Harrow counted the arch of the Great Hall’s open doorway before he counted anything else in the morning.
There were fourteen stones on each side, and a keystone at the top, and the keystone was the one he had set himself in the third year of the Hold, with a wedge of river-oak under its left shoulder because the mortar had been poor. He had set the wedge in the dark. He had been very proud of it at the time, and then very annoyed with himself, because a wedge is a thing a builder adds when he has not trusted his own work, and he had never once in two hundred years admitted to a wedge. He counted the fourteen stones on the left, and then the fourteen on the right, and then the keystone, and then the wedge, which was not in the arch at all but in his head, where he kept it.
Thirty-one. The arch was sound.
He stood in the open arch with the morning on his back and the sky over the Hold grey and low, the colour of wet slate, and the marsh’s damp came up off the causeway in a fog that made the fallen timber of the ram look like the bones of something that had been left out for the crows. He would not look at the timber. He looked at the arch. He had the Mason’s habit of standing in a doorway as a man stands in front of…
