The courier came up to the river gate on a grey horse with a green pennant tied to its bridle, and Ysra counted him in, because counting was what she did when a stranger came up the road and she could not yet tell what he was for. One rider. One horse, shod all round, with a white stocking on the near fore. One sack behind the saddle, tied with a Chancery cord. Four buttons on the coat that showed under his travelling cloak, two of them brass and two of them horn. Two doors between the river gate and the gatehouse board, and eleven steps up from the court to the board’s stone shelf. She had counted those steps every night for a year, and she counted them again now as the courier came up through the gate, so that she would know, afterward, whether he had looked at any of them.
He did not glance at the steps. He ignored the wall and the scaffold and the Watch on the parapet, with their bows unstrung and their hands on their belts. He was a clerk, not a soldier. She saw it in the way he sat the horse, leaning forward like a man who has been on too many roads with a sack that does not get lighter. He was polite and tired and his cheeks were chapped from the wind, and when he saw Ysra on the gate-stair he took off his hat to her, a little…
