Lady Ossane Tiller was a woman of perhaps fifty, with a grey braid pinned up at the nape of her neck and a face that had been handsome once and had since become something more useful. She wore a plain travelling coat of dark green wool, with no jewel at the throat and no badge on the shoulder. Her gloves were brown leather, and she took them off before she came down onto the causeway’s stones, and folded them into one palm, and did not put out the other hand when Idrin reached the foot of the steps to meet her.
It was a courtesy. He understood that at once. A woman who did not offer her hand to a Warden was a woman who did not intend to be thanked for anything, and who wished him to know it.
“Warden,” she said. Her voice was low and even and carried without any effort, the voice of a person who had never needed to raise it in a court, because the court had always come quiet to hear her. “You have had a fortnight of letters from me, and I have had a fortnight of silence back. I am glad we are both out in the air. Lessary’s courts are very stuffy in summer and the Hold, I see, is not.”
“The Hold is autumn,” said Idrin.
“So it is,” said Ossane. “Then the Hold has made a better job of it than the Crown has.”
Behind her, at the edge of the reach-stone’s shadow, her two clerks stood with their hats in their hands and their heads bowed, waiting. The men-at-arms had dismounted at last, and they stood in a loose rank at the causeway’s end with their horses’ reins over their arms, not looking at the Hold’s wall. Beyond them, across the river, the marsh-men had come out from the reeds. Idrin could see their pole-boats drawn up along the far bank, and the men standing in the shallows with their poles grounded, and a little apart from them, a single figure in a patched brown coat who was Bardo Kell. Bardo did not move. He was watching Ossane as a man watches a dog that has not yet decided whether to bite.
Ossane took a folded paper from her coat. It was tied with a grey ribbon. She untied it with a single pull and held it in both hands, and then she began to read. She did not read loudly. She read as a clerk reads an inventory, slowly, with a pause after each name, so that the names would have room to be heard.
“The Quiet Census of the Lamentine marsh,” she said. “Taken by the Chancery’s order of two winters back, under the Crown’s seal, and entered in the rolls of the Assembly as a clearance of unentered ground. Forty villages, struck from the Lessary roll. Each village is listed with its count of souls. The souls were moved from the Crown’s register of subjects to its register of property, in a single morning, by a single order, and they were never afterward entered as subjects of anything.”
Idrin said nothing. He felt the cold of the causeway come up through his boots.
“Ferrow,” read Ossane. “Count, one hundred and six.”
Harrow, who had come down from the wall and stood at the reach-stone with his hands behind his back, took the name with a small, hard nod. He did not say the number. He said the name, quietly, to the stone under his palm, and his other hand moved very slightly, as though he were setting a block into a course.
“Lantern Moss,” read Ossane. “Count, forty-two.”
“Lantern Moss,” said Harrow.
“Coldmarsh. Count, two hundred and eleven.”
Across the river, one of the marsh-men in the shallows lifted his pole, very slowly, and struck the water once with its end. The sound came over the causeway clear and flat, a single hard knock, like a stone set on another stone. Then another man, further along the bank, did the same. Then another. By the time Ossane had read the name of Coldmarsh, a line of poles had risen and fallen along the far bank, each one striking the water once, and the marsh-men were standing with their heads bowed over their grounded poles as if they were at a burial.
“Why did the Crown strike the names?” said Idrin.
He had not meant to ask it so bluntly. But he had been raised in the Lessary court, and he had been taught to ask questions in the form of a statement, so that the answer would have to come back as an admission, and the question had come out of him without the form.
Ossane looked up from the paper. Her eyes were grey, like his own. He had not noticed that before.
“Because the Crown’s bookkeeping required it,” she said.
“The bookkeeping,” said Idrin, “has taken forty villages out of a kingdom.”
“The kingdom,” said Ossane, with great gentleness, “has never needed them to be in it. That is what a kingdom is for, Warden. It is a set of people whose names are required by the Crown, and the Crown will always require the same number of names, in the same rolls, year after year, until the rolls balance. The marsh did not balance. The Crown cannot keep a book with forty villages in it that will not add up. So the villages were moved out of the book. The souls are property. The Crown’s law is very clear about what is property and what is not, and I have never yet found a court that thought the question was difficult.”
“Is it difficult for the souls?” asked Idrin.
Ossane looked at him for a moment with her head slightly on one side. “Yes,” she said. “I expect it is. I have not been asked to count that.”
She turned back to the paper. Her voice did not change. She read the next village, and the next, and each one had its name and its count and its pause. Stonebank. The Hollow. Two villages Idrin had never heard of, which had been named in the Crown’s rolls by a clerk who had not known how to spell them, and whose names Ossane pronounced correctly anyway, with great care, as if she were reading the names of dead people at a graveside. Harrow took every one. He said each name back to the reach-stone in a low, steady murmur, and each time he said it, the marsh-men struck the water once with their poles, so that the causeway seemed to be keeping time with his voice.
“Forty,” said Harrow, when Ossane closed the paper. “There are forty names. I have counted them. The river has counted them. The marsh has counted them too, and they agree.”
“They always agree,” said Ossane, “when they are counted by the people who lost them.”
She folded the paper. She retied the grey ribbon with two precise knots and put it back inside her coat, and then she took off her other glove, very slowly, and looked at the bare hand for a moment as if it belonged to someone else. Idrin saw that the hand was not steady. It was a small tremor, almost nothing, but it was there, and she saw him see it, and did not hide it.
“I have never read those names aloud before,” she said. “In the Crown’s own hearing, I mean. It was always done by a clerk, with his back to the marsh, so that the marsh could not see his face. I thought I should do it properly, once, with my own voice, before I go back and tell Sallowmere that I have done it.”
“Why did you come to do it at all?” asked Idrin.
“Because the Crown wants the Hold to know what it is,” said Ossane, “and because I wanted to see whether the Hold would count the names back. It has. That is a thing I did not expect, and I shall write it in my report, and the Chancellor will not like it, and I will not be sorry.”
She turned to look at the wall. It rose above the reach-stone, grey and square, its north face catching the low sun. The new courses shone pale against the old.
“Lessary keeps its books in two ledgers,” she said. “Did you know that, Warden? The first is the ledger of the rolls, which the Chancery keeps and everybody knows about. The second is the ledger of the audit, which checks the first. It has to, or the rolls would lie. The second ledger is kept by a princess of the blood, who has been given the task of finding every name the Crown has struck and asking, very politely, whether they were struck correctly.” She paused. “She has been asking for a long time. Her name is in the audit’s own book, in the margin, very small. I have seen it. I should not like to say it aloud in front of the marsh.”
Idrin heard the word princess go past him like a cold draught through an open door. He did not move. But he felt the Seal on his breast, under the wool, tighten, the way a healing wound tightens over a bone that has been set too quickly. It was not painful. It was simply there, pressing, as if someone had put a hand flat on his chest to hold him still.
“Which princess?” he said, very quietly.
Ossane did not answer. She only looked at him, with her grey eyes and her ungloved hand, and said, after a long moment, “I think you know, Warden. You have the same way of counting that she does.”