Ysra counted the lights along the Ruined Bridge road. There were four.
She counted them again, because four was a number that did not fit the Lessaran camp, which had been seven tents and a standard and a cart since the Crown’s envoy walked up the causeway in the first heat. Four lights meant four men with lanterns, or three men and a woman with a lamp she did not want seen. She wrote four in her book in the smallest hand she had, under the day’s count of the Hollowed’s fires, which had gone out a long time ago, and then she went on counting, because a Watch that stopped counting at the first wrong number was a Watch that had already been fooled.
Then the lights along the Lessary road beyond the bridge. Nine of those. Then the escort’s horses, which she could not see at all, but could hear, as they came up the wet stone of the ford road in a slow line. She knew horses by their hooves the way she knew stairs by their rise. These were tired horses, shod in Chancery iron, walking carefully on a surface that they did not trust. There were six of them. She wrote six, carefully, and underlined it.
