The Hold’s answer came down to the Sallow Ford at dawn, in the hand of the Clerk, and Ossane took it standing on the landing stone with the carriage door open at her back and her clerk already inside, pale and silent, with the Writ of Surrender folded in its case on his knees.
She had not slept well. She had lain awake in the inn’s narrow bed at the causeway’s post, listening to the river and the rope, and had told herself several times that a rope was a rope and a river was a river and that the Ferryman was a figure in a Hold’s minute, not a voice that could speak across the Sallow in the dark. It had not helped. At the first grey light she had dressed herself in the Assembly’s dark green with the braid at the cuffs, because she wished to be seen to leave as she had arrived, and she had come down to the landing with her gloves on and her case under her arm and had found that the ferry was already tied at the stone, with its gold seal dull in the early light and its poler sitting on the thwart with his pipe in his teeth.
