Dace Orrow led six hundred foot off the causeway and into the Reed-House road because the Writ said delivered at the arch, and his counsel had told him that the arch could be reached from the marsh side, through the granary and the sluice, without the Hold’s gate ever being rushed.
He did not like the counsel. He had never liked counsel. He had been a marshal for twenty years, and in that time he had learned to distrust any plan that could be drawn on a single sheet and folded into a coat, because the marsh did not fold, and the men who had to cross it did not fold either. But the Chancery had given him the sheet and the seal, and the Crown had given him the six hundred, and the Hold’s answer had come back up the Lessary Road in a leather bag on the herald’s horse, and he had read it three times in the cold before he let anyone see his face. The bronze pennant that flew over his own tent beside the toll-house was his house-mark, a bronze wheel with a bar through its hub, which the Orrows had carried since their first marshal and had never once flown for anyone else.
