Ysra counted the cart that crossed the lifted bar, because counting was the only thing she had left to do with her hands.
It came up out of the grey dawn at the far end of the causeway, slowly, with its lamps unlit and its driver sitting very upright on the box. It was a small cart, Lessaran-built, with a canvas cover drawn tight over a bed that rode low on its axles. Two wardens walked beside it, one at each wheel, with their hands on the hubs. Ysra counted the wheels, which were four, and the horses, which were two, and the men, which were three, counting the driver. Then she counted the bed, which had one chest in it, sealed with green wax and roped to the boards, and she could see the chest’s lock glinting through a rip in the canvas.
One cart. One chest. Two wardens at the wheels and a driver on the box, and nothing in the cover but the one chest and its rope.
The bar was up.
It stood on its iron hinge at the stake’s side, lifted clean from its brackets, and the gap it had left in the causeway’s inside post was wide enough for a cart and two men walking. Nobody had lifted it. That was the thing Ysra kept coming back to, as she stood beside it with her book in one hand and her pencil in the other and watched the cart come on. Nobody had lifted…
