The rider came up the Sallow road in the late afternoon, and Ysra counted his horses and his saddle-bags from the wall-walk before he was halfway to the Lowgate green.
There was one horse. It was a tall bay gelding, lathered at the neck and tired at the hocks, and it had been ridden hard from the north for most of a day, because the road from Sallowmere ran forty leagues through the Lessaran marsh-towns and the bay had the look of an animal that had been paid for speed and had not yet been told the speed was over. The rider sat it very straight. He wore the Assembly’s grey, with the green braid at the cuffs, and a close-cropped cap, and a face that Ysra could not see clearly at that distance but could feel, somehow, as a set and careful stillness, the stillness of a man who has been told what to say and has decided to say it exactly.
There were two saddle-bags. They were leather, dark with wet, buckled tight at the flaps. Ysra counted the buckles. Four. Then she saw that the saddle-bag on the near side had a bulge in it, square and thick, the shape of a book, and that the rider’s hand went to it once, very briefly, as he came up the last rise before the gate, as though he were making sure it was still there.
