Wren walked the boy down to the Sallow Ford with her marsh-knife on her belt and a copy of the Hosting Charter folded inside her coat, where it sat against the bone of her shoulder and made her walk a little crooked. She did not mind the crookedness. The shoulder had been hurt in the marsh, at the Lantern causeway, when she was young enough to think a wound was a sort of badge, and it ached in the damp as a well-told lie aches in the throat. The damp was coming up off the river in long grey rolls. It was the hour when the water seemed to be standing still and only the reeds were moving.
Teodor walked beside her in his good coat, which Pell had brushed twice and Harrow once, and he did not speak. He had his mother’s exact way of holding his shoulders, as if they had been measured for a seat he had not yet been offered. He had put the pen into his inside pocket. Wren had watched him do it at the Great Hall door, and had seen him check the pocket twice on the stair, as a child checks a thing he has been told he must not lose.
