Ysra counted the Lessaran line up the Lessary Road at dawn, because the Chamber had asked her to, and because she had been counting that road every morning for three years and was not going to stop on the one morning it mattered.
The grey came up over the Caul ridge slowly, the way it did in midwinter, so that the first light did not so much break as seep. It showed the road first. The Lessary Road ran white and straight from the Hold’s gate down the long slope to the ford, and at its foot the Lessaran companies were coming up off the bank in column. Ysra counted them as they came. She counted with her lips moving and her slate open on the parapet beside her and the cold stone under her palms, and the numbers came out as the light did, one at a time, in order.
Six companies of fifty line-foot. Three hundred, and then three hundred more, and then a last small company of riders with a single banner at their head, the grey field and the black bar that the Crown’s marshals carried when they came to take a thing in the Crown’s name. Six carts behind the riders. Ysra counted the carts twice, because each one had a tarpaulin tied so tight over its load that she could see the ropes straining at the corners. Six carts. Six mules to each of the two front carts and four to each of the…
