The first snow of the year came down on Lowgate in the middle of the night, and Ysra knew it was snowing before she saw it, because the bell-rope in the watch-tower stopped swinging in the draught and hung straight, the way it did only when the air outside had gone thick and still. She had been awake since the third bell. She was always awake. She had long ago stopped expecting to sleep through a night, and she had stopped being sorry about it.
She went out onto the wall-walk with her lamp shuttered and her boots soft on the stone. The snow had settled on the merlons in a thin white line, the kind that would not last past the thaw but would hide every scratch on the parapet until the morning. She put her gloved hand on the nearest merlon and felt it give nothing back. Below her the Hold was dark, the roofs of the goat-lane furred white, the Kitchen chimney breathing a single thread of smoke that the wind laid flat along the yard.
She counted the gate-stair. Forty-four steps from the wall-walk to the postern, as they had been since the Hold was built, and every one of them was where it belonged. She counted the four doors between the tower and the Kitchen yard, and they were shut, and their bars were in their brackets, and the bars were cold in the way bars were cold when no one had lifted them since…
