Ysra counted the gate-tower stair at dusk, because she always did. There were thirty-one steps from the wall-walk down to the river-gate arch, and the fourteenth was worn lower in the middle than the others, where a hundred years of the Watch had stepped on it in the same place. She knew each of the thirty-one by its weight under her boot. She knew the chip in the twelfth, and the mortar crack that ran across the twenty-second like a seam in a boot. She counted them down with the lantern in one hand and the other hand resting on the cold wall, and when she came to the fourteenth she stopped.
There was a packet propped against the wall on that step.
It had not been left by any Hand of the Hold. She knew that before she touched it, because she had counted the Hands’ boots on the stair for a year, and the Hands did not leave things where they could be stepped on. It was a folded oblong of heavy paper, sealed in dark blue wax, with a lily stamped into the wax so sharply that the petals showed as ridges under the lantern. Ysra held the lantern closer. The lily had five petals. The Lessaran Chancery used six, for its own reasons, and had done so since before the Hold had any walls to protect.
