Ysra went down the Undercroft stair with the lamp on a night she could not sleep, because she had been counting the Hold’s doors since the bell and she could not get the number to come out even.
It was ten days before midwinter. The Hold had gone quiet in the way it did before the longest night, when the lamps were lit early and the Kitchen fire was banked hard and the people in the lanes stayed indoors with their shutters closed. The wall-walk had been empty since the second bell. The Lessaran fires on the causeway had burned low and then gone out, one by one, and the marsh beyond the reeds had been dark for two nights, with no smoke in it and no sound but the water. She had written all of it down. She had written the count of the doors, which was forty-one, not forty-two as the Register said, because the Kitchen’s back door had been nailed shut in the autumn and nobody had thought to strike it from the Register. She had written the count of the Hands, which was eight, and then she had sat with the pen in her hand for a while, because a Hand had gone quiet that morning in the bone-room, and the Clerk had come up the stair with the news in his face, and there was no number in her tally for a seat that had gone empty for good.
