Korrin counted the sacks himself, because nobody else in the Hold counted fast enough, and because a number that passed through three mouths on its way to the ledger came out the far side as a rumour.
The granary stood off the Kitchen yard, two rooms of dry stone under a turf roof with a single oak door. The bar on that door had been cut from a whole ash trunk in the first winter, and it took two grown men to lift it out of its brackets, and it took Korrin, on a good day, about as long as it took to say the words he used to lift it. He did not lift it that morning. He stood in the doorway with the lamp at his hip and his breath going up in the cold and looked at the sacks stacked along the north wall, eleven high, the grain soft-grey in the lamplight, and he began.
“One.”
Four Lowgate men came forward to lift. They were the Hard Hands, the volunteers he had taken in the autumn when the Hold had needed men to stand in the lanes at night and had not been able to pay them in coin. They had no uniforms. They had a set of spears from the Forge that did not match, and a habit of waiting for his word before they moved, which he had taught them in the first week and which he found, now, that he liked.
