The east parapet was Ysra’s watch from the second bell to the fourth, and she had walked it for so long that she could have walked it blind, which was one of the reasons she did not trust herself to do it blind. She counted by feel as well as by eye. Forty-one merlons on the north stretch, forty-four on the east. The third from the stair had a chip in its cap that the frost had made in the first winter after the Crown, and she touched it every time she passed, because a chip you touched was a chip you could report.
The Regent was walking the parapet too.
He was ten paces ahead of her, which was the distance the Watch-book required between a sentry and any person she was guarding, and he had been walking that distance all evening, from the stair-head to the corner-bastion and back, with his right hand on the wall-cap and his left hand inside his coat. He did not stop at the corner. He turned, with a little hitch in the turn that she could hear in the scrape of his boot, and came back along the course. She counted his steps as he came. Thirty-one from the bastion to the stair. She had counted the same thirty-one on eleven nights running, and on every one of them she had been ten paces behind him, and on every one of them he had not once looked round to see whether she…
