The gate had not shut properly since the siege. Gaunt had been objecting to it for two years, and now that the gatewarden was awake again to work it, Gaunt was finally asked to mend the hinge, and he did so with the air of a man who has been insulted in a language he speaks fluently.
“The pin is ruined,” said Gaunt. He said it before he had even reached the gate, from halfway across the gatehouse yard, with his splinted arm across his chest and his bad temper set like cast-iron in his face. “I’ve seen the ram’s mark on it. The engine put its whole weight through that pin the night they came over the causeway, and a pin that’s been hit like that is a pin that’s finished. Anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar, and I’ll say it to the gatewarden’s face.”
“It is not ruined,” said Brannoc, from the lever. “It is only unhappy.”
He stood with one hand on the great gate’s lever-bar, his grey many-jointed shape very still against the iron. His face was turned toward the hinge, and his eyes had the faraway patience of a man listening to water under a bridge. He did not glance at Gaunt. He looked at the place where the left leaf met the stone, and he said, quite gently, that the pin wanted warming, and that the iron was cold, and that the bar was stiff because it had been kept too long…
