The Hollowed had camped apart from the Lessaran road since the march halted at the arch, and every night since then Idrin had counted their fires from the north wall. He did it because Ysra counted them, and because he could not sleep, and because he would rather be useful at a bad hour than lie in the dark with the pale mark on his shoulder and feel it spread. The mark had reached the top of his arm now. It had a cold line to it, like a seam of frost under the skin, and when he pressed his thumb against it the flesh did not answer him.
Tonight there were forty fires on the Caul road where there had been sixty a few nights ago. He counted them from the wall’s top, where the stone was cold enough to make his teeth ache, and he counted them twice, because the first count had come out with a figure that did not agree with his own memory of it. The fires were small and low and spread along the road’s edge in no order that a Lessaran marshal would have drawn. Some burned very bright. Some were only embers under a grey shawl of ash. Between them figures moved, slowly, without the purpose of a camp at work, and Idrin had decided some nights ago that they were not sentries but people, and had found that this made the counting harder.
