Harrow counted the ring as the sun came up through the marsh haze, and he counted it out loud, pot by pot, because he had never learned to count any other way.
He stood on the north wall with the cord in his left fist and the first light coming grey and wet over the reeds. Below him the Hold was waking, badly. He could hear the Watch on the stair, a rhythm of boots and buckets and a cough that would be Ysra’s, because Ysra coughed only when she had not slept and was too proud to say so. He could hear the bread going into the ovens in the Kitchen, though the wind was wrong for the smell to carry. He could hear the goats. The goats were always the first thing up in a Hold, and the last to be quiet, and this morning they were calling for water with the high unhappy note that Tamsin said meant the wells had gone thin.
“One,” said Harrow, to the marsh.
It was the first pot, nearest the causeway. It stood on an iron stand the height of a man, with its bowl of coals heaped high and its base banked round with wet peat so the smoke would lie low and thick along the ground. A Hunt-Warden sat beside it on a stool with his bow across his knees and his face turned toward the Hold. Harrow could see the man’s breath going up in the cold, a…
