By the fourth bell of the night the people of Lowlock had begun to go home.Ravel watched them from the causeway, wrapped in a Dunmarch horse-blanket, with his back against a milestone. They went in ones and twos at first, and then in families, back through the postern that Odran had unbolted and over the two planks, towards their own open doors. Nobody stopped them. There was nobody left on that side who cared to."It's the Concordat," Tobiah said. He was sitting in the road with his satchel on his knees, grey with tiredness and very pleased with himself. "The eleventh title. A ward that has been cleansed is clean, for a year and a day, as a matter of law. He's said the Rite. He can't say it again without admitting that the first one took nothing. They are safer in those houses tonight than anywhere in Brannoch." He pushed up his spectacles. "I shouldn't think he's ever been beaten by a footnote before."It did not hold for everyone. The marked could not go back, nor the Lockwatch wh

Marta Flint took the summons herself.She waded out to the middle of the ford to do it, past his stirrup, with the water creaming round her knees. She held up her hand for the paper as she had held it up for a thousand watch-bills. The lancer who had it on his point looked at Maren. Maren shrugged. He lowered it."Witness," Marta said, when she had read it through. She read slowly, with her lips. "Against him. Before a bench in the League." She folded the sheet in four and put it inside her jerkin. "I'll attend, ma'am. I never missed a parade in five-and-twenty year, and I don't see that being dead excuses me. I'd like to look at the court that'll take my oath." She considered. "You can tell them I'll want my expenses."Dame Rochelle Aubry looked at her for a moment across the water. Something moved in the calm square face that was not quite a smile."I shall have it noted," she said. She bent her head to Maren, as one officer to another, and turned her horse. "At the border, then, Ca

The League of Tollen began at a brass strip.It was let into the roadway across the east end of the bridge at Halt Cross, a hand wide and worn bright by two hundred years of hooves. On the near side of it was Brannoch, where Ravel Ashlock was an attainted heretic who could be taken by any man in white. On the far side was a toll-house built out over the first arch, with green shutters and a weathervane in the shape of a pair of scales. The notice Kheshi had spoken of was nailed to its door. He could read his own name from the saddle.He could also see the Vigil.They were drawn up in a meadow a furlong upstream, on the Brannoch bank, forty horse in white with their lances grounded. The hounds lay in the grass in front of them. Nobody there was doing anything."She said she'd not fight us," Maren muttered."She said she'd not fight your lances." He was counting the paces from the last hedge to the brass strip. "She never said a word about mine."A small man in a russet gown had come ou

He went up the coast the next morning. He could not have stayed away.It was three leagues by the cliff road, and he walked it, because he did not trust himself on a horse with his mind where it was. Kheshi came, and Marta with her hood up. Pell came too, uninvited, in a hired trap, on the grounds that anything which made a whole city take its hat off was worth pricing."I merely observe," the broker said, jolting along beside them, "that grief is the one market nobody has cornered.""Pell.""I shall be quiet. I am only thinking aloud. I'm told it helps."The road ran along the top of the land with the sea on its left, a long way down. It was a bright, hard day, with a wind. Gulls stood on it over the cliff edge without moving their wings. He thought that it was a good coast for fishing people, and that they had probably loved it.They smelled the camp before they saw it. It was woodsmoke and tar and fish drying.There must have been two hundred of them. They were living on the cliff-

By the eighth day they were laying odds on it at the Exchange.Pell reported this with a kind of horrified pride. It stood at five to two against. A syndicate of tallow merchants had taken the short side heavily, on the theory that no bench in the world would find for a corpse. He had been approached twice by gentlemen who wished to know whether the Captain's dead could be made to faint in court."I told them that I would enquire," he said. "I was curious what they'd pay."Edda had not turned a hair in nine days. She had gone on washing. She had been to law once before, she said, with a starch-chandler in Greywater over a short hundredweight, and had won. It was all the same thing. You stood up straight and said what was so. She had, however, starched her best cap until it could have stopped a crossbow bolt. Each night she went along the wall of the sail-loft with a clothes-brush and did every one of the Host, living or wicker."If I'm to hang for you," s