Sella weighed the Measure the way she weighed a bone. She did not have a scale for it. She had two columns in her ledger and a hand that knew what a column ought to look like when it was honest.
On the left she kept the Forge’s tally of iron: the bars that had come in from the caravan, the pigs from the marsh, the chains from the Caul bridge that Korrin had carried home across his arms like a sleeper. On the right she kept the Kitchen’s grain, which Pell gave her every morning on a slip of brown paper with the figures written in a hand as sharp as a knife. The two columns did not agree. They never agreed now. The iron went down, and the grain went down, and the body in the middle of them went down with both, like a man standing in a flood who is losing his footing by inches.
Eight hundred weights.
She had counted it twice in the bone-room, with the lamp at her elbow and the ledger open on her knee. Once from the iron column, adding what the Hold had and taking off what the body had already eaten. Once from the faces. The faces were the more honest measure. Measure told you how much weft was in the body. Faces told you how much of it was still holding its shape.
