On the night watch Ysra counted the doors. She did it every night, from the river gate along the inner wall to the Gatehouse steps and then up the inner stair to the Great Hall’s arch, and she did it in the same order each time, so that the order itself was a kind of sentry. Nineteen doors. Fourteen steps on the gate-tower stair. Twenty-two paces of wall-walk between the watch-lamp and the north turret, where the stone was cold through her boots and the mortar had been repointed by Harrow in the spring with a grey that never quite matched the old.
She was at the nineteenth door when she saw the stranger.
He was in the Gatehouse yard, under the lamp, counting the same doors. He had a notched stick in one hand, a short grey stick of the kind carters used for tallies, and he was touching each door-frame with its point and making a small mark in the wood as he went. He wore a long grey greatcoat buttoned to the throat and a hat with its brim pulled low, and he was not a lodger, and no Hand had let him in. Ysra knew that without asking. She had been counting the Hold’s gates since the first winter, and she had never once seen a man come through them who had not been let in by somebody.
