Ysra did not expect to be read.
She had been sure of it since the first winter, when the Roll was a thing the Ink had only just begun to make and nobody yet knew what it would hold. A Watch was a trade. A trade was a line. But nobody could read a stair. You could read the wage a stair had cost and the reason it had been built, but a stair was a thing that was always being walked on by somebody else, and when it was done well, nobody remembered who had counted it. That was what she had thought, all through the sittings, standing at the wall by the Great Hall’s door with her book against her chest and her eyes going, every few breaths, to the lectern and the names.
The sitting that day was seventy. It began at the second bell, with the Hall fuller than usual because the Crown’s envoy had gone home and the lodgers had come up from the lanes to see what the Roll would do without a Crown in it. Tallow read the first name and the Mantle’s Writ fell on it. He read the second, and the third. The boards under Ysra’s feet took each one without a creak. She had counted them all. Forty-one by the candle-clock’s first turn, a fishwife, a fuller, two of the Lowgate cooper’s brothers who had argued about the wood until the Hall was tired of them. Forty-nine when the sun…
