Korrin rode out to the Lantern Ford causeway on the fifty-first morning because the quarry’s riders were late, and because he did not trust a late rider from Thornwick any more than he trusted an early one. The causeway lay two leagues south-west of the Hold, out on the marsh-edge where the Lessary Road came down out of the reeds onto a long raised bank of stone and mud and crossed the water on three arches. It was inside the Hold’s three-league reach. He knew that without being told. He had felt it once, in the spring, when the gate-warden had been sent to count the arches and had come back with a face like a sick cow, saying the reach-stone at the causeway’s end had gone very faint.
The toll-house at the causeway’s west end was empty. Lessary’s collectors had left it the year the Hold’s wall went up, and nobody had come back to it since, except the marsh birds and the wind. Its door hung open on one hinge. Its windows were broken. Its stone was cold, Korrin thought, as cold as a grave-stone, and he did not go inside.
He counted the toll-stones instead. They ran along the Lessary Road at intervals of a furlong, each one a squat grey post with the Lessary crown carved on its top and the Crown’s old tolls cut into its face, and Korrin had counted every one of them since he was a boy. He counted them now as…
