Ysra rode out to Lantern Ford alone, because she was the Hand who counted things and because the Warden had told her, in the plain voice he used when he had already decided and only wanted to be agreed with, that she was not to go in force. Two of the Watch had wanted to come. Korrin had wanted to come, very loudly, and had been stopped at the gate by Pell, who had taken him by the collar and walked him back across the court like a dog that had been caught in the bread. Ysra had said nothing to any of them. She had taken the grey mare from the stables, saddled her herself, and gone out through the lodgers’ gate at the first grey light, with her lantern unlit and her warning-book in the pocket of her coat.
The road to the ford was soft after the thaw. The mare picked her way through standing water and broken ice, and Ysra counted the hoofbeats, because a count was what kept her from thinking about the rider she had seen the day before, who had stopped beside the Hold’s wall and looked up at its windows as a man looks at a column he means to check. Four hundred and eleven hoofbeats to the lower ford. Then the causeway, which was stone, and rang under the mare’s shoes like a bell with a crack in it.
