Mireille laid the Quiet Census on the Chamber table at the candle-clock, and the Hands looked at it as they would have looked at a body on a bier. Nobody had asked them to. They simply went quiet, one after another, down the length of the oak, until the only sound in the Great Hall was the hiss of the wick and the faint, regular tick of the water-clock in the corner, which Tallow had set going on the first day of the Hold and which no one had ever thought to stop.
Idrin sat at the head. He had been there since before the bell, and his coat was still buttoned, and he had not eaten. He watched his sister’s hands on the grey board. They were perfectly steady. She set the ledger down with the spine toward the Chamber, opened its cover, and turned the first leaf, and then she stepped back to the wall by the door and folded her arms, so that the book stood alone on the oak with the whole Hold looking at it.
“Four hundred leaves,” said Gaunt, at once. “I object. Nobody can read four hundred leaves aloud in a morning. It is not a reading. It is a punishment.”
“Three hundred and eighty-eight,” said Harrow, in a whisper, to his cord. He had counted the leaves from the back while the book lay open on the table, with his lips moving and his cord in his fist, and he had got the number to the leaf. “Three hundred and eighty-eight, Gaunt. Two fewer than you have objected to.”
“Three hundred and eighty-six,” said Tallow, who had been counting too, with a clerk’s frown. “I make it three hundred and eighty-eight. With a margin of two either way, which is the same leaf twice, because the Lessary clerks liked to stitch in a blank page at the foot of every tenth sheet and then forget it.”
“Then let the Smith object to the blank pages,” said Korrin. He had both hands flat on the table, and his knuckles were white. “Let him object to the stitching. I’ll read the granary leaves, and the rest can be shot.”
“You will not shoot anything, Korrin,” said Idrin, very quietly, and the Lash, to everyone’s surprise, sat back and was quiet for three breaths. It was a record, Tallow would later write in the margin. He had never once seen Korrin hold his tongue for longer than the length of an order.
Then Mireille began to read.
She did not stand up to do it. She sat at the table’s end, at Idrin’s left, with the ledger turned toward her and her hand flat on the page, and she read the names in the even, level Lessaran voice she used for sums. Her voice did not rise. It did not drop. It went through each village in the order the clerks had struck it, one after another, giving the headman’s name, the number of hearths, the grain in its last recorded measure, and then the stroke, and then the word that the clerk had written at the foot of every line, which she read in exactly the same tone as the rest.
“Carrow Wick,” she read. “Headman, Edrin Lowe. Hearths, nineteen. Grain, forty measures. Loss.” She turned the leaf. “Saltmarsh Cross. Headman’s widow, Ann Carrick.” It was the first time that name had been said in the Hold, and Pell, at the Mouth, looked up sharply. “Hearths, twenty-two. Grain, fifty-one measures. Loss.”
The Hands listened. They listened the way they had listened to nothing else in the Hold’s life: not to the voice, which was perfectly ordinary, nor to the figures, which were perfectly dull, but to the names, one after another, each one standing alone on the oak for an instant before the next one came. Harrow counted them. He did not count aloud. His lips moved and his fingers touched the knots on his cord, one for each village, and his face, which was usually as blank as a well-cut stone, had gone the colour of old ash.
Mireille read on. She read fourteen villages. She read twenty. Her voice did not change when the names were the names of children, and it did not change when a village had only a single hearth standing in it, or when the clerk had written loss beside a grain figure that was larger than the tithe. She read as a woman reads a sentence aloud to a court that has already decided the verdict, and that wants at least to hear the words.
When she reached the marsh-towns, the room changed.
Idrin felt it before he saw it. It was the same feeling he had had when the Hunt-Wardens’ bolts went into the reeds, a shift in the air, a stillness that had weight to it. Pell put both hands flat on the oak. Korrin’s jaw worked. Gaunt, who had not objected to anything for almost a quarter of an hour, stared at the table as if he had only just noticed what he had been objecting to all along. Tamsin looked toward the window with her eyes wet. Sella raised her head from the bone-ledger, which she had not done since the Chamber sat down, and she looked at her sister’s ledger as a bonesetter looks at a limb that has been broken in an old and badly set fracture.
“Hollin Reach,” said Mireille. “Headman, the reeve’s cousin, Matthias Dun. Hearths, thirty-four. Grain, sixty-three measures, which was entered as tithe owed and then, in another ink, as loss to the Crown’s store. Loss.”
She turned the leaf.
“Sallowfen,” she said. “Headman, Ormond Crake. Hearths, twenty-nine.”
She did not read the grain. She stopped, with her finger under the line, and the Great Hall was silent for a moment, so that Idrin could hear the water-clock in the corner, and the wick, and the faint creak of the timber in the walls that the body had made in the dark for two hundred years.
Wren stood up at the far end of the table.
She stood very straight, with her hands hanging loose at her sides, and the Hands turned their heads toward her as if they had been waiting for her to do it. She did not turn to Idrin. She did not turn to the Chamber. She looked at the ledger, and at the name on the page, and her face had none of the fear Idrin had seen on it at the causeway, only a kind of plain, hard attention, as if she had come to a river and meant to cross it.
“By the Chamber’s leave,” she said. “One reading. No standing.”
“Granted,” said Idrin, and heard his own voice from some distance away. “By voices.”
The Chamber gave its voices without a word. Pell, Harrow, Ysra, Korrin, Gaunt, Tamsin, Sella and Tallow: eight yeses, down the length of the oak, in silence, which was the only sort of vote the marsh had ever trusted. Then Wren began to speak.
She did not speak in Lessaran. She spoke in the marsh manner, with the vowels stretched long and the consonants struck hard, as her mother and her mother’s mother had spoken across the reeds to lost children. The names came out of her one at a time, each name a single note, each note carried out over the water in the old way. She said the name of the headman of Carrow Wick, and then the name of his wife, and then the name of each child in the village whose name was in the clerks’ book, and then the names of the children who were not, whom she had got from the Lowgate huts, from the cooper’s widow, from Bardo Kell’s cousins who had walked up the bank that morning to hear her. She said the names of the Sallowfen girl and her brother and her cousin, one after another, and she said them slowly, so that each one would have time to be heard.
She said all forty villages. She said the names of the dead that the clerks had not thought worth counting, and when she came to the end of a village she paused and did not go on until the room had caught up with her. It took a long time. Nobody left the Hall.
When she had finished she sat down. Her face was wet, and she did not wipe it.
Nobody spoke. The water-clock ticked in the corner.
Then Idrin saw the hangings on the Great Hall’s east wall move, very slightly, not in any draught that he could feel. They were the old grey weft, woven from the first shearings of the Hold’s flocks two hundred years before, and they had hung there so long that nobody looked at them any more. Now the weft in them went still, as a face does when someone it knows has been spoken of at a grave. It did not sigh. It did not speak. It only stopped, and stayed stopped, and Idrin, who had heard the body’s voice only in the walls and the stone, understood that it had been listening too.
Mireille turned to the last leaf of the ledger. She put her finger under her own initials, the small upright letters she had written under the Census total, and she held it there, saying nothing.
“I am the only name on this page that is in my own hand,” she said at last, to the Chamber, in the same level voice she had used for the sums. “The clerk wrote the rest. I initialled the total. I did not read the names aloud. I have read them now.”
The Chamber did not vote. It had nothing to vote on. It had only heard.
Idrin looked down the table at the faces of the Hands. He saw Tallow writing, very slowly, in the minutes of the Chamber, and saw that the pen was not steady. He saw Harrow’s lips still moving over the knots, and Gaunt with his big hands clenched on the oak and his head down, and Sella’s pale face, and Pell, who had put her cap back on her head with a jerk that meant she was crying and would deny it. He saw Korrin looking at the wall, and Ysra looking at the door, and Tamsin looking at nothing at all, her hand on the cheek of the nanny goat she had brought into the Hall without anybody noticing.
Then he looked at Wren, who had not got up from her seat, and who was watching the ledger with the flat hard face of somebody who had carried a heavy load up a bank and would not put it down until she was sure it was in the right hands.
On the bench by the door, where she had been since the reading began, the Hold’s auditor opened the ledger’s last leaf again and looked at the margin beside the Sallowfen line, where a small row of characters had been set down in her own ink. Tallow, who had come to stand at her shoulder, bent to look at them and then straightened very slowly, as though something had struck him in the chest.
“The last character,” he said, in a voice that was barely a voice at all. “It is the same as the number of the leaf.”