Ysra counted the torches from the Watch-tower’s top gallery, where the wind came off the marsh in long cold pushes and carried the smell of standing water up the stone like a rumour that had got into the wrong room.
Seven at the foot of the tower. She counted them from the gallery’s north rail, one by one, from the first at the tower’s base where the cliff path met the wall, to the seventh, which was a long way out along the outer ditch and burned low in its iron cup. They were Dovereach torches, or Corvanne, or Lessaran; she could not tell which, since the flames were all the same colour in the dark, but she could tell where they were, and that was what she was there to report.
Three more on the cliff path. These moved. Ysra counted them at the start of their walk and again at its end, and they had gone twelve paces south along the path’s lip, very slowly, as a man walks when he is carrying something heavy and does not want to drop it. They did not stop. They did not raise their heads.
Then the awning.
It was canvas, rigged on four poles at the wall-foot under the tower’s east shoulder, where the ditch was dry and the old masonry had a crack the Mason had patched twice. Under the canvas, in the lantern-light that leaked from its edges, were the sappers. Ysra counted them by their hands. She…
