The watch-tower over the Lessary Road was the highest place in the Hold that a Hand could climb without a rope, and Ysra had claimed it in the first season because nobody else wanted a stair with a hundred and six steps and a draught that came up through the stones like a cold hand under a blanket.
She liked it for that. The stair was hers to count. She could go up it in the dark and know every step, and at the top there was a wooden platform with a rail, a brazier that the watch lit only when the frost came, and a slate on a nail where she wrote the night’s figures in chalk. From the platform she could see the whole of the Lessary Road. It ran west from the Hold’s gate, past the causeway and the toll-house at Lantern Ford, and then it bent south along the ridge, a pale ribbon through the dark country, until the trees took it.
Tonight she had the brazier unlit and her cloak wrapped twice round her shoulders, and she was looking at the far ridge.
There were fires on it.
She counted them. She counted them once, quickly, the way she counted the doors on a stair when she was tired and wanted the number to be right. Then she counted them again, slowly, with her finger on the rail and her lips moving, because she did not trust the first count in the cold. Her eyes…
