The Hearing

The coach had gone north on the twenty-first with an empty seat in it, and five weeks later the treaty office appointed a hearing at Hollow Ash for the twelfth, in the open, the village admitted.

They put the table on the flat grass by the trough where Garrow gave the toast, and it was a door on two trestles, four feet across, because no table in the village would take three sets of papers. Hesper looked at it for some while with a cloth over a pot in her hands.

Two people alive knew what had just been built on that grass, and one of them was sixty feet off with his coat brushed and his hands where anybody could see them.

Three hundred came, and stood along the edges the way they had on the fourteenth of the arrival month, waiting to find out what the looking would…