Mireille did not ask Wren to read the page. She laid the grey ledger open on the gatehouse table, turned it so that the lamp fell across the names, and then she stepped back and folded her hands in front of her and waited, as a woman waits who has decided that the other person must come to the thing by herself or not at all.
Wren stood at the table for a while before she bent over it. She had not been able to read a Lessary ledger since she was small. Her mother had taught her the marsh-marks on the reed-paper and the old word-signs for water and bread and the dead, and the Lessaran letters had come later, in a schoolroom with a cracked slate and a Chancery man who rapped the knuckles of anybody who spelled a name with a marsh accent. She could read them now. She had taught herself in the lodgers’ book, by the light of Idrin’s lamp, one letter at a time. It was slow work, and this page was the slowest she had ever read.
She found Sallowfen in the second column. It was easy to find, because the clerks had written the names of the villages larger than the rest, with a flourish under each one that somebody had not been paid to put there. Under the headman’s line there were rows of smaller names, most of them in the clerk’s neat hand, and one of them in a different hand altogether. It was a child’s hand. The letters were made slowly and carefully, each one held in a fist, and each one leaned a little toward the next. The name was a girl’s. Wren read it with her lips moving and then did not say it aloud. Beside it, in the clerk’s hand, there was a stroke and the word loss.
Her mother had been born in Sallowfen. She had married up the Sallow to the reed-houses before Wren was thought of, and she had never gone back, because the Sallow was a long river and the village had a bad name for its cattle-tax. Wren had never met the headman’s family. She had heard of them as a child hears of a cousin across the water: a story about a girl who could out-swim the pike, a cart that had gone through the ice, a feud over a bridge that nobody remembered the cause of anymore. She did not need to have met them. The name was in front of her, in a child’s hand, with a stroke through the end of it.
She put her finger on the girl’s name and kept it there.
Nobody in the gatehouse spoke. Mireille did not move. Idrin, standing by the window with his back to the light, did not move either, and Wren was aware of him as she was aware of a stone in her shoe: a discomfort that she would have to deal with sooner or later and could not yet think how to. She kept her eyes off him. She looked at the name, and the name looked back at her with the careful, leaning, unhurried patience of a child who has been told to write her name and has done it, and is waiting to see whether anybody will check.
“When a house is lost,” said Wren at last, very quietly, “the marsh does a thing. The people who are left go down to the water at dusk and say the names over it. All of them, the children too, the ones who never got a Writ and never got a tally. You stand in the reeds and you say the names out loud, one after the other, so the river can hear them. Then you go home and put a pot on, because you have to eat.”
“I know the custom,” said Mireille. “Bardo has told the Chamber.”
“Bardo tells the Chamber everything. He sells it to them.” Wren took her finger off the page. The mark it had left in the grey dust of the ledger was small and clear and would be there for as long as the book lasted. “Nobody in Lessary has ever done that for Sallowfen. Nobody in Lessary has ever learned the custom, because the custom was never written down in a Chancery book, and the Chancery does not read anything it has not first struck.”
“Yes.”
“Would this Hold read the names out loud?” Wren asked. “All forty? In the Chamber, at the table, where everybody can hear?”
Mireille was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was as dry and exact as ever, but there was something under it now that Wren had not expected. “That is what the table is for,” she said. “It is the only thing the table has ever been for. It was made in a Hold where people wanted to be heard, and the men who sat at it forgot that after the first winter. But the table does not forget the furniture. It remembers what was put on it.”
“Then they should read them.”
“The Chamber is a Hold of Hands,” said Mireille. “It has never once been asked to read anything aloud. It votes. It minutes. It agrees with Tallow when he is right and disagrees with Gaunt when he is wrong, and it has not, in my knowledge, ever stood up and said a name in front of its own table. I do not know whether it can.”
“Then it’s time it did,” said Wren. “If the Chamber won’t say the Lessary names, I’ll say them in the marsh way, standing at the end of the table with the door open, and let them hear it that way. I don’t need a voice vote. I’ve got a voice.”
“Wren,” said Idrin, from the window.
She turned round. He had not moved from the light. His face was tired and very carefully still, and she saw him take a breath before he spoke, as if the breath were the first thing he had been able to take all morning without someone else’s permission.
“It is a Lessaran table,” he said. “And a Lessaran ledger. The commission will be here in a few weeks, and the Chancellor will want to know who read the names and by what authority. I cannot give you the authority of a Writ. I have already spent the Hold’s memory on one.”
“I’m not asking for a Writ, Warden. I’m asking for the names.”
“Then you shall have them,” said Idrin, very quietly, “by voices, at the table, in the morning. I shall ask the Chamber to allow one reading. One. By the Chamber’s leave, and no standing for the speaker, and no instrument. Will that do?”
Wren thought about it. She did not like the terms. She had never once in her life liked terms, and she disliked them even more when they came from a man who had just failed, in front of her, to say his own name. But he had given her the names, in a voice that had come out of its own accord, and that was something the Chancery had never once given the marsh.
“It’ll do,” she said. “For one reading. And then I’ll be the one who counts.”
She went out before anybody could say anything else. Down the gatehouse stair and across the court and out through the lodgers’ gate, where the Watch let her through without a word, because the Watch had learned by now not to stop a marsh-woman who had a particular face on. She went down the bank in the cold dusk. The river was running high and brown, carrying the last ice of the thaw in slabs that turned slowly against the reed-banks. She stood at the water’s edge for some time, looking at the place where the Sallow bent round the foot of the Hold, and she did not say anything at all.
Then she went back up the bank to the huts. The cooper’s widow, Hedda, had a fire going in the doorway of the hut with the new roof, and two of her boys were sitting by it eating barley out of a shared bowl. Hedda looked up as Wren came in, saw her face, and put down the ladle without a word.
“Is it the Chancery?” Hedda asked.
“It’s Sallowfen.”
Hedda did not know the village. Her husband had come from the upper river, and she had never once crossed to the far bank in her life. But she knew what a face looked like when it had been holding something for too long, and she made room on the bench without being asked.
Wren sat down. She took a stub of charcoal from the hearth, the kind the boys used to mark the wall-tallies, and she turned her left hand over on her knee so the palm was up. Then she wrote on the back of her hand, slowly, in the marsh letters her mother had taught her, the name of a girl she had never met, who had written her own name on a page the Crown had struck out, in a hand that leaned forward as if it were trying to catch up.
She did not write the stroke. She did not write the word. She wrote only the name, so that she would not lose it.
“There,” said Hedda, watching. “Now it’s written down somewhere.”
“Not yet,” said Wren. “It’s only written on me.”
She put the charcoal down, and the boys went back to their barley, and outside the door the dusk came down over the marsh. Somewhere out beyond the reeds a boat’s lamp moved slowly along the channel, going nowhere in particular, and Wren watched it until it was gone, and then she held her hand palm-up on her knee in the firelight and kept saying the name under her breath, so that the river would have it if it ever asked.