Ysra saw the marsh signal-fires from the watch-tower before the bell, when the sky over the Caul was still the colour of a dull pewter plate and the frost on the wall-walk had not yet begun to turn to water.
The first thread of smoke went up from the sluice-house, thin and straight, a single grey line against the lightening sky. She had the glass on it before the second. She wrote the time to the instant, the way Harrow had taught her to write a stone’s setting-day, and then she watched the second thread go up from a clump of willow a quarter-mile east of the sluice, and then a third, lower, from the reed-houses beyond the old marsh path where she had counted nothing but silence for a week. Three threads. She wrote the three figures, and the place of each, and then she wrote the word answering, and underlined it, because that was what the threads were doing. They were answering one another across the flood, as a line of men answers a call.
Across the water the Lessaran carts were unloading into the reeds.
She could see the lanterns move. They went down the causeway in a slow, bobbing line, one after another, toward the place where the causeway ended in mud and the reeds began. The carts stopped there. The lanterns gathered round them. She saw men lift boards from the cart-beds, and long bundles of rope, and a rack of something that flashed when…
