Harrow counted the blank line the way he counted a wall that had not yet been built. He did it standing in the Mason’s Yard with the Roll’s shadow lying across the cobbles at his feet, and he did it with his eyes shut, because the Hearth’s copy of the Roll was pinned to the board by the gate and he had decided he would not look at it again until he had worked out what the empty row would need.
It was one line in the Roll. It sat between Sella’s and Ysra’s in the Hearth’s grey script, a space the width of two fingers, with no name in it and no trade and no date. Harrow had cut more than a hundred stones in his life for names, and he knew to the hair how much room a name needed. A short name needed one stone and a bit. A long one needed two. A name with a trade under it needed a course of its own.
“Eleven,” he said aloud, to the cobbles. Then he counted again, because a blank has an edge, and an edge has two sides, and he could not decide whether the line was waiting for a name or refusing one. “Nine,” he said the second time. “Or eleven. I don’t know.”
