The north wall of the Survey House went up in the heat of high summer, and Ysra took the night watch on the ridge’s shoulder because she was the only Hand who could count a wall in the dark.
She had not always been able to bear a wall at night. In her first season, when she woke on the night wall with the Hold’s gate still broken below her, she had stood in the dark for hours without counting, because a Hand who is only just awake does not yet know what its counts are for. Sella had told her later that the counting was a habit with symptoms. Ysra had decided that the symptom was the thing she could least afford to lose.
She did not mind the dark now. The dark was honest about what it was hiding, which was more than could be said for the Crown’s paper or the Crown’s wardens. On the ridge at night there was no lantern but the one on the stake, and the lodgers had long since gone down to Lowgate with their pails and their children and their songs, and the only sounds were the marsh frogs in the reeds below and the slow knock of the mallet that Harrow had left leaning against the first pile. Ysra walked the wall’s length with her hand on the stone. She counted the courses as she went. There were eleven at the east corner and nine at the west, because the…
