Ysra went down the Undercroft stair with the lamp in her left hand and her right hand flat on the wall, counting each step aloud, because the Undercroft was the one place in the Hold where she did not trust her own sleep. She had slept badly in every room she had ever been given. She had slept worst in the rooms with stairs, because a stair was a count that could be changed while nobody was looking, and she had been woken more than once by a step that was not where her feet had left it.
“One,” she said. The stone was dry under her palm. “Two.”
Tallow came behind her with the minute-book under his arm and his coat buttoned to the collar, and he breathed through his nose in the careful way of a man who has already begun composing the entry for this visit and is not yet sure of the first line. Tobin came last. He kept one hand on the wall, the way Ysra kept hers, and he said the number of each step a half-breath after she said it, so that every stair was counted twice and felt once. It was how he made sure a stair was real. She had never asked him where he had learned it. She assumed he had learned it on the fourth step, where he had been woken, and where he had apparently been counting ever since.
