The water was down, the marsh road was open to the second bridge, and Wren walked into the Great Hall with Corran Kell at her side and the Lowgate lodgers’ ledger under her arm.
Tallow watched her come up the hall from the Register table. He had seen a great many people walk the length of that room in two hundred years of sittings. Most of them had walked it as if they were being judged. A few had walked it as if they were carrying something heavy they did not mean to put down, and he had seen those ones, too, with a particular clerk’s sympathy. Wren walked it the way the marsh walked, steadily, with her eyes on the ground ahead and her shoulders square, and her hands at her sides, empty of anything but the ledger’s cover. The bronze key hung at her throat on its cord. Her face was thin and hard and set. She had not slept in three days, and she had buried a man on the granary’s back step at first light, and she did not look as though she intended to say so.
Corran walked beside her with his cap in his hands. He had been crying in the passage, Tallow thought, and had stopped, and had decided not to be ashamed of it. He had the look of a man who had been given a thing he was not yet sure how to carry.
