Ysra counted the Crown’s post from the stake, because the stake was hers to count and nobody else on the causeway had the patience for it.
Four doors. She had counted them at dawn and again at the candle-clock, and they were four each time: the gate to the road, the kitchen door at the back, the door of the warden-captain’s room over the stable, and the narrow door of the tower, which had been bricked up to the height of a man’s shoulder, presumably by someone who had decided it was easier to climb than to open. One shutter, which belonged to the surveyor’s shed and was shut. The shed itself, with a locked door and a bar outside it and a small window, shuttered, that gave onto the marsh. And the tower, which was stone and had a stair up its outside wall with nine steps and one landing, where the wardens had set a signal lamp on an iron hook. Ysra had been told this by the Watchman who had walked out to the ford with the clerk. She had not needed telling. She had counted the steps herself through the glass of the stake’s lantern, twice, and got nine both times, and disliked the way the number sat in her head.
