The Coldharbour booth had been set up at the causeway’s inland stake on the morning after the Judge’s visit, under a cream awning with a gold tally-stick painted on its valance. It stood on the reach’s near side, inside the Keystone’s three leagues, and the Watch had not been asked whether it could stand there, and Ysra had counted that as a fact and not a grievance. A booth was a booth. It could be taken down by a Watch-woman with a pole and a sensible temper, and she had already measured the pole.
She went to it alone, on the afternoon of the second day, in her Watch coat with the slate under one arm and the chalk behind her ear. She did not take the Watch with her. She had decided that a count was more honest when the counter stood without a crowd at her back, and she had told Korrin so, and Korrin had said that a Watch-woman alone at a Coldharbour booth was the first foolish thing he had heard her say in a month, and then had said nothing more about it, which was his way of letting her go.
The factor was at the trestle when she came up. She was a tidy woman, neat in grey wool, with her hair drawn back severely under a cap of dove-coloured silk and a pen in one hand and a ledger open beneath the other. She did not raise her eyes at once. She finished…
