Ysra was counting the Hollowed fires when the Sovereign came up the north stair, and the count, when he reached the top, was thirty-six.
She did not turn round. She knew his step by now. It was not the step of a man who had been born to climb stairs, because the Lessaran princes did not climb anything they could be carried up, but it was the step of a man who had learned on the Hold’s own stone and had decided to be good at it. He stopped beside her on the parapet and put his good hand on the cold coping, and did not say anything for a while, and that was the first thing she noticed. He had always said something. Even in the worst of the Seal’s winter he had spoken, in the flat, precise voice he kept for the Chamber, as if the Hold could not be trusted to know what a man was thinking unless he said it for the record.
“Thirty-six,” said Ysra, to the fires.
“Thirty-six,” said Idrin.
She had counted the Hollowed fires every night since the march halted at the arch. In the first week she had counted them every hour and woken herself from a half-sleep to be sure of the figure, and she had come to hate the sound of her own voice saying the number. She did not do that now. She had learned that a count checked too often began to count the counter, and that…
