Korrin walked the wall-walk before the sun was up, because the wall did not sleep and neither would he if he could help it. Seven courses of new stone ran along the north side now, grey and square, and he could feel the difference under his boots. The old stone rang when you stamped on it. The new stone only took the stamp and gave it back quietly, like a man who has been told not to make a fuss.
His shoulder hurt. It had hurt since the vote, which was stupid, since he had not been in the vote so much as beside it, shouting. The bruise ran from the blade of his shoulder down under the strap of his jerkin, and every time he swung his arm it said something rude. He let it say it. Pain was information. Gaunt said that, and he was the only one of the Hands who said anything worth remembering before breakfast.
He stopped at the north tower and looked out over the marsh. The reeds were still silver with dew, and the Sallow ran brown and cold under the causeway. Across the water a line of smoke rose from a Lessary farm, and then from another behind it, and he counted them the way he counted everything. Three. Then four. The farm across from the marsh had its goats in the lower pen again. He could see the white of them, bunched together like something spilled.
“Stop counting,” said Ysra behind him, from the stair. “You will count yourself out of the wall.”
“Three smokes,” Korrin said. “Four. The goats are back.”
“The goats are always back,” Ysra said. She came up the last step and stood with her back to the tower’s inner wall, facing the door, which was how Ysra stood on every surface that had a door. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep. She had been on the stair all night counting the bags in the Undercroft, which she would not describe, and she looked as if she had counted the bags twice and got a different number both times. “You want the Hard Hands to hold the marsh road.”
“The Hard Hands want the wall,” Korrin said. “The marsh road is a wall with a gap in it.”
“That is the same thing,” said Ysra, “from the other side.”
They had said it together the night before, in the Kitchen, with the bread going cold and Pell’s back to them. Korrin had not planned the words. He had planned only the count. There were four of them who would say a hard thing in a cold room without looking at the floor first: himself, Gaunt, Ysra and Harrow. Four was enough to hold a wall and not enough to hold a Chamber. That was the point. A Chamber could be argued down by five voices and a bread-count. A wall could not be argued with at all.
The others were the Soft Hands, because someone had to say what they were, and the word had come to Korrin from Tallow’s minutes. Pell, Tamsin and Sella were at the head of them. Pim had been put in the Soft column by Tallow’s reckoning, because a boy who carried stones for the Kitchen had to be counted somewhere, and he had said, loudly, that he was neither, and that he would be whatever the stair required.
Korrin did not care what Pim was. He cared what the Soft Hands did. The Soft Hands fed the Hold. The Soft Hands kept the goats and the bread and the sick-list on the cellar wall, and when a stranger came up the causeway with a Chancery face on him, the Soft Hands gave him soup. That was not a crime. But it meant the Hard Hands would have to be the ones who said no, and somebody had to be the no.
He went down the stair to the Kitchen steps and found the division already known.
Pell was sitting on the top step with a bowl of barley on her knee and a spoon in her fist, and she looked up at Korrin as if she had been expecting him for a week. “Hard Hands,” she said. “I heard. Sounds like two loaves of the same dough to me, love. One gets left in the oven till it’s a brick, and the other gets eaten by the boy before it’s cool.”
“The Hard Hands keep the wall,” Korrin said. “That is the job.”
“And who keeps the Hard Hands fed?”
“The wall does.”
“The wall,” said Pell, “has never once said thank you for a bowl of soup, and it does not get a bowl, and it does not sit up in the cold waiting for the bread to rise.” She took a spoonful and pointed the spoon at the yard. “You will be back at my table by the first frost. Every one of you. Gaunt included.”
Tamsin came up from the goat pens with a bucket swinging from each hand and a grey kid tucked under one arm like a bundle of washing. She set the buckets down, put the kid on the step, and looked at Korrin with the particular gentleness she kept for animals and, sometimes, for the Chamber. “Pell tells me you have a faction,” Tamsin said.
“The Hard Hands,” Korrin said.
“Do you want me to join?”
“Yes.”
“I will not join anything that does not sing,” said Tamsin.
“The Hard Hands do not sing.”
“Then the Hard Hands will not last the winter,” Tamsin said, quite kindly, and she picked up the kid and the buckets and went back down toward the pens, telling the kid in full sentences that the wall was a very good wall and that nobody was going to hurt anybody on a morning like this.
Sella had come out of the bone-room behind him with the ledger under one arm and the look on her face that she wore when she had a number ready. She did not wait to be asked. “The Hard Hands will each need a bone set by autumn,” she said. “I have written it down. Ysra’s fourth rib, because she climbs with the bucket in one hand. Yours, Korrin, the left collarbone, because you lead with it. Gaunt’s wrist, which he has not told anyone about, because he is proud of it.”
“Gaunt has a wrist,” Korrin said.
“Gaunt has a wrist,” Sella agreed. “It will break in the autumn. I have put it down.”
Korrin looked at the ledger. It was open at a page of neat columns, each with a name and a bone and a date beside it, and the dates were all in the autumn, and the autumn was not far off. He did not like it. He said so, which was his habit, and then he waited for Sella to say something useful, which was Sella’s.
“Comfort,” said Sella, dry as a bone. “The break will knit straight if you do not climb the north tower on the day it aches. The diagnosis is that you will climb it. The comfort is that I will be there to set it. That is the order I always give things. The diagnosis first.”
“You always give the diagnosis first,” said Korrin.
“Somebody has to keep the score,” said Sella.
From the forge across the yard came the sound of a hammer missing its mark twice and then striking, hard, and then a voice, loud and wounded, rising over the ring of metal. Gaunt had come out of the forge with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and was standing in the doorway with the hammer still in his hand. He had heard the whole argument. Korrin could tell from the set of his jaw. He had heard the word faction and the word Hard and the word faction again, and he was not going to be quiet about any of it.
“I have never belonged to a faction,” he said, to the yard in general. “I am a smith. A smith belongs to the forge. The forge belongs to iron. Iron belongs to no faction. And I object to the name.”
“It is a good name,” said Korrin.
“It is a stupid name,” said Gaunt. “It is a name a Lessary clerk would give a set of hinges. Every part of it is wrong, Hard and Soft alike. The spelling of Tamsin’s goats is worse, since Tallow has written them with a double t as if they were Lessary goats, which they are not.”
“They are our goats,” said Pell.
“They are the Lessary Crown’s goats until somebody can prove otherwise,” Gaunt said, and then he stopped, because he had reached the end of his objection, and the end of his objection had brought him, without his moving his feet, across the yard and onto the cold stones at the foot of the wall, in the middle of the Hard column, next to Korrin.
He looked down at the stones. He looked at Korrin. He looked, last, at Pell, who was grinning into her barley.
“I have not moved,” Gaunt said.
“No,” said Korrin. “You have not.”
“I object to the wall,” said Gaunt. “I am standing on it.”
The first sun came over the marsh, and the smoke across the water went thin, and Korrin counted the Hands on the wall once more: four, on the stones, in the cold, not one of them willing to say where they had come from. Then he turned back to the north tower and went up it, with the bruise on his shoulder complaining every step, because there was a wall to walk and nobody else had yet thought to do it.