The Order of the Unsealed Door came up the Lowgate road in the middle of the afternoon, when the sacks were still being counted along the arch wall and the Lowgate children had been called in from the lanes to watch from their doorways. Ysra counted them from the wall-walk, as she counted everything that came up the Hold’s road. There were nine novices in grey, walking two by two in a double file, and at their head a tall woman in a grey cloak with the hood back and her grey hair drawn severely from her face.
Hester Venn walked with a small brass handbell in one hand. She did not ring it. She carried it at her side, as a Watch carries a lamp in a house where the sleepers are not yet awake, and the bell caught the thin winter light each time she moved, and threw a little spark of brass across the frost.
Ysra knew the sign on its side. It was the bell and the door, the clapper drawn as a short stroke, the door half open beneath it with a line of light across the sill. It was the same sign that had been pressed into the wax of the Mason’s crate in the Form-store, and she had written it in her tally three days before, with the question underneath it that she had not yet answered.
