Harrow counted the arch before the bell, the way he counted it every morning, from the springing stone on the left to the springing stone on the right, touching each one with two fingers as he went. He had done it for the whole of his waking life in the Hold, and he had never once got the same total twice, because the frost lifted a flake from the keystone most nights and the flake was a stone the count had to take in.
Today he got two hundred and six.
He stood under the arch with his fingers still resting on the cold lip of the last stone and waited for the number to change. It did not. The gate had stood shut for twenty-nine mornings, and the arch had kept its shape through all of them, and every one of those mornings he had come out with a stick of chalk and made a stroke on the stone beside the springing, one stroke for each day the bar had not been lifted. He could see the strokes from the south wall, a row of pale marks like the notches on a tally-stick. The Lowgate children had counted them too. They had chalked their own goats underneath, and he had not asked them to stop.
