Ysra counted the Hollowed in the cistern water the way she counted everything, one at a time and in the order they could hurt her, and by the time she had finished she had made three mistakes and corrected all of them.
The first mistake was the culvert’s mouth. She had counted eleven there, standing shoulder to shoulder in the black water with their hands held out palm up, motionless, like a row of cut reeds leaning toward a light. She had counted them twice. The second count had also been eleven. Then she had looked again, very carefully, at the eleventh, and seen that the reed nearest the arch had a hood pulled low over a face that was the wrong height, and that the hands were not palm up but turned a little inward, as if to hide something held between them.
She had counted it as a twelfth. Then she had decided that she had made a mistake, and had counted it back to eleven, and felt sick at her own certainty.
The second mistake was the walk. Four of them sat there with their hoods down, their knees drawn up and their backs to the cistern wall, the way Watch-men sit when they have been told to rest and do not trust the order. They were not moving. Ysra had watched them for an hour without seeing one shift a limb. She had counted four and kept counting four, until she realised that the one at…
