Ysra climbed the chapel tower at dusk, because the Watch counted every stair in the Hold, and the chapel tower had one more stair than the Watch’s book allowed.
She had known it for a year. Everybody who had ever been sent up the tower with a message knew it, and most of them had made a joke about it, and the Watch-book had a small neat note in its margin under the tower’s entry that said eighty, to the bell-frame, in the square hand of a Watch-captain who had been dead for a century and had never once climbed the stair himself. Ysra had always trusted the note. She trusted the book more than she trusted her own feet, which was a habit she had learned on the wall in the first winter, when the snow came in sideways and her feet had lied to her about the cold.
But she had been told, in the Watch-room that morning, that the Regent wished the chapel’s frame to be looked at, because the Survey would need a bell-tower’s height for a sighting, and the Survey had a rod now and wanted to use it. So Ysra put her slate under her arm and her tape over her shoulder and went in at the chapel’s narrow door, past the bare stone font and the cold hearth where nobody had lit a fire since the winter, and began to count.
