Dawn had not fully broken when Cassian brought Hede Marrow into the south yard and made him point at the road.
The clerk looked worse in outdoor cold than he had behind his desk. Men like him belonged to papers, ledgers, sheltered awnings, and the small moral weather of rooms where other people dirtied themselves farther down the line. Grimridge had put him in a plain cloak with two guards at his shoulders and left his hands bound in front, not for spectacle, only for truth. The road he had helped keep quiet sat out beyond the orchard and the lower fields, pale with frost and already beginning to carry the day's first freight. He could look at it now with the wall behind him and the house fully awake at his back.
