Ysra counted the arrows, and then she counted the men who were carrying them, and then she counted the fires as they caught, because she had found in the first hour of the siege that a number was the only thing in the Watch’s hands that did not burn.
The pitch stuck. That was the first thing she learned about it. It came over the wall in clay pots with the necks stuffed with rag, and the pots broke on the stone and spread their black stuff across the new courses and the old, and where it ran it did not drip like water. It clung. It stood in threads down the west face and stayed there, glistening, and where the threads were thickest the stone began to smoke, a low grey breath that came out of the joints and crept along the parapet and found every arrow-slit in the wall.
The Watch was at the slits. Two of her six were burned. Ysra saw it happen. Dell, who had the middle slit on the west face, put his hand out to shove a burning rag back through the gap, and the rag came apart in his fingers and the pitch went with it, over the backs of both his hands and up his wrists, and he screamed once, very short, and then he did not scream again, because he had been taught on the stair that a Watch does not stop watching for the sake of its own skin…
