Chapter 4: Gerolt Reads the Fine Print

The contract had been written by someone who had never visited Ashford.

Gerolt could tell this from the second line, where the author had described the creature as having established a territory in the village's eastern quarter. Ashford had no eastern quarter. It had a mill, a market square roughly the size of a modest courtyard, fourteen houses ranging from adequate to collapsing, one tavern with a disputed sign, and a chapel that had not held a priest since the fever took the last one two winters ago. It was a town the way a bruise was a color — technically accurate, missing the important part.

He had arrived on a grey Tuesday morning, the kind of morning the Continent specialized in: not cold enough to justify the effort of being miserable about it, not warm enough to forget. His horse, a dun gelding named nothing because Gerolt had stopped naming horses twenty years ago, picked its way down the frozen track into Ashford with the mild sufferance of an animal that had seen worse approaches and expected to see more.