Harrow sat on the bottom step of the Undercroft stair and counted the stones in the cellar wall.
He counted them the old way, under his breath, in the rhythm his hands had learned on the first scaffold in the Mason’s Yard, when the Foundation’s masons had still been living men and women working beside him in the dust. One, and two, and three, and the mortar between them, and a pause for the mortar. He had never once counted a wall without the pause. A stone that was set without its bed of mortar was a stone that would move in the first hard winter, and a mason who did not stop for the mortar would have to be told it, and then would be sorry.
He was a citizen. He had not been a citizen for long. He sat on the step as one, and not as a Hand, because the Chamber had decided that the Reading of Sella should be read where her bones were kept, and the Chamber had also decided, after a long argument at the Great Hall’s table that Gaunt had objected to from beginning to end, that a builder who had walked was entitled to sit in the room where the work had been done. Harrow had walked at the spring’s end. He had not yet got used to sitting still.
