The room over the bakehouse was warm from the ovens below, and Mireille had put her boots up on the rail of the bed as though she had been sleeping in bakehouses all her life. Idrin had never seen her do anything so careless. At Lessary she had folded her gloves before she sat down and corrected the footmen’s chalk on the slate. Now she lay back against the pillows with her stockinged feet crossed at the ankle and a cup of Pell’s tea balanced on her stomach, and she looked at the ceiling beams as though she were counting them.
He sat on the stool by the door, because it was the only seat in the room that did not have her papers on it.
“Tell me what Corvin has done,” he said.
She did not answer straight away. She drank some of the tea, made a face at it, and put the cup on the floor. Then she told him, in order, as an auditor would, starting from the first sum and not allowing herself to skip a column.
“In the autumn of last year, a Chancery commission rode into the Lamentine with a list and a writ,” she said. “The writ was signed by the King. The list was drawn up by the Chancellor’s clerks. The commission’s task was to strike the Lamentine’s towns from the Lessary Register, one by one, and to take their names off the tax-rolls and the grain-rolls and the rolls of the parish priests. In one season, forty villages were struck. Nobody in Lessary is going to count them again, because a village that is not in the Register has no subjects, and a village with no subjects has no one to be taxed, or fed, or protected from the men who come to measure it for a fire.” She paused, and her voice did not change. “The strike was called a census. The Chancery was very proud of the word. It means the counting of people. They counted them, Idrin, and then they took them off the books.”
“Eleven of the forty were marsh-towns.”
“Eleven,” said Mireille. “Yes. Bardo Kell told you the names, I expect. He would have. He is the sort of man who carries a dead village’s name in his coat like a coin he does not intend to spend.”
Idrin found that his hands had closed on his knees. He opened them.
“There was an order,” he said. “Before the strike. A Chancery order, with the King’s seal on it, to make the strike a clearance. I had the paper on my table in Lessary, in the autumn. It said to be cleared, and then it said the word the clerks use for a field that has been burned, and then it asked me to sign it under my own name, as the Saelmar who knew the eastern roads, because the marshes were under my brother’s commission and I was the only prince in the east who had ever ridden them.” He stopped. He had not thought about the paper in months. He had thought about it constantly. “I did not sign it.”
“No,” said Mireille. “I know you did not. I was in the room when they read it to you. You went the colour of tallow and you asked the clerk to read the word again, and then you asked him whether it was a census or a massacre, and the clerk said that there was a difference in the Chancery’s book, and you said that there was not.”
“Did I say that?”
“You said a great deal, and most of it was very good, and then Corvin came in and told you that you were a sentimental fool who had never once been asked to balance a budget, and you went out and got drunk on the Lessary wine and slept in the stables for two nights.” She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him, for the first time, with the expression of a sister who had been waiting for some years to say something unkind and found she did not want to. “You were very brave, Idrin. It was also extremely stupid. Both things are true, and I think you have never been able to forgive yourself for having only one of them.”
He sat with that for a while. The bread-smell came up through the boards, warm and yeasty, and somewhere beneath it Pell was singing a song about a miller’s daughter in a voice that did not care who heard it.
“Say the word, then,” said Mireille. “The one you held on to. You have been holding it since the summer, I expect, in that room with the goats and the stones and the gate. Say it.”
“Massacre,” said Idrin.
It came out quite steadily. He was surprised by that. He had expected his mouth to refuse it, the way it had refused his own name, but the word went out into the warm room and stayed there, and nothing in the stone of the Hold stirred to take it back.
“Yes,” said Mireille. “It is the word you refused to sign. It is the word our brother did not want on paper, so the clerks wrote a census instead. A census is a count, you see. A massacre is a count that has been checked afterward. The Chancery prefers a count.”
“You checked it.”
“I was the auditor. I was asked to check the total.” Her voice was dry and precise, and it did not waver at all, which was the thing about her that Idrin had always found most frightening. “The clerks gave me the strike-off at the end of the season, in a box, with the names and the figures and the marks where the villages had been. I was to initial the total, as the Keeper of the Second Ledger, and say that the sums were right. I did not know what the total was until I was asked to write my initials under it. I wrote them under the total. It was six thousand and some souls. I initialled them without reading the names aloud. I was twenty-six, and I thought that a sum was only a sum.”
“And now you have brought the ledger here.”
“Now I have brought it here.” She lifted her cup from the floor again and held it without drinking. “Because Corvin cannot audit a village that is not on the roll, Idrin. He cannot check a sum he has already struck. He cannot read a name that is not in his book. The only people in the realm who can read a struck name out loud in a court are the ones who were not struck. You were not struck. I am on the Chancellor’s list of auditors to be called to account, in his own hand, and I know what a name on that list becomes when the Chancery has finished with it. I am not sure yet what I am. I have no house in Lessary. I have no name in its roll. I have a ledger in a satchel and a brother who thinks I am still his to correct.”
“You are not his to correct.”
“I know,” said Mireille. “That is why I came. I did not come to be rescued. I came to be a witness. It is a different kind of trouble and it is much harder to do well.”
They were quiet for a time. The window was black, and the lamp on the table had burned down to a bead of yellow light, and Idrin could hear, through the stone, the faint and regular sound of the Hold breathing: the Kitchen’s ovens and the Watch’s boots on the north stair and the goats in the shed lowing softly to one another under their straw. He thought of the Keystone, down in the dark, with the long grey row of notches cut into its north face, which nobody in the Hold had ever troubled to count aloud. He thought of the child who had counted to nine on the stair, and stopped at four.
“Did you read the names?” he asked. “When you initialled the total.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Mireille looked at the ceiling beams. “Because I was afraid that if I read them, I would remember them,” she said. “And then I would have to do something about it, and I did not know what I was for. I think I am only now beginning to know. Give me a few more weeks and I shall tell you whether I have got the sum right.”
She reached for the satchel on the chair and pulled it toward her across the blanket. She did not open it. She took out a pen and a small bottle of ink, the Hold’s own ink, grey and thin in the cold, and she sat up against the pillows and drew the lamp closer. Then she opened the book at its last leaf and dipped the pen, and Idrin saw that she was writing in the margin beside the struck names, very small, in a script that resembled no Lessaran letter he had ever been taught.
“What is that?” he asked.
“A note.” She blotted the line with her sleeve. “For myself. In case I should forget the key.”
“What does it say?”
“It says the sums were right,” said Mireille, “and that I checked them myself. It is not the whole of the note. I shall not show you the rest until you are ready to be ashamed of it.”
She closed the ledger. She laid one hand flat on its grey board, as Pell had laid her hand on the drawer in the Kitchen, as if the book were a living thing that might get up and walk away in the night. Then she lay back down on the pillows with her boots still on the rail and shut her eyes, and her breathing evened out so fast that Idrin knew it was a performance, and that she was not asleep at all, and that she was listening to him not leave.
He got up from the stool and went to the door. At the threshold he stopped.
“Mireille.”
“Mm.”
“Thank you for saying the word.”
“Thank the ledger,” said his sister, without opening her eyes. “I only read it aloud.”