Korrin stood at the market gates on the last morning of the second Turn with his arms folded and his back to the wall. He did not like markets. He did not like the open sky over a market, or the crowd that came under it, or the way people stood behind their stalls and looked at you as if you were a price they had not yet decided to pay. He had stood at the Fair’s gates for two days, and he had not liked a single stall of it, and he had not once been told what he was looking for, which was the way he preferred it.
He had come to look at the pot-sellers. There were three of them at the third gate from the lane, and one of them had a stall that was too clean for a pot-seller’s, and a till with a Lessaran coin in it. Korrin had seen the coin from the gate, the way he saw most things, by the light on the edge of it. It was silver. It was not Coldharbour silver. It had a crown on it, the Lessary crown, with the points too sharp and the band too wide, and beneath the crown, where a plain coin would have had its maker’s mark, it had a small raised lily.
