Korrin watched the envoy’s train come up the Lessary Road from the top of the north tower, where the wind was loudest and the view was best, and he counted it the way he counted anything that might come at him across open ground. He did not hurry. A train was not an attack. An attack came fast, with its spears down and its horses blowing, and this one came slow, at the pace of an old man walking a dog that did not want to be walked.
Six riders first. They came over the ridge in a loose line with the sun behind them, and he could see their horses’ legs flashing as they picked their way down the chalk-track toward the marsh. He counted them twice. Six. Then the carts, three of them, low and solid and dark with tar, each drawn by a pair of heavy grey horses with iron-shod hoofs that rang on the stones of the road even at this distance. Then two clerks on mules, with their hats pulled down and their hands folded on their saddle-horns. Then a lawyer’s chest, bound in black leather and strapped to the middle cart, which Korrin could see because the carter had not thought to cover it. And then the men-at-arms.
There were a dozen of them. They rode at the back, close together, in dull mail under tabards of grey and red, the sashes crossed over their chests. The sashes were the colours of the Gallows-tax company, which had been hanging men on the Lessary Road for twenty years for the crime of not paying the toll on salt. The company did not look at the wall. It kept its eyes on the road in front of it and its hands loose on its reins. Korrin did not like that. A company that kept its eyes off a wall was a company that had already decided what it would do when it reached one.
“Six riders,” he said, to nobody. “Two clerks. Three carts. A chest. Twelve spears, and the spears are in their hands, not on their backs.”
“That is the Crown’s ceremonial,” said Idrin, beside him on the parapet.
“That is the Crown’s habit,” said Korrin. “The Crown always holds its spears where it can see them. It is a habit of people who expect to need them.”
He looked at the carts again. The wheels were dark with iron. The rims had been bound with heavy bands, thick as his thumb, and the spokes were iron-capped at every joint, and the hub-caps glinted in the sun like coins. He could see the rivets from here. There were six to a band.
“The iron is the Crown’s,” said Idrin.
“The Crown has been stealing the Hold’s iron for a century,” said Korrin. “It is time the Hold had the wheels.”
Idrin laughed under his breath. It was not the laugh he had given the table in the autumn. It was thinner, and it stopped sooner. “That is not a legal argument,” he said.
“It is a counting argument,” said Korrin. “Iron is iron. The wheels are six bands and forty spokes. I have counted the spokes. There are forty on the near cart and forty-one on the far one, and the far one is the one with the chest, and the chest is what they want us to see.”
Harrow was counting too. He stood at the gate-head on the far side of the arch, with his hands behind his back, and his voice came up the stair in a steady murmur. “Three carts,” he said. “Two wheels each. Four wheels a cart. That is twelve wheels, and one spare on the middle cart, which the Chancery has never once needed in twenty years of the road. A spare is a thing you bring because you expect a breakage. Somebody on that road is afraid of the ruts.”
“Or somebody wants us to think so,” said Korrin.
“Yes,” said Harrow. “That is also a count.”
Down in the Kitchen, Pell had already begun to count the mouths. Korrin could hear her from the top of the tower, the clatter of pans and the sharp, bossy voice carrying up through the court. “Twelve for the spears, six for the riders, two for the clerks,” Pell was saying, “and one for the lawyer, who will eat half of what he is given and complain about the other half. Pim! Get down to the cellar. I want the second barrel of the barley-beer and the good salt, not the marsh salt, the Crown does not deserve the marsh salt. Go on! Count the stairs on the way down, the Warden does not like to be kept waiting for his wine.”
“I do not like to be kept waiting,” Idrin said, quite distinctly, from the parapet.
“Then you should have stayed in the Hall,” called Pell from the court, “and let the rest of us feed the envoy!”
The train had reached the causeway’s far end. Korrin could see the cart-horses lowering their heads at the reach-marker, and the riders drawing up in a line outside it, and the men-at-arms sitting very still in their saddles as though they had been told the marker was a wall of fire. The envoy’s own carriage, if it was a carriage, was a long black cart with its curtains drawn. It came to a halt at the causeway’s foot, inside the reach by a stone’s throw, and the riders did not dismount.
“They have stopped inside the reach,” said Harrow, quite pleased.
“They have stopped at the Lantern Ford causeway,” said Idrin, “which is inside the reach, and which the Crown has never once admitted lies inside it. The Chancery’s manners require that the Warden walk down to meet the envoy. It is a courtesy. It is also an insult. It is a way of saying that the envoy is not required to come up the causeway to the Hold, because the Hold will have to come down to her.”
“And the Warden will walk,” said Korrin.
“The Warden will walk,” said Idrin, and he set his hand on the parapet and looked down at the causeway without speaking. His scarred hand lay flat on the stone. Korrin saw that he had begun, without meaning to, to count the riders. His lips moved. Korrin could see him dividing them in his head into rows, and the rows were not coming out even. He frowned. He started again.
“You are thinking like a Clerk,” he said.
“I am thinking like a man who was taught to add up other men’s horses,” said Idrin. “It is a habit I did not know I had until this summer. It is an unpleasant habit. I do not like what it tells me.”
“What does it tell you?”
He did not answer her at once. He was watching the riders, the men at arms, the black cart, and the chest on its middle carriage. He was watching the way the envoy’s train sat in its place at the causeway’s foot, with the reach-marker a stone’s throw behind it, and the river a stone’s throw in front, and the Hold’s wall above them all, silent, its north face catching the sun.
“It tells me that someone has counted this Hold very carefully,” said Idrin at last, “and has come to make sure the count is right.”
Ossane’s clerks made camp at the causeway’s foot that afternoon, inside the reach, with a fire of dry marsh-reed that smoked and hissed and set the men-at-arms coughing. Korrin watched them through the glass. One of the clerks went down to the water with a bucket and stood there a long time, not filling it, looking up at the Hold’s wall. The envoy herself walked a little way along the bank toward the reeds, with her braid undone and her coat over her arm, and stopped where the marsh-men’s boats had been drawn up in the autumn. She crouched and looked at the mud. Korrin could not see what Ossane was looking for. He only saw her lay one hand flat on the ground for a moment, the way a Hand lays a palm on a stone before lifting it, and then stand and walk back to the fire without looking round.
The chest was opened on the causeway. Korrin saw it happen. One of the clerks dismounted at the cart’s tail, very precisely, as if he had rehearsed it in an empty room. He unbuckled the black straps, one after another, and lifted the lid, and reached inside. He brought out a bundle tied with grey cord. Then another. The bundles were tallies cut on sticks, the old kind, notched down their length, and in among them there were ledger-slips, pale and fresh, with the Chancery’s crown stamped in the corner of each. He turned one bundle over in his hands and tapped its end, and a small, flat object fell out of it onto the causeway stones and rang when it landed.
Korrin leaned over the parapet. He could see it quite clearly now. It was a token. It was made of wood, not tin, and it was cut into the shape of a salt-cake, flat and round, with a notch on one edge.
It was not made of reed, as Bardo’s had been, but it was the same kind of thing. He had seen Bardo’s token on the parapet, when the marsh-man set it down between himself and the Warden, and he knew the shape of a counter that was meant to stand for a debt.
“Warden,” she said, very quietly.
“I see it,” said Idrin.
The clerk knelt on the causeway stones and picked up the token, and turned it in his fingers, and put it back in the chest, very carefully, beside the sticks and the ledger-slips. Then he closed the lid, and buckled the straps, and stood up, and looked up at the wall with a face that gave nothing away at all.