Chapter 35: The Beam

The caravan would leave at the first bell of the fiftieth, and the Marshal's hour was the first bell of the fifty-first. That gave Seren one day of road to put between Kael and a nail in a door frame. She stood at the Crown's toll gate with her case at her feet and counted what was in front of her instead. One beam, as long as a hay cart, lying across the road on an iron post. One brass pan. A rack of Crown weights worn bright where the clerk's thumb went. Eight carts nose to tail on the near side, their mules unhitched and steaming. The gate stood nine hundred paces past the last house of Ash, where the Ironway quit being a street and started being a road, and at first light it smelled of mule and wet lead. Past the beam the Ironway posts began again,…