The custom had been kept for a month, and Bardo kept his word.
Ysra had the bar-count on her slate before the carts were out of the reeds. She had been up on the gate-tower since the dawn bell, with a Watch-lantern shuttered to one crack and a clean slate on her knee, because the Regent had asked for a Watch at the bar for the silver and the Watch had asked her to stand it, and she did not trust anyone else to stand a count she had begun in her own head a month ago. The lamps along the gate-court were burning down. The Mason’s stones lay in their neat rows on the court’s flags, each one chalked with its number. Below her the bar was down across the Lamentine road, a rough oak beam on iron pivots, and the bar-men stood either side of it with their hands on the pins.
Three carts came up out of the marsh-mist under the pennant. The reed-horn on the nearest sounded twice, flat and short, the way the marsh-men rang the river-bells, and then the mist closed round the carts again so that for a moment there was nothing on the road but the noise of the wheels. The wheels were flat and wide and sank a little at every turn, and the mules that drew them walked with their heads down and their ears back, as though they had been told a long story they did not believe. Each…
