Ysra counted the escort three times, because she had been taught by the Watch’s old captain that a count made once was a rumour and a count made twice was a guess, and only a count made three times was a fact that could be sent up the wall in a runner’s mouth.
She counted from the north ridge, where the Watch kept its glass on a stand of old timber under a tarpaulin that smelled of tar and wet sheep. The glass was brass, with a crack along one barrel, and it had been left to the Watch by a Lowgate pedlar who had come up the Lessary road selling spectacles and had not gone back down. Through it, the south road was a pale ribbon with dark specks on it, and the specks came up the ribbon one after another in the late light, like the letters of a sentence being written slowly by a hand that did not want to finish.
Fourteen spears, in salt-grey. She counted them as they came round the bend below the toll-house, and then again at the causeway, and then a third time at the foot of the Hold’s south slope, where the road turned to face the river gate and the spears bunched into a column. Fourteen. They wore the Dovereach wheat on their shoulders and carried their pikes at an angle that Ysra would have been ashamed to see on a Watch recruit.
