The headman of Lowgate had a limp, a rope over his shoulder, and a face that had clearly been taught by the river to distrust anything that stood still for too long. Ansgar Rook decided that he liked him before the man had finished crossing the gate-arch.
“Eleven shares a week,” said Rook, before Osk had asked the question a second time. “Paid at the sluice-house at dawn, against a tally-stick notched by the gate-warden. A bed in the sluice-house loft, which is dry on the left side and wet on the right, and I have taken the left. A ration of barley bread and salt fish, which is not the Hold’s and is not Coldharbour’s, and which the cook says is the Hold’s surplus from a Coldharbour order that never got paid. I have it written down. You may read it.”
Osk looked at the stick, which the warden had held up in his lantern-light. He ran his thumb over the notches, counting them, and then looked up at Rook with an expression Rook could not name.
“That’s the exact figure,” said Osk.
“Yes.”
“Is it enough?”
Rook had been asked a great many questions in the last year by men who wanted a figure they could argue with, and he had learned that most of them did not want the answer. They wanted to be told that the answer was not theirs to give. He gave them the answer anyway, because that was his nature, and because he…
