Jon Hale did not wait for Captain Dain’s halberdiers to finish shackling the five disarmed Oath Guards beside the carriage wheels.
Tucking the leather-cased Bound Common Charter beneath his left arm, Jon vaulted onto the greased iron hub of the baggage wain’s rear wheel, braced his boot on the oak brake-block, and hauled himself onto the tailboard to scan the crowd surging back from the north gate arch.
Fifty yards down North Street, the morning market traffic had jammed against the narrow bottleneck where the tanners’ wynd branched off toward the bark-pits and the low drainage ditch. Farmers leading pannier-mules, women carrying willow baskets of salt fish, and weavers’ apprentices hauling bolts of undyed wool pressed against the timber shop-fronts, craned toward the shouting under the gatehouse.
Through that shifting press of homespun hoods and wet oilskin capes, Jon caught a single, unmistakable movement against the grain of the crowd.
A wiry man of middle height, stripped of his blued-steel breastplate and wearing a mud-spattered gray drover’s cloak thrown hastily over dark chainmail haubergeon sleeves, ducked beneath the belly of a halted hay wain. He did not run like a startled townsman fleeing pikes; he moved with the low, flat-footed glide of a royal sapper-subaltern measuring sight-lines, his left hand holding the flap of his cloak closed over his ribs while his right hand guided a short, broad-bladed skinning knife back into an inner boot-sheath after slicing the wain’s tail-rope.
