The Judge’s carriage came along the Lessary Road in the middle of the afternoon, in the thick heat of late midsummer, with its lamps unlit and its brass fittings flashing in the sun. It was a square black vehicle with four grey horses and a driver on the box in a green Chancery coat, and it came up the causeway’s stone at a walk, slowly, as though it did not wish to be seen arriving. It stopped at the Hold’s stake. It did not come past it.
Idrin had come down to the stake alone. He had not been asked to. He had walked out along the causeway from the gate in the heat, with the cold in his left arm to the shoulder and his left glove on, and he had stood beside the faded rag and the oak post and waited, with his good hand resting on the post’s top, because he had wanted the Judge to see the Hold’s Regent at the Hold’s own mark, and not in the Crown’s tent with the Crown’s tea.
The carriage door opened. A man got down.
He was not old. He was perhaps fifty, with a grey beard trimmed close and a pale, careful, courteous face, and he wore a black coat with the Chancery’s green lining turned up at the cuffs, and the coat was very clean, as though it had been brushed at every stop along the road. He carried a leather case under one arm and a…
