The Lessaran clerk came to the grain store on a grey afternoon with a measuring rod under one arm, a purse in his other hand, and a ledger on a strap across his chest that thumped against his ribs every time he took a step. He had the look of a man who had been told that the cook was difficult and had decided, before he set foot in the building, that he would be very polite about it.
Pell let him in. She stood in the doorway of the store with a ladle in her fist, because a woman with a ladle in her fist is harder to bargain with than a woman with her hands folded, and she waited for him to speak.
“Mistress Cook,” said Marle. “I am instructed to take the exact count of the Hold’s stores, to the sack, for the Chancery’s ledger. It is a formality.”
“Nothing is a formality in a grain store,” said Pell. “Ask the rats.”
He smiled, a little uncertainly, and opened his ledger on the top of a barrel. He had a pen in his hand already. Behind him in the cool dim light the sacks were stacked to the rafters in long grey rows, each one stencilled with the Kitchen’s mark, and the air smelled of dust and barley and the faint sour sweetness of grain that has been in the store since the winter and has begun, very slightly, to turn.
