The Crown’s paper weighed more than it had any right to. Ossane Tiller had carried it for nine years as an envoy and four as a Chaincrown, and she had never once felt it in her coat the way she felt it now, pressing against her ribs as she came down the last of the Lantern Ford road in the first heat of midsummer.
The causeway ran out across the brown water on piled stone. On her left, at its far end, stood a plain house of Lowgate timber with a slate roof and a door painted a bright and careful blue. She had watched the Survey House go up over two summers from the Crown’s side of the ford, and had expected it to be ugly. It was not ugly. It was merely exact, which she found harder to forgive.
She stopped in the road to look at the door. A rod-marked line had been painted across it in the Crown’s own colours, the gold and the dark green of the Chancery’s seal, with the Crown’s figure for the Hold’s boundary written beside it in a Chancery clerk’s flourish. Somebody inside had corrected the paint. The gold had been taken out where it ran two leagues past the stone, and a thinner line in plain grey had been drawn in its place, with a figure in the surveyor’s hand. The grey was a league and a half shorter. Ossane had no doubt at all which of the two was…
