The letter came up the Sallow road on the magistrate’s own horse, with the rider’s boots still white from the ford and the seal on the cord broken in two places, as if somebody had wanted to be sure it had been opened and then closed again. Teodor Quill saw the broken seal before he saw the rider. He had been taught to look for seals by a mother who had never once in her life left a seal unbroken on a letter she had sent herself.
He took the packet at the library shelf, where he had been sitting with a book of Dovereach law open on his knees and his feet tucked under him, because the shelf was the only place in the Great Hall where a boy could read without a Hand asking him what he was reading. The rider was a Dovereach man with a flat face and a Hold cap he had clearly been given for the ride. He did not come in. He bowed to the door and went back down the causeway without asking for water, and Teodor thought that was a kind of message in itself.
The letter was in his mother’s hand. Teodor knew the hand the way he knew the shape of his own name. It was small and upright and exact, and the lines ran level without any ruler, and the capital letters had the little hooks at their tails that his tutor in Dovereach had told him were…
