Tallow rode out to Lantern Ford under a white flag, with a folder under his coat and a range in his head that he had worked out carefully over three nights at the candle-clock. The wardens would take a day and a half to read what he carried. He was sure of the figure. He had checked it against the Crown’s own habits as they were recorded in the Chamber’s old minutes, and the habits of a Crown’s post were, in Tallow’s experience, slower than the habits of a Hold’s Chamber, which had at least to argue before it did anything.
He was wrong by one hour, and the hour was the most instructive thing he learned all day.
The folder held the Survey Writ, which the Hold had issued earlier that summer to walk its own ground, in the Regent’s hand and the Chamber’s plain sealing. It held the Charter of the Survey, which defined the Hold as the walked March within three leagues of the Keystone and which Tallow had written out himself, two fair copies, one for the Hold and one for the Assembly’s registry in Sallowmere, where it had never been acknowledged. It held the Hold’s own definition of its March, in four lines and a diagram. It held a copy of the Feast of Lanterns minute, which recorded that the Crown’s Census offer had lapsed unanswered and that the Chamber had declined to answer it, and which the Crown had never once mentioned in return…
