The Chamber was gathering in the Great Hall for the Edict, and Ysra went down to the Undercroft first to see the stair, because she always did before a sitting. A Watch who did not glance at the steps before the Hold came down them had already decided not to notice what was on them.
The Undercroft was dark. The brazier had been banked for the night, and its red had dulled to a low grey glow under the bricks, and the lamps along the wall had been turned down to a single flame each. The Keystone’s warmth lay across the flags like a rug that had been laid by somebody who knew the house and did not want to be thanked for it. Ysra stood at the stair-head with her hand on the rail, and she did not go down. She listened.
The counting came up through the stone.
She knew the rhythm now. She had known it for a month. It was the falls of a small body on a stone step, the pause at nine, the start again at one, and the faint small breath between the numbers that Ysra had learned to hear the way she heard the wind change on the north wall in the night. She had counted with it so many times that the figures had stopped being a sound. They had become a tally she could read without looking at her slate, a long pale column in her head that she had…
