Ysra counted the Undercroft stair alone, at first light, because she did not trust anyone else to count it correctly. She had been told, by the others, that this was a fault in her. Pell had said it was a sort of vanity. Tallow had said, kindly, that a watch which counted only for itself could hardly be called a watch at all. Harrow had said nothing, which was the most reasonable reply of the three, since he counted everything and was therefore in no position to judge.
She went down the stair with a lamp in one hand and her other palm against the rock, and she counted each tread under her feet. One. The first was cold and damp and worn into a shallow bowl at the centre. Two. The second was the same. Three. Four.
On the fourth she stopped.
It was the wrong height. She had known that the day before. She had said it aloud, in front of the prince, and had seen his face go still at her saying it. But she had not stood on it alone. The step was lower than the three above it by a finger’s width, and the edge of the tread had a little lip of stone that caught the toe of her boot, so that she had to lift her foot a little higher than she wanted to step over it. The other steps did not have lips. Their edges were smooth and clean. This one had been cut, or had been worn, to hold something.
She stood on it for a moment with her weight on one foot, and felt the stone under her, and listened. There was nothing. The Undercroft’s drip sounded faint and far away at the bottom of the stair. The rock was silent. Ysra breathed slowly through her nose and went on.
Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
At the eighth she felt the familiar tightening in her chest, the small cold clench of a number that is coming out wrong. She had counted nine on the way up the day before. She had counted nine every time she had ever come down this stair, going back as far as she could remember, which was only as far as the morning she woke. She stopped on the eighth tread and looked down the stair, and then up it, and counted again, very carefully, with her lips moving.
Nine.
She went down the ninth. It was a plain step, unremarkable, with its dish-worn centre and its smooth clean edge. She stood on it with the lamp held high, and then she took one more step, because the Watch always took one more step to be sure of the bottom, and her boot came down on the Undercroft’s flagstones and rang on them, flat and solid, and she said quietly, “Ten.”
She went back up.
She went up the way she had come, slowly, with her palm on the cold rock. One, at the bottom. Two. Three. Four, the lipped step, lower than the others. Five. Six. Seven. Eight, and the clench in her chest came again. Nine, the last of the treads before the top. Then she stood on the Undercroft’s threshold, with her lamp in her hand, and looked down at the stair.
Ten.
She had counted it from the top too. She counted it from the top, with her eyes shut, touching each step with her toe as she went down, and when she came to the bottom she said, aloud, to the dark, “Ten,” in a voice that was very steady and not at all pleased.
Harrow was on the stair above her, waiting, with his hands at his sides. He had come to see whether the Watch had found a fault in the steps, because the Watch always found something, and he had been standing there for some time without speaking.
“Ten,” he said. He did not sound surprised. He sounded like a man who has been told the price of a thing he suspected all along would be too high. “You’ve counted it again.”
“I’ve counted it three times.”
“Then it’s ten.”
“It’s ten,” said Ysra. “And it’s nine. I’ve counted it nine every day I’ve been awake, and I’ve never once come down it and found ten until this morning. Which is the wrong number for a stair. A stair has the number it has. It doesn’t change its mind.”
Harrow looked at the fourth step for a while. “It’s changed its mind,” he said.
He fetched a measuring cord from the gatehouse. It was a long length of plaited hemp with knots tied in it at every pace, and it had been checked against the Chancery’s own rod, Harrow said, though he could not read the rod’s marks and had only the word of the clerk who gave it to him. He laid one end of the cord at the top of the stair, against the threshold, and drew it down the centre of the treads, one knot after another, to the flagstones at the foot. He counted the knots aloud. Then he came up the stair again, sat on the top step, and drew the cord back up, counting as he pulled.
“Nine,” said Harrow, when the cord came level with the threshold. He looked at the end of it in his hand, and turned it over, and turned it over again.
“There’s a knot missing,” said Ysra.
“There’s a knot missing,” agreed Harrow. “Nine knots and a gap of one. It came up short, Ysra. The cord says there’s nine steps and the room at the bottom’s a pace further on than the cord goes. There’s a stone floor down there, and it’s a pace lower than the nine.”
“Then the tenth isn’t a step.”
“It’s a step,” said Harrow. “It’s the fourth, counted twice. You feel it under your foot and you count it, and then you feel it again, and you count it again, and the stair gives you two. That’s how a stone does a thing like that.” He let the cord slither down the steps and lay still. “It’s not a fault in the count. It’s a fault in the stone.”
Tallow had come up behind them, with the minutes under his arm and a pencil in his teeth. He took the pencil out and wrote, in the margin of the minute for the day, a line in his small square hand, and then he read it aloud, in the flat deliberate way he had when he was determined to be exact.
“Undercroft stair. Nine steps by the cord. Ten by the Watch, counted three times, at the first light and the threshold and the bottom. The difference lies at the fourth step, which is lower, with a lip. Cause unknown.” He tapped the pencil on the margin. “I’d give you nine to ten. I’d put my mark on nine and my pencil on ten, and I’d not sign for either.”
“You’re a coward,” said Ysra.
“I’m a clerk,” said Tallow, mildly. “It’s the same thing, in a Chamber.”
That night she could not sleep, and did not try. She sat on the wall-walk with her back to a merlon and her hands in her lap and counted the crenellations between the north tower and the gate. There were sixteen. Eleven were cracked. Four had been repointed by someone who had not known how, and the mortar had been smeared across the stone in grey streaks like tears. She counted the streaks. She counted the stars above the marsh, and then gave up on the stars, because they moved, and a stair could not be counted if it moved.
She slept in the end, toward the small hours, with her head against the stone. And she dreamed of the stair.
It was the Undercroft stair, the nine dished treads, and in the dream she was on the top step with the lamp in her hand. She began to go down. At the fourth step she stopped, because the step was there and she could not see round it. The lip of stone was in her way. And the step spoke. It did not speak in words. It spoke in a sort of soft, polite, patient sound, like a board creaking under a foot that did not want to frighten the house. It was asking her, very courteously, whether it might be let up.
She woke with a jolt. The wall-walk was grey with the first light, and her neck was stiff, and there was a cold dampness on her cheek where the stone had pressed. She sat for a moment, breathing hard, and then she got up and went down the north stair, counting, to the kitchen.
Pell was at the oven with her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She looked round at Ysra’s face and frowned, and then she turned back to the bread without waiting to be asked.
“You’ve had the stair dream,” said Pell.
“I’ve had a dream about a stair.”
“Same thing. You’ve got the look.” Pell slid a loaf out of the oven on the flat of the peel and set it on the rack. “It’s the Hold’s way of saying a mouth wants feeding. I’ve had it myself, and I’m not the Watch, I’m only the cook. You’re hungry, love. The stair’s hungry. Sit down and eat something and go to bed.”
“I don’t want to eat.”
“Then you’ll go to bed hungry, and the stair can wait.”
Ysra did not sit down. She stood in the middle of the kitchen floor with her arms folded and her face pale, and she looked at the cook for a moment before she spoke. “Nine,” she said. “Then ten. I’ll not swear to either one until the stair stops changing its mind.”
Pell laughed, a short, warm, unsurprised sound. She came round the end of the table with the bread-knife in one hand and a long wooden ladle in the other, and she stood on the top of the cellar steps, which led down into the kitchen-store, and she tapped the ladle on the stone.
“Here’s my opinion, since nobody asked me,” said Pell. “The stair holds a different opinion from the Watch. That’s all it is. It’s not a fault, and it’s not a dream, and it’s not the Hold’s fault either. It’s just the stair. And you can’t settle a matter like that by standing about counting it.” She slapped the ladle on the stone once more, decisively. “You settle it by sitting on the thing until one of you gives way. I’d put my money on the stair. It’s been sat on longer than you.”
Ysra stared at her. Then, very slowly, she let her arms drop to her sides.
She did not go to bed. But she did sit down on the bottom step of the kitchen stair, the one that led up to the yard, and she stayed there with her hands in her lap while the bread cooled and the sun came up over the marsh. She did not count anything. She listened.
It was late in the morning when she heard it. She was still on the step, with her head bowed and her eyes shut, and the sound came up to her through the stone of the floor, very faint, from somewhere far below the kitchen, down past the cellar and the Great Hall and the Undercroft’s nine dished treads.
It was a child’s voice, counting under its breath.
It counted slowly, in a whisper, with the careful, precise, anxious rhythm of a boy who has been taught his numbers and is terrified of getting one of them wrong. One. Two. Three. It came up through the rock as though through water, thin and clear and very close to the ear. Four. Ysra got to her feet. She went to the cellar door and opened it and stood on the top step, looking down.
“Who’s there?” she called.
The counting stopped.
For a moment there was nothing. Then the voice came up out of the dark, from somewhere beneath the fourth stair of the Undercroft, small and frightened and very polite, the voice of a child who has been caught out of bed.
“It’s me,” it whispered. “I’m not allowed to come up yet.”