Dace Orrow stood on the outer ford’s bank with his counsel’s copy of the lease in one hand and his marshal’s glass in the other, and he watched the Hold’s wall rise out of the dusk like a cliff that somebody had built out of stacked grey loaves.
He had been a marshal for twenty years. He had fought in the Dunmere hills and the salt-mires of the south and once, for a bad month, in a Chancery’s tax-riot in the city of Sallowmere, where he had learned that a sword was the cheapest instrument a man of the Crown could carry and the most expensive to use. He had never before been stopped by a clerk’s paper at a gate he could see. Stopped by weather, yes, and by ice, and by the sluice-men of the Caul in spring when the water rose too fast for anybody to bridge it. But never by a paper, and never by a paper that had been read aloud from the wrong side of a wall.
His men were tired. Six hundred line-foot had lived for ten days in the reeds along the Sallow bank on the Writ’s bread and the Writ’s promises, and the bread had gone grey and the promises had gone thin, and the men had begun to look at the Hold’s wall as a man looks at the sea when he has been told he will be drowned in it. Orrow did not blame them. He did not much…
