Kessa wrote her letter in the scullery, after the pans were dry, on a sheet of the Kitchen’s own paper that she had taken from the drawer beneath Pell’s slate. She had asked nobody. Pell did not keep paper under lock. Pell kept the bread in the oven and the salt in the crock and the goats’ milk on the step, and she had no use for anything that could not be eaten, or used to wrap a loaf, or lit to start a fire.
Kessa did not mind that. She had grown up with people who kept things for the purpose of keeping them, and she had learned, early, that the Kitchen was a different country. Its laws were simpler. Its debts were paid in bread. There was no one here who would wish to read a letter for its meaning, only for the spelling, and Kessa had never been a bad speller.
She wrote in the grey ink the Order had sent her in the spring, which was thin and very slow and did not blot. She wrote in a small, clear hand. She had been taught that a closed letter was a kind of prayer, and that a prayer should be as plain as the thing it asked for.
