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They lost the lower valley on a wet morning and it cost them four hundred and eleven people.
Sevrin got the count at noon and read it twice, because the first time he had read it as a hundred and eleven, and a hundred and eleven would have been a bad week.
He was standing on the outer wall with the paper in his fist and the smoke still going up off the terraces below when Ivet came along the parapet at a run to tell him the eastern signal post had gone dark.
She was nineteen and she had ink on her hands and she stopped four feet away because she had learned to stop four feet away.
"There's no answer off the east post since dawn."
"Then they're dead."
"Or the lamp's—"
"Ivet." Sevrin folded the paper. "They're dead. Take the post down. You're not going out there to check a lamp."
"Somebody has to—"
