The smoke lay in the infirmary’s beams like a row of grey wires, and Teodor counted it, because counting was the thing he could still do when he could not manage the stairs.
He lay on the cot with his back against the bolster and his head tipped back so that he could see the roof. The window was a square of pale light high on the east wall, and the light came down through the room at a slant and found the smoke in the rafters. It was thin and grey and a little yellow, like old milk. It hung in lines between the beams, and where the light struck it the lines glowed faintly, and where it did not they went dark, so that the whole ceiling seemed to breathe.
He had counted forty-one lines.
He had counted them twice, and then once more, very slowly, with his finger pointing up from under the blanket, the way his tutor in Dovereach had taught him to count the columns of a ledger. Forty-one. It was the same as the doors. Ysra had told him the number of the doors on the first day, when she had carried him up the Hold’s stair for the first time and he had been too frightened to look at the steps. She had said it in her flat clear voice, very firm, as if the number were a rope she was handing him to hold. He had held on to it all through…
