The ram had struck the river gate so hard on the second day of the siege that the oak took a dent the size of a child’s head, and Idrin had not yet found the heart to ask Harrow to fill it. He stood beside it now with the Abbess of the Order of the Unsealed Door, and the dent sat between them like a third person nobody had introduced.
The Abbess did not touch it. She had the look of a woman who had been told not to touch things in other people’s houses and had decided, long ago, to obey the rule without ever agreeing to it. Her grey hood was pushed back now that she was inside the Hold, and her hair under it was the colour of ash that had been left out in rain. She was not old. She was not young. Idrin had expected a face with a hard edge, the kind that a bell-rope had worn into a woman’s palms, and instead he found a face that looked as though it had been asked a gentle question many years ago and had never once stopped answering it.
“You have a good gate,” said Venn.
