Someone had to count the Caul while Korrin was on the ford road, and Ysra had decided, somewhere between the Gatehouse stair and the lower gate, that the someone was going to be her.
She went out by the culvert postern with a lantern shuttered to a crack and her tape looped over one shoulder, and a second slate wrapped in oilcloth under her arm, and nobody on the wall stopped her. The Watch-men knew her walk. They knew the sound of her boots on the stair and the particular way she stood still in a doorway, counting the stones, before she came through. She went down the old carriers’ ramp in the dark, her feet finding the worn steps by memory, and came out onto the Caul road at the foot of the rise with the wind coming off the reeds into her face.
It was colder on the road than on the wall. The cold had a smell, peat and iron and something faintly sweet underneath, like cut grass left too long in the rain. She had noticed it at the culvert on the first morning of the thaw and had never been able to say what it was. Tonight it was stronger. It came up off the marsh in long slow breaths, and every breath carried it a little further toward the Hold.
