Ossane had the Assembly’s pen and the Assembly’s book, and she had been using them for thirty years in every district of the four kingdoms that had ever wished to be counted. She knew how a clerk’s hand changed when he was frightened, and how it changed when he was bored, and how it changed when he was in love with a figure and did not wish anyone to see. She had learned all of this at the age of nineteen, in a damp office above a tannery in Sallowmere, with a ruler in her left hand and a rule-book in her right, and she had never once since then been surprised by a page.
She was surprised by the scale-tickets.
They lay in a shallow tin tray at the end of her table, and there were two hundred and eleven of them, one for every weighing the Assembly’s clerk had made at the scale since the fair opened. Each was a small square of pale card, stamped at the top with the Assembly’s arms, and each had a weight written in the clerk’s own column and a name written beneath it in the clerk’s own hand. But the names were not the clerk’s. The clerk’s capitals were round and cramped and tended to lean backward, like a man reluctant to enter a room. The names on the tickets were upright, perfect, pedantic and entirely without flourish, each letter set down like a stone on a wall that had been…
