Osk walked the lodgers’ wall-walk above Lowgate at dusk because the headman’s watch fell to him on the eve of the feast, and because the lodgers had asked him to, and because he did not sleep either. He had stopped expecting to sleep some time in the autumn, when the Lowgate children began to wake in the night and ask whether the grey people on the road could hear them breathing. He had not known what to tell them. He had said the grey people were far away, and then he had gone out onto the wall-walk and looked, and had seen that they were not so far as he had hoped.
The wall-walk above Lowgate was a narrow path of flagstones along the old outer rampart, with a parapet on the left that came up to a man’s hip and a drop on the right into the lodgers’ gardens. The gardens were brown in the frost. The cabbage stalks stood up in their rows like the bones of a small army, and the well-cover at the garden’s end had been chained shut against the cold. Osk walked past the chain and the well and the stalks, counting the lodgers’ doors under him as he went, because Ysra had taught him to, and because counting a door kept his hands from shaking on the parapet.
