Rook asked for Ysra by name, at midday, under the same yellowed flag, because he said she was the one Hand on the causeway who counted the things he was paid to count.
She did not go at once. She sent a Watchman to the cordon’s edge to say so, and to say that she would come to the inside stake and no further, and that the captain could stand on the far side of the bar and speak to her there, and that if his men lifted a single crossbow while he did it she would count them all twice before anybody moved. The Watchman came back grinning. Rook had sent word that he had expected nothing else, and that he was glad of it, and that the stake was the right place for a parley because it was the only thing on the causeway that had been built by the people who would have to live with its consequences.
So she went to the stake, and stood behind the iron bar with her book in one hand and her pencil in the other, and waited.
Rook came up the causeway alone. He did not carry a bow, or a sword, or the flag. He came up in the flat, sun-bleached light with his hands loose at his sides and his leather coat open, and he stopped a yard short of the bar, as he had been told, and looked at her across it with the same attentive, unhurried…
