Ysra counted the doors of the Hold for the last time before the gate-hand was closed, and when she had finished the count she counted them again, because the number had changed.
There were forty-one. They were the same forty-one that had stood in the Hold since the Charter of Assent, the same oak leaves and iron-banded hatches and narrow low doorways that let the cold up from the Undercroft. She knew them by their hinges. She knew the squeal of the Kitchen’s back door and the sigh of the Gatehouse’s inner leaf and the stiff knock of the Mason’s loft, which had a bad latch that Harrow would not let anyone fix because he said it told him who was coming in. She knew them all. Forty-one.
But the Watch-stair had a new step.
She found it at the foot of the stair under the Hall’s arch, in the grey light before the first bell. It was wet. It was heavy and dark, and when she set her boot on it the whole stair gave a small groan, as though the tread had been set without its wedge. She crouched and put her palm on the wood. It was oak. Not the Hold’s ordinary oak, the old grey planking from the Mason’s yard, but a close-grained, red-brown wood that smelled faintly of river and iron and a cold that was not the Hold’s own.
