Wren carried the Warden’s letter down the Lantern Ford road in the cold before the dawn, with the frost still white on the verges and her breath going up in small grey clouds in front of her face.
It was not a heavy thing to carry. It was a single folded sheet, sealed in the plain brown wax that the Hold used for its own letters, which had no crown on it and no Chancery mark, only a small square stamp that Tallow had cut himself from a piece of old oak. She had it inside her coat, against her ribs, where she could feel the corner of it when she breathed. She did not need to feel it to know it was there. She had been carrying the Hold’s letters since the spring, and she knew how each one sat in the body, as a marsh-woman knows the weight of a basket of eels. This one was lighter than the others. It had only a few lines on it, and the Warden had written them slowly, and then Tallow had read them over and asked him to keep them plain, and he had.
She was Lodger One. It was a title the Hold had given her in its own book, in the Ink, the first lodger the Hold had ever written down, and it meant that she was a living person who stayed inside the walls without a Dwelling of her own. It meant she kept a separate ledger…
