Jory opened his hand at last, in the gatehouse arch, with the sun going down behind the Caul and the Chamber’s clerk standing at his left shoulder with a lamp.
The disc lay across his palm. It was pale tin, the size of a thumbnail, and it had no stamp on either face, which was the first thing anybody noticed about it and the last thing anybody could explain. It had been warm from his chest for four winters. He could feel the warmth going out of it now, into the cold evening air, and he found that he did not want it to go. He closed his fingers over it again for a moment, and then opened them, because that was what he had come to do.
“Tell it short,” said Tallow, quite gently. He had a habit of asking for ranges, and he had left the range out this time, which Jory thought was a kindness. “The Register will want a figure, but you can give it afterwards. Tell me the thing as it happened.”
So Jory told it short, because the marsh had taught him to tell things short. A man on a Lessary road did not have the breath for long stories.
