Salt on Every Threshold

You are Herewig, and you ride for House Grimhold, and the errand is a small one: two letters have gone to the reeve of Grimsditch asking why the quarter's wall-fee has not come, and two letters have been answered by nothing at all, and Lord Godric wants to know why before the roads close for the winter.

Grimsditch should be lit by now. It is not. Every door on the street is barred — not shut, barred, the crossbar down and the pin driven through it, the way a house is barred against wolves, and it is barely dusk. Someone has laid a line of salt across every threshold you can see, thick as a plough-furrow, and the rain has not touched it, which means it was laid after the rain stopped, and the rain stopped an hour ago.

On the green a dog lies dead in the mud. It has stiffened. Nobody has moved it, and nobody is coming to. Past the green the mill wheel is turning — not stopped for the season, not iced over, turning steadily in the last of the light — and there is no miller on the platform, no sack going up, no sound from the mill but the water and the wheel.