Ysra went to Pell’s door on the night her penance should have ended, which the Watch had asked the Chamber to extend until the Mound was quiet, and said what she had not yet said aloud in the Hold.
She went down the back stair with her count-book under her arm and a candle in her other hand, and she did not count the steps. That was the first thing she noticed about herself. She had counted every stair in the Hold since the Crossing, the north stair and the Undercroft stair and the Lowgate steps and the three flights up to the Watch-room, and she had counted them so many times that she could feel the number of each one in her knees. Tonight she went down the back stair of the Kitchen wing with her eyes open and her mind empty, and she did not know how many steps there were until she reached the bottom and found herself standing at the Kitchen passage with the candle guttering.
The door was shut. A thin line of firelight showed under it. Pell was inside, moving about, humming something tuneless under her breath, and the sound of her pans came through the wood in small domestic clinks, like a clock that had forgotten its hour.
