The chapel-tent stood at the north end of the fair, where the causeway’s stone gave way to a bank of rushes and the Assembly’s carpenters had left a gap in the booths for a Lessaran shrine. The shrine was small. It had a wooden table for an altar and a painted cloth hung behind it with a ship on it, and a bowl of marsh-water with a single white flower floating in the middle, and a cushion for kneeling that had been embroidered with the name of a saint Mourner did not know. The saint had been dead for a long time, Mourner gathered. The cushion had not been worn.
The pilgrim’s face had been sitting on the cushion since the morning. It had come up from the scale-room step in the first grey light, with its cord in its hands, and it had walked along the causeway’s edge to the shrine as though it had been called there, and had knelt. It did not pray. It only knelt with its hands in its lap and its head bowed over the grey cord, which it had been holding for some time, and it looked very tired.
Mourner came up the bank in the afternoon, from the Mound, with a length of grave-cord over her shoulder.
