“One,” said Harrow, and set the first stone of the east curtain-course on its bed of lime.
The Mason’s Yard counted with him under its breath. It did so every morning, and it had done so since the Hold’s first stone was lifted out of the marsh-clay by a pair of hands that had no names and no wages. The apprentices counted in a mumble. The Hard Hands counted in whatever voice they used for work. Only Harrow counted out loud, slowly, the way he set his own feet on a wet step, and the Yard had learned to follow the number as a rope follows a wheel.
“Two,” said Harrow.
“Lime’s too thin,” said Gaunt.
He stood at the head of the course with his big arms folded across a leather apron that was scorched brown at the hem. He had come to the Yard before the bell, with the forge’s own barrow behind him, and he had found the lime-trough already mixed. Harrow had mixed it in the dark. Gaunt had not wanted to say so. He had instead been saying since the bell that the lime was too thin, and that the course would not set before the frost, and that the Mason’s Yard was a place where a builder could wait a month for a wall to be ready and then wait another month for it to fall down.
