The Chamber sat in the Great Hall the next morning to decide where the auditor should sleep, and Tallow minuted it, because he was the only Hand who could write a sentence about a bed without making it sound like an apology. He had a clean board, a fresh bottle of ink, and a sheet of the Charter of Shares folded at the page he would need. He had not slept much. He had spent the night in the gatehouse with the lamp turned low and the lodgers’ book open beside the Register’s copy, trying to find a column for a sister, and there was no column for a sister anywhere in the book.
“There is no line for a sister,” he told the Chamber, before anyone had asked him to tell it anything. “I have looked. The lodgers’ book has a column for name, a column for household, a column for the day of entry, and a column for the Writ, which is blank for anyone who has not been brought in under one. It has no column for relations. The Hold has never needed one. It has only ever had lodgers, and lodgers have never once had families.”
“Then rule one,” said Pell, from the Mouth. She sat with her big hands folded on the board and her cap pinned down over her ears against the draught from the door. “I’ll put her in the dry room over the bakehouse, and you can put the column wherever you like, and to hell with the column.”
“That is not a decision, Pell. It is a bread-hall.”
“It’s a room with a stove in it, Tallow, and I’m the one who lights the stove.”
Gaunt stood up at once. He objected to a Lessaran in the Hold on principle, he said, and to the bakehouse on the grounds that it was warmer than his forge and he had not been offered it. He said that the Hold had let in one marsh girl already, which was a mistake, and that letting in a second Lessaran was a mistake of the kind that nobody ever recovered from, because it was always the same mistake, made by the same kind of people, in the same warm room. Then he sat down again, slightly out of breath, and looked as if he had enjoyed it very much.
“Does it rain in Sallowmere?” asked Harrow, to nobody.
The Chamber took this as a no, as it generally did when Harrow asked a question about the sky. Tallow wrote it down as Harrow’s no, which was his private code for the Mason’s silences, and which he had never once shown to anybody.
Ysra stood at the back of the Hall with her shoulder against the door-frame and her eyes on the stair. “I don’t want a stranger counting my doors,” she said.
“You’ll not be asked to count her doors, Ysra,” said Pell.
“Everybody counts doors when a stranger comes into the Hold,” said Ysra. “It is the first thing a stranger does. I don’t want to be the one who has to stop her.”
Idrin, at the head of the table, said nothing. He had his hands flat on the oak and his face was tired, and he looked from one Hand to the next as though he were counting them himself. Tallow saw the look, and made a note of it. It was the look the Warden had worn in the stores room on the morning of the silver, when he had been asked to say a number and had given a guess instead.
“Master Tallow,” said Idrin at last. “Read us what the Chamber may settle by voices.”
Tallow unfolded the sheet of the Charter of Shares. He did not need it; he had memorised the clause in the first winter, out of shame at how often the Chamber had argued about what it was allowed to argue about. He read it anyway, because the reading was the procedure, and because it made the Hands sit up when they heard their own rules spoken in their own clerk’s voice.
“The Chamber may settle by voices any matter of common keeping within the reach of the Hold, including the bread, the stores, the stone, the beds and the lodgers’ hours, but not any matter of instrument, which requires Assent, and not any matter touching a name, which requires the name’s own consent.” He lowered the sheet. “A bed is on the list. The list does not say that a vote costs anything. It does not say that the Writ of Lodging is required. It says the Chamber may settle the beds.”
“Then settle it,” said Gaunt.
“By voices,” said Idrin.
They gave them. Pell said yes with a flat hand on the board. Harrow said yes, and then said that the bakehouse roof would hold through the thaw, which was a yes in the Mason’s dialect and was entered as one. Korrin said yes as though he had been asked to spit. Sella said yes without looking up from the bone-ledger, and added that the dry room had a bad draught from the north, and that a Lessaran with a cough would be better off over the stables, which was not a vote but was minuted anyway. Gaunt said he objected, and that he would vote for it, and Tallow wrote both. Tamsin said yes to the goats, who were not present and had not been consulted, and Idrin said yes last, and his voice was perfectly steady.
“The auditor sleeps over the bakehouse,” said Tallow, and wrote it. “By the Chamber’s voices. No instrument and no memory.”
He went down to the bakehouse afterward with the lodgers’ book under his arm. The room over the ovens was warm and smelled of new bread and old wood, and Mireille was standing at the little window with her satchel on the chair beside her and her cloak off, looking out at the lodgers’ huts with the expression she had worn at the landing, which Tallow had come to think of as her accounting face. She turned when he came in. She did not smile, but she inclined her head, as a Lessaran lady acknowledged a clerk she had decided was worth the trouble.
“You are the one who writes the lodgers’ names,” she said.
“I am the one who writes everything, Lady,” said Tallow, “but yes.”
“Then write mine.” She came to the table and held out her hand for the book. He gave it to her. She took the pen from his fingers without asking, and wrote in the column for name, in a small upright hand, Mirelle Ash. Then, after a pause that seemed to Tallow to last a full breath, she wrote in the column for household Saelmar, by her own account, and set the pen down.
He looked at what she had written. He had written the same thing himself, in a different book, the night before, in a sentence he had been unable to make sound right. Her version was shorter. It was better.
“Lodger by the Chamber’s leave,” he said. “I shall add that in the margin.”
“Add what you like,” said Mireille. “It will still be true.”
She turned the pages of the book with one finger, slowly, until she reached the Hold’s own sums: the stores, the silver, the bread for the lodgers’ children, the tallies of the Kitchen and the Mason’s count. She ran her finger down a column of figures. Tallow watched her face, which did not move, and then her finger stopped. She tapped the page with the nail of her forefinger, twice.
“There is a carry wrong here,” she said. “Two places down from the Lowgate sum. You have carried a ten where it should be a nine. It’s a small mistake. It doesn’t change the total.”
“It changes the total,” said Tallow, and he was stung. “I had it at a range of two.”
“Then it was a range of two in the wrong direction, and the Mason was kind enough not to point it out.” She looked at him directly for the first time, and her expression softened by a degree. “You are not a bad clerk, Master Tallow. You are a clerk who has been left alone with a book too long. It makes everyone’s sums a little crooked.”
He thanked her, which surprised him. Then he thanked her again, which surprised him more, and she laughed, once, quietly, as if he had given her something she had not expected to be given in the Hold.
“You should ask Ossane about my brother’s Writ,” she said, when he had corrected the carry with a neat stroke and a note in the margin. “Not Idrin. He will not tell you the truth about it, because he does not know it. The Writ that took his name is a thing he cannot see. Ossane keeps accounts of everything, including her own discomfort. She will tell you what was written in the Chamber’s minutes, and she will tell you what they left out.”
“I have already asked her.”
Mireille’s eyebrows lifted very slightly. “Then you are ahead of me, Master Tallow, and I am not used to that.”
She went to the window again, and Tallow stood at the table with the book in front of him, and for a while neither of them spoke. Outside, the lodgers’ children were running down the bank with a loaf between them, and a woman was calling a name across the water. The bread in the oven below was beginning to smell of burning at one edge, and Pell’s voice came up through the boards, cursing it in four languages.
“Where is the Register kept?” asked Mireille, without turning round. “I have been wondering since the landing. Is it in the gatehouse box, or down in the Undercroft, with the stone?”
“The box is empty,” said Tallow. “And the Register is not a thing one asks about in the same breath as one’s sums.”
“That is a very Lessaran answer.”
“It is a very clerk’s answer,” said Tallow, and went back down the stair to tell the Warden about the carry.