Idrin rode to the Sallow Ford landing in the late morning, because the Assembly’s courier had asked for the Regent in person and had asked for him by name, which no Lessaran clerk had done since the autumn he was exiled.
The landing was inside the Hold’s reach, which Idrin had been told several times that week by three different people, each of whom had measured it differently. It lay at the bend of the Sallow where the river ran slow and brown between two banks of reed, and the ferry lay tied to its post at the water’s edge, a broad flat boat with a rope running from its bow to a block on the far bank and back. The rope was old. Idrin could see the wear at the block, where the hemp had gone grey and thin, and he could see that somebody had been careful to keep it from fraying further, because there was tarred twine wound round the worst of the wear, very neatly, in the manner of a man who expected to be checked.
The Ferryman was not on the boat. The Ferryman had not been awake since the Yielding, in the season of the Articles, long before the Hold had built its Chamber’s study or Idrin had learned where the candle-clock stood. Its seat was empty, which was a fact Idrin had read in the Chamber’s minute and could now see for himself in the stillness of the landing, and which made the…
