Ysra carried the lamp. She had not been asked to. She had come down the receiving-hall’s back stair at the lord’s heels without a word, with the Mouth’s leave in her pocket and her tally-cord round her wrist, and when the Chamberlain’s narrow door had swung open under Vale’s hand she had walked straight through it and taken the iron lantern from its hook on the wall. The stair was hers. She had counted it every night since the siege. Nobody else was going to tell the lord how many steps there were.
“Nine,” said Ysra, at the top, and started down.
Vale followed her, a pace behind, with his hand on the wall. The stone was cold and damp, and the smell that came up from below was the Undercroft’s smell: wet mortar, old iron, the sweetish breath of a cellar that had been sealed for centuries and was only lately breathing again. Ysra’s lamp swung on its ring, and the shadows of the steps swung with it, and Vale’s breath came short and loud in the narrow space, as though he had been running.
“Eight,” said Ysra, and stepped down.
On the fourth stair she stopped.
She did not stop because she was tired. She stopped because the fourth stair had a crack along its outer edge, a thin dark line in the old grey stone, and because she had never once stepped on the fourth stair without stopping there first. Her foot hovered above it. She set…
