Ysra counted the Hold’s doors for the length of an afternoon, because counting was the only search she was allowed to make without a Knot.
She had not been given a Knot. She had been given a refusal, in the Kitchen, in the cook’s flat voice, over a board of onions, and she had given herself the Watch’s own ruling, which was that a count is only an adding up, and she had decided that the ruling was enough. The Chamber had not forbidden her to count. It had not forbidden her to stand in a corridor with her palm on the wood and listen. It had only refused to open the drawer, and a Watch that stood in front of a locked door and listened was not, in any sense the Hearth had yet written down, opening it.
She began at the stable yard, because that was where the foreign line had first been heard, and she walked the Hold from there toward the Kitchen passage in the order of its doors.
The first was the gatehouse, which had no door of its own, only the great arch and the wicket in it, and she counted the wicket because it had shut itself by Brannoc’s leave. The second was the Watch-room door, oak and iron-banded, with a brass count nailed beside the latch that somebody had made long ago and never polished. The third was the chapel stair, which was narrow and dark and smelled of old candles, and…
