Tallow wrote the Register line himself, in the Ink, at the gatehouse board, under the first line of the Hold.
The board hung on the inside wall of the gatehouse, beside the arch, where every cart and carter and Lessaran clerk who had ever come through the gate had been obliged to stop and look at it. It was a plain oak panel the width of a man’s outstretched arms, black with age and smoke, and it was the oldest written thing in Ormhold. The first line on it was in a Foundation hand that Tallow had learned to read in his first winter, and it said, in the old dry grammar of the Hold’s founding: Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing. Under it, in the same hand, was a struck name, scratched through so thoroughly that only a clerk who knew where to look could still find the letters beneath the scoring. Sabeth Corre. Under that, the Ink.
He had written under the Ink for a whole season, one entry at a time. It was the only place in the Hold where his hand had ever been plain enough to be trusted by everybody who read it, and he had thought, the first morning he came to the board with the Register open on his arm, that nothing in his life had ever been so exactly where it belonged.
