Wren’s cousin had come up the marsh from Sallowfen in the night, in a flat boat with a bad leak, poled by a man who would not give his name and who went straight back down the channel as soon as he had handed her ashore. She was called Ottilie. She was a long-boned, quick-handed girl with the marsh in her vowels and a strip of reed-paper folded small inside her shirt, and she had walked the last mile from the landing with the paper pressed against her breastbone as though it might be taken from her at the gate.
She gave it to Wren in the lodgers’ lane, in front of the cooper’s hut, and Wren read it standing up. Idrin, coming down from the wall, saw her read it. She did not move her lips. She went motionless, as a reed goes still before the wind comes over it, and then she turned the strip of paper over and read the back, and then she folded it again and held it out, not to Ottilie, but to him.
“These are the living,” said Wren. “From Sallowfen. The ones who got out before the riders came, and the ones who came back after, and the ones who have been in the reeds since the autumn and have only now found the nerve to be counted. Forty-one names. Forty-one people who can still be asked where they were born.”
