The Assembly’s fair went up in four days, which Tallow said was a record for any fair on the marsh and which he said, a moment later, was a record of the wrong kind. The clerks came first, in a wagon with a canvas hood that had been painted with the Assembly’s arms, and then the carpenters, who built the booths on the flat ground between the toll-house and the causeway’s northern footing. The booths were striped. Each one had a painted board over its door with the name of a Lessaran district on it, and under each name a small brass plate that said who had paid for the board.
By the morning of the fifth day there were twelve booths, a scale, a long clerk’s table under an awning of blue and white, and a ledger on the table that was open to a page with forty empty columns, ruled in red.
Idrin rode out to see it with Tallow at his side, Lune on a borrowed mare with the rod strapped to the saddle like a lance, and Ysra behind them on foot, because Ysra said she did not trust the horses and would count them from the ground. They rode inside the three-league reach. That was the Hold’s first rule for the fair, and it had been written in the Ink and read aloud at the Chamber’s table before they left. The body stayed whole if it stayed in reach. Beyond the Keystone’s three leagues it…
