lantern Ford was a black thread laid across the silver, and the willows at its end had thinned to a grey haze, as if they had been drawn in pencil and not yet inked.
He had his coat buttoned to the throat. The braid lay on his left sleeve, cold against the wrist, and he could not feel it. He had a sheet of paper in his right hand, folded twice, and he had not let go of it since the Gatehouse.
He had brought a Chancery receipt. It was the only paper in his room that was not an instrument, and the only one that had a clean back. He had found it in the coat’s inside pocket, from a bill for salt that Ossane’s clerk had paid at the Lowgate stall in the first week of the thaw, and he had turned it over and looked at its blank side for some time…
