The notice had said first light, and the Low Brace had taken it at its word: it had watched the minute from its roofs, and then it had come down and walked to the guild hall, and the hall was full within the hour.
It was a long high room with a gallery around three sides and tall windows on the fourth, facing east, and its floor was crowded with benches and the benches were crowded with people: guild fitters in their work coats, dock hands, women from the market, old men from the dormitory blocks, a row of shrine-keepers in grey sashes along one wall with their arms folded. The gallery was full too. People stood along its railings, the railings the clerk had said were the reason nobody under fifteen could come in. Mara looked at them as she walked up the aisle and thought they looked sound enough.
Pell was on the stair outside the hall’s side door. She had seen him there as she came in, sitting on the top step with his notebook on his knee and the page of questions she had given him tucked into its cover. He had looked up at her and nodded, once, and gone back to writing.
