Harrow counted the pivot-stones at the river gate’s north socket with his hand on the first of them, and he counted aloud, since counting in the head was a thing he could not trust.
“One,” he said. The stone was squared and grey and fitted into the Hold’s old sill with a lead pin that had been poured warm by someone who knew what he was doing. “Two. Three.”
There were twelve in all. He had counted them every morning for a season, since the gate’s pivot had been cut loose in the Crossing, and he had found each one sound. Tonight the third stone was not sound. He ran his thumb along it, from the socket’s lip to the sill’s edge, and felt the crack under the skin before he saw it: a fine line, the thickness of a hair, running down the stone’s face like a vein under a wrist. It had come from the frost. He could tell by the shape. A blow would have split the stone across its middle. The frost had worked from the inside out, the way water does when it finds a crack too small to see, and had split the stone’s heart in the dark, one night at a time.
