Ysra counted the Hold’s doors and stairs every night, because she could not sleep otherwise, and she had never once pretended that the counting was a virtue. It was a habit that had kept her awake since the Watch-wall was first set, and it had made her, by the end of a long winter, the one Hand in the body who knew the number of every step between the gatehouse and the Undercroft.
On the night after the Charter she came down the Gatehouse stair with a lamp and counted nine.
Then she counted again, because the first count had come out wrong, and it came out eleven.
She stopped on the seventh step. Her lamp threw her shadow up the wall ahead of her, long and thin, and it did not match the step under her boot. She had walked this stair every night since the spring. She had set her feet on the same worn dip in the third stone every time, and there had been nine steps in the spring, and there were nine now, and somewhere in the winter two more had been laid in without anyone telling the Watch.
“Someone’s on the stair,” she said quietly, to herself.
