The famine sent Ysra down into the Undercroft with a lamp, because the Hard Hands had decided that the Keystone’s base was ironstone-bearing, and she was the only one of them who could be trusted to count what she found.
She did not believe it. Korrin had said it at the archive table in a voice that did not invite questions, and Gaunt had said he would dig if somebody told him where, and Harrow had said that the Keystone’s footing was a good stone that would not bear a pick without cracking. Ysra had listened to them all and had said nothing, because she had been counting the cracks in the Keystone’s footing for three nights before anyone else had noticed them, and she was not sure that a Hand who had spent so long counting stone could ever believe that a stone had iron in it. But the Hold was short of iron. Everyone knew that. And so she took the lamp, and a broom with a stiff bristle, and went down the nine steps from the Hall to the cellar floor without counting them aloud, which was the first time in her life she had let a stair go uncounted.
