The gate had been a hole in the wall since the first morning of the Hold, and Harrow had been waiting for the iron and the wood to come together for the whole of the Silent Winter. He had waited as a Mason waits, which is to say he had not waited at all. He had dressed stone. He had sounded footings. He had walked the length of the north wall every morning and counted every course that the frost had lifted, and he had laid the new frame’s stones on the cobbles in their order, so that the first course would be the first course and nobody would have to ask him which stone went where.
Now the frame was going up. He stood at the foot of the scaffold with his cord looped over one wrist and his hands on his hips, and he counted the stones aloud as they came up on the hoist.
“Thirty-nine,” he said. “Forty. Forty-one. That is a course.”
The Watch on the hoist-rope had begun, in the way of young men with nothing else to do, to shout the numbers back at him from the top of the scaffold. They did it as a joke, and then they did it as a habit, and by the third course they were bellowing each figure with a theatrical roll of the vowels, so that the whole court rang with it like a market.
