Idrin heard his sister before he saw her. He was coming down the bank from the gate with his hands in his coat and the mud of the landing sucking at his boots, and he heard a level, precise voice correcting a figure under its breath, a single number at a time. It was the voice their mother had used at dinner when a steward had got the sums wrong. She had never raised it. She had only said the correct number, very softly, so that the steward alone could hear it and be shamed by it for the rest of his days.
He knew before he reached the foot of the bank who was speaking. He stopped on the planks for a moment and let the knowledge settle, as one lets a cold river settle before stepping into it. Then he went on.
The woman at the bottom of the landing had turned to face him. She was wearing a grey travelling cloak, mud to the knee, with the hood thrown back from a head of dark hair pinned up tight. There was a streak of grey at her left temple, which had not been there when he was nineteen, and she held her long hands at her sides with the fingers loose, as if she had come to the edge of a sum and did not yet know whether she would be asked to add it. She was twenty-seven. She had been twenty-six when he was sent away from Lessary, in a closed carriage, under a warrant with his name struck out of the Chancery’s own book. He had not thought, all those months, about what she looked like. He thought about it now and was shocked by how little he had needed to.
“Mireille,” he said.
“Do not make a fuss, Idrin.” She did not come forward. She did not put her arms out. She looked at him just as she had always looked at the accounts before she signed them, steadily and without warmth, and then something in her face gave a fraction, like a seam under strain. “Mirelle Ash is the name on my warrant of travel. I have found it extremely useful. Please use it in front of the Mason.”
“The Mason has heard the name already,” said Harrow, from the top of the landing. He had not moved from the cloth. He still had one finger out, tapping the air beside the buttons of her cloak, which he had counted and found to be the correct number. “I am glad to meet you, Mirelle Ash. You are one button short of a set. I shall not say which one.”
Mireille turned her head toward the Mason, and her mouth moved in something that was almost a smile and was gone before it could be finished.
“Thank you, Mason. I shall see about it.”
She looked back at her brother. Her eyes went over him slowly, from his boots to the collar of his coat and up to his face, and Idrin knew that she was seeing the things a stranger would see and a sister would not bother to hide from. The shadows under his eyes from a week of bad sleep. The ink on his thumb. The left hand, which he kept in his coat pocket, because the scar on it was still pink and tender in the cold.
“You have been ill,” she said.
“I have been a Warden.”
“That is a kind of illness. Our father had it. It is the one thing about him that Corvin did not inherit, and it is why Corvin cannot be trusted with a map.” She shifted the satchel on her shoulder. It was heavy; he could see the strain in the strap. “I have brought the ledger. It is in here. I have carried it from the Lessary Road under the saddle, and I have carried it through two inns and a wet ford, and I have not let it out of my sight since I left Sallowmere. I shall not put it down until somebody in this place tells me in plain words that they will read it.”
“Who has been asking you to put it down?”
“Everybody,” said Mireille. “Including you, in your head, the moment you saw my face.”
He did not deny it. He was ashamed to find that he could not.
They went up the bank together, slowly, with the Mason’s count following them up the steps. Idrin asked her about the road. She told him, in the flat tone she used for bad news, that the Silent Winter had made the Lessary Road into a line of ice and bad temper, that she had been asked for her papers at four barriers and had shown the warrant at each, and that at the third a man in the grey of the Hunt-Wardens had looked at her warrant at length and said he hoped she would not be disappointed in her welcome. She had asked him what he meant. He had said that he had been told to look for a grey cloak, and that he had found one.
“Did he take your name?”
“He took my horse’s bridle, which was more than he was entitled to,” said Mireille. “I took it back. He did not argue. He was too busy wondering what a Lessaran auditor was doing in a marsh with a satchel full of paper.”
At the top of the landing she stopped and looked round at the Hold: the new gate and its ash-and-oak bar, the lodgers’ huts with their smoke going up thin and grey into the still air, the wall, the gatehouse, the chapel tower and its silent bell. Her face did not change, but Idrin saw her hand tighten on the strap.
“There are children,” she said.
“There are forty-one of them, at the last count.”
“Forty-one.” She let the number sit. Then she looked at him. “I have a room in mind, if the Hold will give one. I should prefer a room that does not have a column in the lodgers’ book with my brother’s name in it. Can the Hold do that?”
He thought about the Writ of Lodging. It was the instrument that would put her on the Hold’s roll, under the Hold’s law, with the Hold’s memory taken at the Hold’s cost. He could see the clause in his mind, every word of it, and the small blank space under it where the Register said One taken and did not say which. He could see the ink. He could feel, very faintly, the place in him where the Writ had been cast before, the place that had been emptied by the last instrument he had signed for a stranger. He was not going to pay a memory for his sister. He would not.
“The Chamber will decide,” he said.
It came out in the Warden’s voice. He heard it as it left his mouth, and so did she.
“Will it,” said Mireille. “By voices, I suppose. As Corvin would decide, if he had the grace to be honest about it. A show of hands in a room full of people who have never been asked what they think.”
“By voices. The Chamber does not vote on lodging with a Writ. It has not been asked to.” He took a breath. “There is no memory in a vote, Mireille. I cannot give you a memory that I do not have to spare.”
“No,” said his sister, and her voice dropped, so that for the first time she sounded less like an auditor and more like the girl who had sat across from him at the long table in Lessary and told him exactly which of the servants was stealing the candles. “No, you cannot. And I did not come here to ask you for one. I came to see whether you were still capable of saying by voices in front of me without looking as if you wished you could pull the words back into your mouth.”
“And are you satisfied?”
“I am disappointed,” said Mireille, “and so, I think, are you. That is the first honest thing either of us has said since the Writ.”
She turned away from him toward the gatehouse, where Tallow had come to the door with his board and was watching them with the mild, absorbed attention of a clerk who has been waiting all afternoon for something that could be written down.
“Tallow,” said Mireille. “You will want to know what is in the satchel.”
“I shall want to know what it says,” said Tallow, “which is a different thing.”
“It says what the pages say. That is the whole of my reading, and I have had a long time to make it.” She set the satchel down at last, on the step of the gatehouse, and undid its clasp, and took out a thick book bound in grey board and tied with cord. She did not open it. She put one hand flat on its cover. “The Quiet Census,” she said. “Forty villages. The last leaf has my name on it, in my own hand, as the auditor who initialled the total. The Chancery’s clerk wrote everything else. Corvin’s name is on every page of it, in the Chancery’s ink, as the King who ordered the strike. Mine is the only name in the margin that I wrote myself.”
“And you want the Hold to read it.”
“I want the Hold to hear it,” said Mireille. “There is a difference. A ledger is only paper until somebody says the numbers aloud, and then it is a list of the people who were lost. I shall lay it on the Chamber’s table in the morning. You may be there when I do, Idrin. You may stand at the back, if you like, and watch your sister count.”
She picked the satchel up again, and walked up the step, and went into the gatehouse without waiting for him to answer. Idrin stood on the cold stone with the ledger’s weight still in his mind, and heard the Mason, behind him at the landing, begin to count the knots on his cord again, one at a time, very slowly, as if he had decided that this day would need all of them.