Ysra had not slept properly since the fair began, and she had not expected to. A Watch-woman who sleeps badly in the Hold is a woman who has counted the stairs of her own house in the dark and got a different number each time, and Ysra had done that for two hundred years, in one form or another, and had never once minded. But at the toll-house she had begun to dream of steps. Not stairs in general, but a particular run of them going down behind a wall, and a particular number, which she could never quite hold in her mind when she woke, though she knew it was wrong.
On the seventh morning she went looking for the number.
The toll-house stair was the Assembly’s stair. It ran up from the yard to the upper room where the toll-clerk kept his slate, and it ran down behind the scale-room into the cellar, and the Assembly’s plan of the building showed both. The plan was a good plan. It had been drawn in a fine clean hand, in Chancery Ink, and it had been pinned to the scale-room’s door with four brass tacks, and anyone who wished to know the house could look at it and see how it was made. Ysra had looked at it on the first morning. She had counted the rooms and the windows and the stair up from the yard, which was twelve steps and a landing, and she had counted the lower…
