The Hollowed built their wall one hide at a time, and Ysra counted every one of them from the Watch-tower’s top step.
She had a glass for it, a brass-rimmed Dovereach glass that Quill’s clerk had left behind on the causeway the week the stay was read, and she had a tally-cord with a knot for every fifty. She had her back against the tower’s cold stone and her feet braced on the step, which was the only way to hold the glass steady in a wind that came off the marsh with the smell of rot in it. She did not need to look down at the cliff to know where the wall was going. She could hear it. Every hide that came up the rock made a slap against the stone, and every slap was followed by the small hard tap of an iron stake being driven through the hide’s edge into the cliff’s face, and the taps were a rhythm, and the rhythm had a count.
Two hundred and six. Two hundred and seven.
The Hollowed were good at this. That was the thing she could not forgive them. They had been raised on hides in the Hasp valley, and they had come up the cliff road with the hides rolled on their backs like the carcasses of very large, very patient animals, and now they were pinning those hides to the cliff in a long row, overlapping, each one lapped over the next as a roof…
