Gaunt had come down to the ford on the third morning for one reason, which was to see that the Forge’s boat-hooks had not been sold to the Assembly’s carpenters for a wagon-brace. He had found the boat-hooks in the toll-yard, lying in a heap behind the scale-room with a Lessaran label tied to the handle of each one. He had objected to the labels. He had objected to the heap. He had been about to object to the carpenter, a long-jawed man with pencil marks behind both ears, when he saw the soldier.
The soldier stood at the back of the living line, in the shadow of the scale-room wall. He was grey-haired and lean and wore a border-man’s coat with the buttons polished, and he was not a face. He was a man, and Gaunt knew at once by the way he held his shoulders that he was a man who had been asked to stand in a line for the Assembly’s amusement and had said yes out of spite. Gaunt had a great deal of respect for spite. He had none at all for the Assembly.
On the other side of the yard, under the awning’s edge, a face of the same man stood in the line of weft, with the same grey hair and the same polished buttons and the same jaw, and it held its chin up at the same angle, and it looked at the marsh with an expression of pure, borrowed patience.
