The ford was smaller than Idrin had imagined it. He had thought of it, on the walk down the river-path in the early light, as a place with weight, a crossing where the Hold’s history had been waiting for him to arrive. It was a gravel bar. It was a long low spit of grey shingle between two brown channels of the Sallow, with a rope strung across the water from a stake on the Hold’s bank to a stake on the far one, and the rope lay slack in the current, dripping, with the morning light caught in its beads.
The table had been set up on the bar’s middle, on trestles that the Dovereach runners had carried down on their backs. It was a folding table of plain wood with a green cloth over it, and on the cloth lay the Bench’s paper, weighted at its corners by four smooth river-stones. Beside the paper was a pot of ink and a sealed letter with a wheat-stamped wax disc, and beside that was a small brass hand-bell, which the Dovereach clerk had set out, Idrin supposed, to call the sitting to order.
Quill sat behind the table. She had her hands folded on the cloth and her face arranged in the expression Idrin had come to know, correct and unmoving, the expression of a woman who had said everything she meant to say on paper and intended to have it read back to her exactly. She did not glance…
