Wren walked the wall because the lodgers had been told that a lodger who would not learn the watch would be sent back to the marsh. The notice had been read out at the Lowgate well by a Watch corporal with a bad cold, and it had been read again by the cooper’s widow, who read better and put more feeling into the word marsh. Wren had listened to both readings with her arms folded. Then she had gone up the north steps the next morning before anybody asked her, which was the only way she had ever learned anything worth knowing.
She did not mind the wall. She had grown up in the reed-houses, where the ground was never quite the same ground twice, and a wall that stayed put for a hundred yards seemed to her a kind of miracle that the Hold had no business showing off. What she minded was being told what she would be sent back to. She had not been born in a Lessary book. She had not been born in a lodgers’ book either, and she did not intend to be the kind of person who thought a book could tell her what her own feet were for.
Ysra was waiting at the top of the north stair with her lantern unlit and her eyes already moving over the parapet. She was a thin, quick, sour woman who had slept, Wren thought, about four hours a night since the autumn, and who knew where every door in the Hold stood as a fisherman knew the bottom of a river. She did not say good morning. She said, “Twenty-two steps to the first tower. Count them with me.”
“I’ll count them myself, thanks.”
“Then count them aloud. It helps the wall.”
So they counted. Ysra called out each step on the stair in a flat, clipped voice, and Wren counted the watchmen’s boots on the parapet above them, the paces of the patrol, the number of arrow-slits on the north face, and the number of times Ysra looked back over her shoulder at the gatehouse. By the north tower they had a rhythm between them. Ysra’s numbers went up and Wren’s went down, and the two of them met somewhere near the middle, and that rhythm annoyed them both so much that neither would stop.
“You count like a marsh-woman,” Ysra said at the tower.
“You count like a door that’s worried about the draught,” said Wren. “I’d sooner be a marsh-woman. The marsh counts the living. Your doors only count themselves.”
Ysra considered this in silence, which Wren took as a point to herself.
Under the wall the lodgers’ village was building itself out of the thaw. Wren could see it from the parapet: the new huts along the bank, their roofs thatched in reed the way the marsh thatched its houses, and the cart-track worn into the mud, and the well Harrow had dug in the afternoon of the gate-hanging. There were twelve hearths lit along the bank, and there would be more by dusk. Somebody was singing down there, badly, to a baby. A cooper’s widow was trying to lift a roof-beam on her own, and her two boys were trying to help, and the beam was winning.
Wren went down the north steps without a word to Ysra. She had a good arm and a bad temper, and the beam did not need either of them to be gentle with it.
“Hold it at the middle,” she said to the widow, whose name was Hedda and whose hands were already raw. “No, the middle. You’re lifting the end, and the end’s the bit that wants to fall on you. Your boys take the weight. You take the knees. Good. Now walk.”
They walked. The beam lifted, and held, and went up into the frame of the hut with a groan of old wood. Hedda wiped her face with the back of her wrist and laughed, and then she looked at Wren’s arm, at the faint pattern on the inside of the wrist, the line of small bars and hooks that the marsh-women had cut into their girls’ skin in the days before the Chancery. Her mother’s mother had cut Wren’s, a thin mark no bigger than a thumbnail, and the old women called it a receipt because it showed what had been given and what had been owed.
“Is that Lessary writing?” Hedda asked.
“It’s the marsh’s,” said Wren. “It’s older than the Chancery’s ink. It says the family was counted once, in the reeds, by the people who could read reed-marks. That’s all it says. It’s not a charter. It doesn’t make me anybody’s subject.”
“It’s a Chancery word, love. A receipt.”
“Then the Chancery stole it,” said Wren, “the same as it steals everything else that’s worth looking at.”
She went back up the bank without waiting for thanks. The thing about the lodgers’ huts was that everyone thanked everyone for everything, and it was tiring, and Wren had never once in her life been good at being thanked. She preferred to be needed, which was a different thing and could be checked by the weight of a beam.
At noon she went to the gatehouse. She had been putting it off for three days, and she had decided that today was the day, because she had lifted a beam and did not feel any braver than she had before she lifted it. The door of the gatehouse was open. Idrin sat at the writing table inside, with the lamp unlit and the daylight coming in across the pages. He had ink on his fingers and a pile of sheets at his elbow, and he looked up when her shadow crossed the threshold, as a man looks up when he has been waiting for an interruption and is half-glad of it.
“Wren,” he said.
“I want you to read my name,” she said. “From the lodgers’ book. Not the one Tallow keeps for the Chamber’s minutes. The book with the lodgers in it. I want to hear you say it.”
He pulled the book across the table. It was a plain book with a cloth cover and a lot of crossings-out, and her name was on the page under the Writ’s date, in Tallow’s careful script and then, below it, in another hand that was not careful at all. He had written it himself, she thought, the night after the Writ was cast. The letters were uneven. The W leaned, and the n had been done twice.
Idrin looked at the name for some time. Then he opened his mouth to read it, and she watched his face try to do the thing he had told the Chamber he could no longer do. His mouth made the first sound. It made a soft w, the sound a kettle makes before it has boiled, and then it stopped. He stood there with his lips parted and his throat working. The muscles in his jaw went hard. Nothing came out after the w.
Wren was not kind about it. She had decided beforehand that she would not be, because kindness would have made it worse for him, and she did not think he had the stomach for it. “I can read,” she said. “I’ve always been able to read. You don’t need to say my name for me to know you’ve got it written down right.”
“It is written down,” said Idrin. His voice was very steady. It sounded like a voice that had decided to be steady before it started.
“The marsh doesn’t mind a man who writes what he can’t say,” said Wren. “It only minds if he writes it wrong. So write it right.”
He took the pen. He dipped it, and he wrote her name again, below the old line, in capitals this time, and the letters came out larger and straighter, the W standing upright on its own legs. He did not try to say it. He only looked at what he had written, and then at her, with the particular expression of a man who has learned something from a child and is not sure yet whether to be ashamed of it.
“Better,” said Wren. “That’s the one I’ll keep.”
“It is larger than the last.”
“Then it’s easier to see from the stair. Your Hold’s full of people who won’t look up from their paper, Warden. They’ll see mine, anyway.” She turned to leave, and then stopped at the door with her hand on the frame. “Tell the Lash the beam’s up in the cooper’s hut. He’ll want to object to it. He’s been waiting all week for a beam he could object to.”
She went back down the lane to the huts, because the beam was up and she had said she would help lift the roof-boards that afternoon, and because the thing about being needed was that it did not care whether you had been thanked.
It was not until she was halfway across the Lowgate lane that she saw the rider. He came from the north, out along the Lessary Road in the thin noon light, a single man in a grey cloak with a satchel slung across his back. The satchel was bound with cord in a way Wren knew, the way the reed-houses bound their tally-sheets when they were carrying something that could not get wet. He rode past the ford without slowing. He did not glance at the gate, the wall, the huts, or the marsh. He looked straight ahead, as if the Hold were nothing but a road sign that had been put up in the wrong place, and he did not stop until the road was lost behind the first rise.
Ysra was on the north tower. Wren could see her, a small dark shape with one hand held up against the glare, watching the same road. Ysra did not wave. She did not need to. She had seen the rider too, and had already begun, very likely, to count the rider’s horse.