Ysra counted the causeway before she counted anything else, because the causeway was the part of the Hold that would change first.
At the toll-house, in the grey before the bells, there were eleven tents where yesterday there had been none. They were salt-grey canvas, pegged in a tidy row with the guy-ropes drawn to the same pitch, and the cook-fires beneath them had not yet been lit. A pole stood beside the largest tent with a banner on it. Someone had straightened the banner in the night and had done it well, so that the blue and white of the seven salt-cities hung as flat as a ruled line. Ysra counted the forty-one steps from the wall-walk down to the arch. She counted the men at the causeway’s end, who were twelve, and then a thirteenth, who carried the chain. She wrote the numbers on her slate in the Watch’s shorthand, four strokes and a bar for each group, and she did not go back to bed, because there was nothing to be gained by it.
“Thirteen,” she said to Harrow, who was crouched by the wicket with his palm flat on the gate’s oak.
“Thirteen,” Harrow agreed. He had counted something of his own while she was counting. “Forty-two arch stones and the crown stone over them. The wind is in the north-east, which is the wrong side for a flag.”
