Ysra went down the tower’s water-stair with her boots tied round her neck and her hands flat on the wall. The stone was slick under her palms, and very cold, and it had a grain to it that she could feel through the skin of her fingers, the faint ridge of the builder’s chisel running in lines from the top of the wall to the water. She counted every step aloud. She had been counting steps since she was old enough to be trusted on the wall-walk stair with a Watch’s hand on her collar, and she had never once gone down a stair without counting it, because a stair that was not counted was a stair that could take you without your knowing.
“One,” she said, and stepped down into the water.
It came to her knees on the first step. It was colder than any water she had touched since the old Cistern in the Hold, and it did not feel like water at all. It felt like the weight of a closed door pressing against her shins. She let it press. She kept her hands on the wall and she kept her feet moving, and she counted the second step and the third, and her voice came back to her off the stone, flat and slightly late, as if the stair were repeating her one number at a time to someone further down.
