Ysra counted the boy’s breaths, because it was the only count in the Kitchen that she could make without taking her eyes off his hands.
There were eleven breaths to the minute. He breathed through his mouth, short and shallow, as a child breathes when it has been holding its breath for an age and has only just been allowed to stop. His wrists were thin under her grip. She could feel the bones move when he flexed them, and she could feel that he was not flexing them to get free. He had given up on that some time ago, she thought. He had given up on getting free when he saw the shape of the tower stair from the gap under the loose step, and understood that there was nobody in the Hold who would let a Chancery child lie in a wall for three days without counting him too.
She had found him at dawn. She had counted the tower stair the way she always did, from the Watch-tower’s room to the parapet, sixty-one steps, and she had counted the fourth from the bottom as she passed it and felt the lip rock under her foot the way it always did. But this morning it had rocked too far. It had rocked with a small dry sound that was not the grit-cough of the old stone, and when she stopped and crouched and put her palm down on the step, the stone had moved under her hand…
