The Lowgate well stood in the middle of the lane below the wall, and it was the only well in the March that had never once been counted by a Lessaran surveyor. Osk liked that about it. He liked the rope, which was hemp and had been spliced so many times that its middle was thicker than its ends, and the iron bucket, which had a dent in its lip from the day a Lowgate boy had tried to drink from it upside down. He liked most of all that the water was cold, sweet, and entirely indifferent to who was in charge of it.
At dusk the lodgers came down the lane to the well, one household at a time, with their buckets and their children and their arguments. There were a hundred and six of them that evening. Osk knew because he had counted them twice, once from the wall as they came down the lane and once at the well as they stood in their knots and muttered, and the two figures had agreed, which was more than the Chamber had ever managed on a Turn.
He stood on the well-kerb with his left hip stiff under him and his weight on the good leg. It had been stiff since the barge on the Sallow, the spring he was forty, when a sack of Lantern barley had come off a tilted deck and taken him square across the hip. He had been a grain-factor on the Lantern…
