Ysra counted the riders down the river road, because counting was the one thing the Watch had ever been trusted to do, and because a Hold that counted its people as they went away could at least say afterward how many had gone.
Twenty-four. She had made the figure at the foot of the bank when the commission gathered its horses, and again when the grooms brought them round from the lee of the reeds, and now she made it a third time while the column wound out past the first marsh post into the dusk. Twenty-four riders on the Lessary Road, their coats still stiff from the Hold’s cold. Two carriages behind them. The closed one rode low on its springs. The open one carried a clerk’s trunk lashed to its roof with the grey cord the Watch used for barrows, and the clerk sat beside it with one hand on the rope, as though a trunk could walk off a moving roof between the gate and the first bend.
In the closed carriage, across from the door and wrapped in a travelling cloak, sat a square box of pale wood with a brass hasp. Ysra knew what was in it. She had watched the clerks lift the grey-board book out of Mireille’s satchel that afternoon and lock it away with the commission’s papers, and she had watched Mireille’s hands come up off the satchel and stay in the air for a moment, like a bird that has been…
