Pell counted the Hold’s grain with Ysra, sack by sack, on the third morning of the blockade, and the count came to three hundred, which was sixty sacks short of what Tallow’s book had carried since the fair.
She did not believe it at first. She had been cooking for the Hold for longer than most of the Hands had been awake, and she knew to the handful how much flour went into a loaf of the Kitchen’s bread, and how much the Kitchen’s own salt-box held, and how many mouths the Hold had to feed in a day. But the book said three hundred and sixty, in Tallow’s neat round Ink, and the floor of the Lowgate granary said three hundred, in sacks, with their tops tied and their seals whole, and somewhere between the book and the floor the sixty had gone missing.
“The garrison’s summer draw,” said Ysra, who had her own book open on a barrel-top and was running her pencil down a column with the grim patience of a Watchwoman. “Nobody entered it. It went out in the spring, in the Lowgate carts, on the Crown’s own bread-ration, and the Chamber signed for it, but the Chamber did not sign for the book.”
