The body could not haul the sprig back, and Ysra tried anyway. She tried because a Watch did not leave a thing on the far side of a wall without first testing the mortar, and because the sprig had been hers as a shed arm was hers, a part of her that had walked up the Caul in a sling against her chest. She tried on the third morning, when the light over the lake was a clean pale grey and the water in the stairwell had gone quiet.
She took a loop of gate-rope, the good tarred stuff that Brannoc had used on the windlass, and tied it into a noose with a running knot that she had learned from the bell-tower men in the Hold’s first year. At the end of the rope she fastened a hook from the Mason’s Yard, a stubby iron thing with a bent tip, the kind used for lifting a stone by its carved edge. She carried the bundle down the stair in her teeth and then in her fist, and she went down the wet steps with her hand on the wall and her eyes on the stone, and she counted every one of them aloud, because counting was what held her upright.
