The Assembly’s ferry came across the Sallow at the candle-clock’s third bell, and the Lessarans called it the Ferry of Crowns in their songs, because the Assembly’s seal had been painted on its bow in gold leaf, very large, so that it could be read from the far bank by anybody who could read at all.
Idrin watched it come. He had been standing on the Sallow Ford landing since the middle of the morning, in the Regent’s grey coat with the Seal’s pale mark showing at his left wrist where the cuff had ridden up, and he had watched the ferry’s shape grow out of the brown river-haze for most of an hour. It was a broad, flat, heavy boat with a high painted bow and a canopy of Lessaran green drawn over its stern. It moved very slowly. The rope ran through its block on the far bank and back, and the ferry rode the rope as a man rides a horse he does not trust, and its poler stood at the stern with his pole set in the river’s bed and his face turned towards the landing.
It was the same poler. Idrin knew it at once. He had the same grey-bearded jaw and the same cold unlit pipe in his teeth, and he showed the landing no particular interest. He looked at the rope. He had not looked at anything else, Idrin suspected, since the Yielding.
