The Hard Hands had not met as a company since the spring, when Korrin had sent the last of them home from the Lowgate barracks with their pay in the Crown’s silver and a promise that they would be called again when the granaries were open. Nobody had called them. The granaries were not open. Three of the Hard Hands had gone to work for the lodgers’ bakery, and two had taken Lowgate wives, and one, a carter named Tom Wick who had lost two fingers at the Caul bridge, had simply stopped coming to the barracks gate and had been seen since in the Thornwick road with a load of coal on his cart and a face like a shut door.
They came back for the reading. Nobody sent for them. They heard, in the Lowgate taverns and at the bakery’s back door, that Korrin meant to read his Bond aloud in the old hall, and that the Hold’s clerk was coming to hear him do it, and that Korrin’s jaw had been set like a granary bar since midwinter’s eve. So they came in ones and twos, in their old coats, and stood along the granary’s lime-washed wall with their hands in their pockets, and waited to see what the Lash would do.
