The gate-foot was a mess of broken flags, and it had been a mess for so long that Idrin had stopped seeing it. He had walked across it a dozen times since the Writ. He had stood on it to look at the arch, and he had leaned on the gate-post with his good hand while he thought, and he had not once wondered why the flags round the post were heaved up and cracked in a neat half-circle, as if something under them had been trying to rise and had been held down.
He wondered now. He was standing at the gate-foot with a coil of rope over one shoulder, come to fetch a loose stone for the kitchen steps, and he noticed a stone in the middle of the paving that had lifted from its bed.
It was not much of a lift. A flag the size of a cartwheel had come up on one edge, a finger’s width, and then another finger’s width, and then it stopped and stood there, tilted, like a man who has begun to rise from a chair and is considering whether the effort is worth the trouble. Idrin stopped walking. He put his rope down. He watched.
The flag went on up. It rose on its edge until it was standing upright, a slab of pale grey limestone the height of a child, and then it turned, slowly and deliberately, on its lower corner, as a door turns on a hinge. It came round to face the arch. And beside it, where there had been nothing but cracked paving and weeds a moment before, a man was standing.
He was big in the shoulder and thick in the neck, with a mason’s forearms and a mason’s hands, the knuckles scarred white from years of stone. His coat had been a labourer’s coat, once, and had been mended so many times that it had become a patchwork of different greys. He had a short grey beard that had been cut with a knife, and a face that was not old, exactly, but looked as though it had been out in weather for a very long time and had grown used to it. He was looking at the stone. He had not yet looked at Idrin at all.
“One,” he said.
His voice was deep and slow and flat, the voice of a man who has spent his life telling a crew where to set the next block. He put one hand flat on the top of the standing stone, as if testing whether it would hold, and then he began to move his other hand along the flags of the gate-foot, one after another, touching each one lightly, and he counted. He did not stop. He did not glance round.
“Two. Three. Four. Five.”
“Are you the Hold’s mason?” Idrin asked.
The man went on counting. “Six. Seven.” He reached the edge of the half-circle of heaved paving, put his palm on a broken flag, and pressed. The flag rocked a little, then settled. “Eight. Nine.”
“I am Idrin Saelmar.”
“Ten,” said the man. “Eleven. Twelve.” He turned round at last, and his eyes went over Idrin’s face as a mason’s eyes go over a wall, looking for the place where the bond has failed. “Harrow,” he said. “Mason. That’s the trade, and that’s the name for it, and I’ll not say more than that until I’ve counted the stones. Twelve, you said?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.” Harrow crouched beside the upright slab and ran his thumb along its edge. “Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. How many stones are in this courtyard, would you say?”
It was not a question Idrin had prepared for. He thought about it for a moment, honestly, because the man had asked it honestly. “I haven’t counted them.”
“Four hundred and nine,” said Harrow.
“You’ve counted them already?”
“I’ve counted them as far as I could reach. I’ll count the rest once I’m stood on the lot.” He stood up, stiffly, one hand on the small of his back, and shook his head at the broken paving as though it had disappointed him personally. “The wall’s four hundred and twelve paces, I reckon. I heard you walk it. You were muttering.”
Idrin said nothing for a moment. Then he said, carefully, “The wall is four hundred and twelve paces round the inner ward. I measured it myself, with a Chancery cord, and I counted it twice.”
“Aye. That’s the wrong measure for stones.”
“Is it?”
“It’s the right measure for a wall,” said Harrow, as though the difference were obvious. “A wall you measure in paces, because a man walks it. A stone you measure in stones, because a stone’s the thing that’s there. Four hundred and nine stones in the yard. That’s a count. Four hundred and twelve paces round the wall is a walk. The one doesn’t tell you the other.” He looked at the upright slab. “This one’s standing wrong.”
“It was lying in a crack.”
“It was lying where it had been put. It doesn’t like standing.” Harrow walked round it, slowly, checking its bed with his boot. “Did you put it up?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t think anyone did,” said Idrin. “I think it put itself up. Like the gate. Like the doors.”
Harrow did not seem surprised. He nodded, once, the nod of a man who has been told the price of bread is up and is not much interested in the reasons. Then he looked up past the arch, toward the grey sky over the marsh, where the clouds had come in low and fat from the west.
“Will it rain?” Idrin asked, because it was the first thing he could think of to say, and because the cloud looked as though it would.
Harrow turned his head slowly and looked at him. There was no hostility in the look. There was a faint, dry, professional curiosity, the look a builder gives a client who has asked him whether the mortar will cure in the frost.
“Have you ever seen weather?” said Harrow.
“Of course I have seen weather.”
“Have you ever seen it do what it was going to do, when you looked at it?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“No,” said Harrow, and seemed content with that, and turned back to the stone.
Idrin picked up his coil of rope again, feeling foolish, and then felt the foolishness fade into something more interesting. It was the same thing he had felt in the gatehouse with Jory, a blankness where an answer should have been. He tried a different approach.
“Would you fix the gate-foot?” he asked. “The flags. If the Hold can give you what you need.”
“What do you need?”
“Nothing from the Hold,” said Idrin. “The Hold has four hundred sacks of grain, which it can’t eat, and a gate which it can’t open, and a Register which it doesn’t read. I need the gate-foot level, so the doors can seat.”
“Then I’ll level it,” said Harrow, “in exchange for a list.”
“A list of what?”
“Which stones you want to keep.” Harrow was already walking back toward the cracked half-circle, counting under his breath again. “Some of these I’d not put back. They’ve been wrong too long. Some of them are good stones that have lain in the wrong place, and they want lifting out and setting right. You tell me which you want to keep, and I’ll set them. The others I’ll make into a wall that doesn’t need counting twice.”
“Why does the wall need counting twice?”
“Because the last man who counted it got it wrong,” said Harrow, “and the one before him did too, and I’m tired of being counted by people who can’t count.” He stopped, and turned, and for the first time there was something in his face that was not dry. It was weariness, plain and old. “I’d like to be the one who counts them right. That’s all. I’ve been stood in this yard a long time with my hands in the dirt, and nobody’s asked me what I think of the stones.”
“What do you think of the stones?”
“I think four hundred and nine is a fair count,” said Harrow, “and I’d like to see it kept.”
He crouched by the gate-post and began lifting the broken flags, one at a time, counting each as he moved it, and Idrin stood by with the rope and did not know what to do with his hands. After a while he began to help, because the flags were heavy and Harrow was not going to ask him, and the two of them worked along the half-circle in silence for a quarter of an hour, lifting and setting and counting under their breath. The gate-foot came up level, slowly. Idrin felt the stone take each setting like a man’s shoulder easing under a load.
When the last flag was seated, Harrow stood up, dusted his palms on his thighs, and looked at Idrin with the quiet seriousness of a man who has asked the question he came to ask.
“Was it shut for a reason,” he said, “or only because a prince said so?”
Idrin opened his mouth. He thought of the Writ, the clear dry voice under the arch, the chain singing like a struck bell. He thought of the face in the grain of the oak, and of the word he had lost, and of the line on the board that said the Register did not say which thing had been taken. He tried to find the answer and found that he did not have it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Harrow nodded, once. “Then that’s an answer,” he said. “I’ll count it as one.”
He bent to the last flag, the one at the very edge of the gate-foot, where the cracked half-circle met the arch. It was the only stone he had not lifted. It sat flush with the others, and it was marked with a deep, uneven gouge across its top surface where something heavy had been dragged across it long ago. Harrow ran his thumb along the gouge and then, very carefully, slid his fingers beneath the edge of the stone and lifted.
It came up easily. Beneath it, in a shallow bed of grey sand, lay a second stone. It was smaller than the first and rougher, a flat river-slab no bigger than a bread board, and someone had cut into its face with a chisel. The letters were deep and worn, as though the stone had been turned over and over in the sand for a very long time, but they were still legible under the grit.
Harrow looked at the letters for a moment. His lips moved. He read the first letter aloud, quite softly, as a man reads the first line of a name on a grave he has been asked to dig.
“O,” said Harrow.
Then he closed his mouth, and put the slab back in its bed, and laid the great flag over it, and set his palm flat on the stone as if to keep it from waking. He did not say the rest of the name. He said, instead, in a voice that had gone very dry again, that he would not say the rest until it was wanted, and that a stone which had waited this long could wait a little longer, and that the wind was getting up.