Hesper Quill wrote the Bench’s dispute by lamplight in the causeway camp, at a folding table with one leg shorter than the others, because the siege was lifted and her son was in the Hold with a cough and a citizen’s entry pending, and she had found that she could not write either fact without the other.
The camp was quiet. The Dovereach men had struck their tents at the first grey light and carried them back down the causeway on carts, and only her own pavilion remained at the causeway’s foot, with its pennant hanging limp in the damp and the Bench’s wheat embroidered on it in faded thread. Beyond it the valley lay in the dusk, very flat, with the Corvanne engine broken down into pieces on its trestles and the cliff’s great grey hide-sheet lying along the rock like a dropped cloth. There were no lamps on the cliff. There had been none since the Hollowed sat down on the hides that morning and did not get up.
Quill did not turn to the cliff. She had decided that. She had been a magistrate for a great many years, and she knew the difference between a thing that required her attention and a thing that only wished to have it.
