Ysra counted the fires from the Watch-tower at dusk, as she had counted everything since the Hold gave her the Watch, and she had got to forty before the sun was properly down.
They sat along the rise above Lantern Ford in a loose line, as a row of lamps sits on a shelf in a house where nobody has yet decided where the shelf should go. Each one was a pot of coals on an iron stand. Each stand had a Hunt-Warden beside it with his coat buttoned up against the damp, and a bow slung on his back, and a face that she could not make out from the wall but could tell from the set of his shoulders was not happy to be standing in the wet. She wrote forty in the book, and under it the hour, which was the candle-clock’s last mark before the Watch changed.
The light went out of the marsh quickly, the way it always did in spring, as if somebody had drawn a grey cloth over the reeds. By the time the cloth was over everything she could see, she had counted sixty-one. Some of the new ones were being carried up on carts from the south-west, along the causeway, with cloth over their tops and their coals hidden under sacking. She could see the shapes of the carts moving against the lighter sky. She could hear the wheels, faintly, in the still air, and the slow tread of the horses…
