Idrin walked Lowgate’s lane to the kiln with Joss Hallet on the morning of the twenty-third day, because Joss had asked him to come and look at a set of pots that were cracking in the cold, and because the Regent of the Hold had, that week, very little to do that could not be done by someone else.
The lane ran below the wall like a ditch with pretensions. The lodgers’ houses were built against the stones, one after another, their roofs patched with the Mason’s spare slate, and their doors opened on to a track of beaten mud that had been paved in the spring and had sunk again since. Children were out on it, as they always were, in a loose pack that ran ahead of the adults and came back to look at the prince, and then ran ahead again. A woman was hanging wet linen between two posts. A man was carrying a bucket of whey past the kiln with the care of someone who knew the whey was counted.
The kiln sat at the lane’s end, a squat brick oven with a flue that smoked grey in the still air. Beside it, hung from a beam on an iron bracket, was the kiln-bell. It was the size of a child’s head and it had a tongue on a leather strap, and when the kiln-keeper pulled the strap at the hour it rang out over the pottery with a thin, flat, bright note that carried…
