The Ink-lamp was still burning in the gatehouse when the rider came up the causeway, and Tallow, who had sat beside it through the whole of the night, had not yet decided whether to put it out. The lease had run its term at midnight. It was the Chancery’s old paper, which said that the Crown held the Hold’s ground and the Hold’s labour for a term of years, and when the term ran out the ground and the labour were meant to go back to the men who had built the Hold, and nobody in Sallowmere had yet said who those men were. He had written the Register’s last line of the season in the plainest hand he owned, and then he had sat at the table with the ink drying on his cuff and waited for the Hold to tell him what it had become. The Hold had told him nothing. The Caul stood grey behind the hills, the causeway was empty, and the only sound in the room was the wick ticking as it cooled.
“One horse,” said Ysra, from the wall stair above the gate. Her voice came down the stone without any hurry in it. “Two saddle-bags. One man. He has a packet in his coat, sealed, and he is carrying it as a man carries something he was told not to drop.”
