Korrin rode out with Jory and the cart to fetch the Survey House’s new timbers, which Lowgate had cut and the Mason’s Yard had squared, and the road to Lantern Ford was the road on which Korrin had sold the causeway password.
Nobody had made him say so. He did not need to. The road was the road, and it had a toll-house at the end of it with a grey-stone post and a crooked lintel, and the wardens who had taken the password from him in Year 200 had stood under that lintel with their hands out. He had given them the words for the causeway’s second stone and the hour of the change. In return they had given him a promise, written on a Chancery slip, that the Hard Hands would be counted apart from the Lowgate lodgers in any count the Crown made of the Hold. He had kept the slip. He had read it every night for a month. Then he had put it in the stove, because it was the first thing he had ever owned that could be used against him.
Nobody had kept the promise. Korrin did not say so. He had not expected them to.
