The step behind the Kitchen was the coldest place in the Hold before matins, and Kessa sat on it every morning because it was the only place in the Hold where nobody asked her what she was thinking.
She held the bell in her palm. It was small enough to close her hand over, silver and worn smooth at the lip, with a wooden handle no longer than her thumb and a grey wool cord threaded through a hole in the handle’s end. On the lip, where a bell’s mouth would be most struck, somebody had stamped a knot. It was a loop with its tail drawn back under itself, and when she looked at it too long the loop seemed to tighten, as a rope does when it is taken up by a hand that knows what it is doing.
The Order had given it to her in the winter the Charter of Forms was made, some months after she had come to the Kitchen. A boy had brought it to the back gate in a sack of onions, wrapped in a rag, with no letter and no name. The rag had been a dark red, the colour of the Order’s robes in the Sallowmere market. Kessa had known what it was before she unwrapped it, the way one knows a debt by its weight. She had carried it since then in the seam of her apron, and then in her coat, and then, when the siege came, on…
