Harrow went down to the outer ford alone, with a coil of rope over one shoulder and a square of white linen tied to a stick in his fist, because the Chamber had sent a Hold voice to speak to the marshal and he was the only Hand whose voice the Lessaran line had not already heard quarrelling.
He did not like going. He had not liked anything since the silence in the Undercroft, and the walk down the Sallow bank in the late dusk felt to him like walking a wall that had lost a course. He kept his eyes on the ground. The frost was thick on the reeds and the path was slick with it, and he went carefully, testing each step with his heel, because a mason who went down a bank without testing it would go down on his face in front of an army, and he had no wish to be remembered for that.
The ford itself was a wide shallow crossing where the Sallow ran over a bed of grey stones. Harrow knew every stone of it. He had laid the first causeway there in the second year, when the Chamber had wanted a road to the marsh and nobody had been willing to pay the Lessary carters to build one. He had counted the stones as he laid them. There had been twenty-six then. The river had moved some since, and the frost had heaved a few, and now he could see…
