The roar of the crowd reached him before the doorway did, a deep restless sound that pressed through the corridor walls and seemed to rattle the air itself, no quieter than it had been when the servants woke him near midmorning.
Reports had come in through the night, each one pushing the estimate higher until the numbers stopped being useful. In the end, Godric had simply told Beorn that if he wanted the truth, he would have to see it for himself.
Now he stepped out onto the platform Cerdic's crews had managed to raise in only two days, and the work showed itself in every pale seam of fresh-cut timber. The wood still carried the clean sharp smell of something newly hewn, still bright where the saws had passed through it, still too raw to belong to the square around it. Two days was scarcely enough to build a structure meant to hold one man before half a city, but it had stood so far, and that was what mattered.
