Rook received the Crown’s order at the cordon’s flat stone, at the candle-clock’s second bell, from a rider who had come up the Lessaran road at a gallop and had not yet stopped sweating.
The paper was sealed in green. It was written in the Chancery’s brown Ink, with the faint blue cast Rook had come to recognise from the notice at the stake, and it had been folded in four and tucked into a leather case with a cracked clasp. Rook read it through once, slowly, with his lips moving slightly on the longer words, in the way he read every paper the Crown had ever sent him. He had learned in the reeds that the Crown’s paper always said more than it meant, and that the thing it meant was usually at the very bottom, after the seal.
He read it twice.
The company was to withdraw from the causeway. It was to march north, along the Sallow road, to the ferry landing at the Sallow Ford, where the Assembly’s envoy would cross the river that week under the Assembly’s protection. The cordon was lifted for the envoy’s passage. The Hold’s grain might cross the causeway from the next dawn, under the Crown’s seal, in carts that had been inspected by the Crown’s wardens and found to contain nothing but grain. The paper named the ferry three times. It did not name the Survey House at all.
