The fifteenth step of the north stair cracked under the grey shape’s weight, and Harrow heard it from the Mason’s Yard before he had properly finished his breakfast.
It was a small sound. It was like a dry bone under a boot, a single short crack with a slither at the end of it, and in the quiet of the morning it carried clean across the yard and up the gatehouse wall. Harrow put his bowl down on the bench. He had been eating standing up, because the stones were not going to wait for him to sit, and he had been counting the courses of the Mason’s Yard’s new wall, one by one, out of habit, when the sound came. He was up the north stair before Ysra’s tally could finish its last number from the Watch-room window.
The shape was gone. He knew it would be. It had gone down to the Mound at dawn, as it had done every morning for a week, carrying the Mourn copy’s morning broth in its long grey arms, like a child carrying a cup it had been told not to spill. He had watched it pass the lime pits with the cup held level in front of it, and it had not once looked down to check the broth. It had not needed to. Its arms had known how much the cup held.
