The lease expired at midnight, and nobody in the Hold noticed it happen, except for Tallow, who had been waiting for it since the first winter.
He sat at the Register table in the gatehouse with the Ink in its well and the lamp at his elbow and the Roll’s last leaf closed beside him, and he listened to the Hold go about its last hour of the year. The Kitchen’s ovens ticked as they cooled. A Lowgate child was singing somewhere below the wall, a thin bright song with no words in it that anyone could remember, and a dog barked once, twice, and then went quiet. Harrow’s footsteps went along the north wall, counting, one step to a stone, and stopped at the third course from the gate, and went on again. Up in the Hall, the Chamber was asleep, or pretending to be, in the chairs it had sat in all evening. He could hear Pell’s breathing from the Kitchen passage, slow and regular, and Ysra’s, from the stair-head, quicker, and Gaunt’s, very loud, and once, through two floors and a wall, the soft steady murmur of the Mound at her rest.
The candle-clock’s brass hand moved toward the twelve.
