The envoy’s clerk came up the ridge to the Survey House in the late afternoon, on foot, with a copy of the Writ of Surrender rolled under his arm and the leather satchel bumping at his hip, and Lune met him at the door.
Lune had been watching him come. It had taken him a long time, because the clerk walked the causeway road as a clerk walks a road he has been told to walk and has not chosen, with his head down and his shoulders hunched against the wind. He had stopped twice at the stake, once to speak to Ysra and once to look at the bar, and both times Lune had seen Ysra’s pencil move. He had stopped once more at the Lowgate green, where a child had been chalking a river on the cobbles, and he had crouched down to look at the drawing for a long moment before going on. Lune had measured the distance from the stake to the ridge’s foot at forty-one paces. The clerk had taken fifty-two. The difference was the clerk’s own, and Lune had written it down.
He was a thin, careful, polite young man, with a face that had been schooled to show nothing and had not yet learned how. He bowed at the door, correctly and not too far. He did not come in.
