Ysra counted the causeway the way other people said their prayers, which was often, and without expecting the count to change anything.
From the gate watch-tower she could see one hundred and sixty-two paces of stone road between the river gate and the first marker post, then the flat grey ditch, then the valley bending off toward the Lessary road with its scatter of burnt farms. She had the glass to her eye. It was a Watch piece with a brass rim and a crack across one lens that she had stopped minding in the spring. Through it the causeway came up close enough to show the hobnails in a runner’s boots.
The runner was a Dovereach man in a blue coat, with a staff over his shoulder. The staff carried a flag, the Dovereach wheat on a white field, but the staff itself was black-ironed and fitted with a brass sleeve at the butt, and that was the first thing Ysra wrote down in her head. A Corvanne staff. A flag that travelled on the enemy’s wood was a flag that had been lent, and she wanted to know who had lent it.
Behind the runner walked a woman in a grey hood.
