The Lantern Ford causeway lay two leagues south-west of the Hold, low across the marsh-edge with black water on both sides of it, and Wren of the Reed-Houses had been riding out to it all her life, first in a reed-boat and then on a borrowed horse, and never once with a Writ in her saddle-bag. She had one now. It belonged to the Hold, folded small, a Writ of Lodging with her own name on the seal, and the thing it had made of her was still new enough to feel like a stranger’s coat that fitted in the shoulders.
Lodger One, the marsh-men called her. The Hold called her Wren when it remembered, and Lodger when it did not. Only Bardo Kell had ever called her by the number, and he had done it first across a table in the Gatehouse, grinning, with a cup of Pell’s cider in his fist and the air of a man who knew exactly how much a number was worth.
She rode out with two lodgers beside her on the Hold’s old horses. Osk came first, with his bad knee wrapped in strips of sacking under the stirrup, and a face that never quite agreed to the cold. Behind him rode the Coldharbour man, Piers Hadley, who had been a wool-factor and was now something Wren did not have a word for, because his hands were broad and smooth and kept moving on the reins as though they were measuring the leather…
