Korrin walked the marsh shore at the Sallow’s mouth with the Warden at his side and the wind coming in off the water so hard it pushed the reeds flat in long grey bands, and he counted the boats before he counted anything else. There were nine of them drawn up on the mud, long and low and black with tar. Each had a sheet of reed-mat over its hull to keep the rain out, and a single pole lashed along its gunwale, and a flat wooden board at the prow with a mark cut into it. Korrin walked along the row with his bow across his back and his eyes on the marks.
“Nine,” he said.
“Nine,” said Idrin. He was looking at the boats too, with his hands in the pockets of his coat, and his face had the careful, puzzled look it wore when he was trying to see something from the outside. “They are very well made.”
“They are made to float on the wrong water,” said Korrin. “The Hold’s boats float on the Sallow. These float on the mud. You have to push them on the mud and then the mud lets you go, and the boat goes on the water and you are in it. That is a good idea, if you do not mind being wet all the time.”
“Do the marsh-men mind?”
“No,” said Korrin. “They like it. They are not very clever about dry things.”
He stopped at the fourth boat. The board at its prow was the size of a hand, and the mark on it was a notch. It was not a simple notch. It had a hook at its top, and a bar across its middle, and a tail that curled back on itself the way the notches on the Keystone curled. Korrin looked at it hard, and then he moved along the row to the fifth boat, and the sixth, and the seventh. Every board had the same mark. Every board had the same hook and the same bar, and some had two bars, and some had three.
“Why is every mark a notch?” he asked the Warden.
Idrin came to stand beside her. He looked at the board and then at the next one. He did not answer straight away. He had been a Lessary prince before he was anything else, and Korrin had watched him learn, over the summer, that the Lessary were a people who put a clause on everything, and then turned round and forgot what the clause was for.
“I do not know,” he said. “I have never seen a marsh-mark before the summer. Tallow would know.”
“Tallow would give a range,” said Korrin.
“Then I shall ask him for a figure.”
“Ask the marsh,” said Korrin, and turned to look out across the reeds.
Corran came out of them while she was looking.
He came slowly, wading through the shallows in a pair of cut-down trousers with the water to his knees, and he carried something in one hand that caught the light, and something in the other that he held close against his chest. He was a tall, brown, thin man, not so old as Bardo, with a scar across the back of his left forearm that had healed white and puckered. He stopped at the edge of the mud and looked at the Hold’s Warden and the Hold’s Lash with the flat, measured patience of a man who had been looking at Lessary soldiers all his life and did not expect anything from them that he could use.
“Bardo said you would come to the shore,” he said. “He said you would count the boats, and then you would ask why the marks are notches. I told him you would have to ask the marsh.”
“I was told the same thing,” said Korrin.
“Then we are all told the same thing,” said Corran, and waded out of the water, and came up the mud to them.
He held out the thing in his right hand. It was a salt-cake, pressed flat and round and grey, with a notch cut into its edge. He did not give it to Korrin. He gave it to the Warden. Then he stood before them both with the other hand still against his chest, and Korrin saw that he was holding something wrapped in a scrap of reed-mat, very carefully, the way Tamsin held a sick kid.
“Bardo has told you the marsh’s terms,” said Corran. “The dead are to be buried in the marsh. The stone is to be laid on their graves. The Hold does not touch them. Is that not so?”
“That is so,” said Idrin.
“Then it is done,” said Corran. “We buried them at the turn of the week, in the reeds beyond the sluice, where the water comes up through the roots and the ground is soft. We put them in the mud with their faces to the sky, and we did not count them, because the marsh does not count its dead. The marsh only remembers them.”
“How many?” asked Korrin.
Corran turned his head and looked at her steadily. He had a plain face, lined and tired, and his eyes were the same colour as the reeds. He did not seem angry. He seemed to be weighing the question against something he had already decided to tell them.
“Three,” he said. “My cousin’s three. Men who went out in the winter raid and did not come back. The cold had them in the reeds for a month before we found them. Bardo cut the notches on the boat-boards for them. You are looking at the marks now.” He lifted his chin toward the nearest prow. “Each of those marks is a man of the marsh who did not come back to the boat. Every boat on this shore carries the notches of its own dead. That is how we keep our tally.”
Idrin did not move. “Three,” he said.
“Three,” said Corran.
“Did the Hold count them?” asked Korrin, and his voice came out flatter than he meant it to.
Corran looked at her again. This time there was something in his face that was almost pity. “The Hold counted them once,” he said. “On the causeway. In the summer, when the Hold’s men came down to the stone-table to take Bardo’s terms, and your Clerk read out the count of the marsh’s losses from his book, and then the Hold went home. It counted them once, Lash. And then it forgot.”
The wind came in off the water. Korrin felt it cold against the back of his neck, and he kept his eyes on him.
Idrin had gone very still. Korrin saw him take his hand out of his coat pocket and put it, slowly, flat against his thigh, and he knew, without being told, that the scarred hand was trembling and that he did not want anybody to see it. He did not argue. He did not explain. He stood on the marsh’s mud with the salt-cake in his other hand and his face gone pale and set, and he took the rebuke the way a man takes a stone thrown from the wall: straight in the chest, without a sound.
“I shall write it down,” he said.
He did not say when. He turned his head toward the Hold’s wall, which stood grey and high above the reeds, and then looked back at Corran, and said, in a voice that was very quiet and very plain, “Thank you for telling me. I did not know the count had been forgotten. I should have known.”
“You were not made to know,” said Corran. “The Lessary taught you to count the wrong way.”
“Yes,” said Idrin. “I am beginning to see that.”
They went back up the shore together, the Warden and the Lash and the marsh-man, and Corran walked a little apart, with his bundle held against his chest. At the causeway’s foot, where the stones began, the Warden stopped, and took out the Register’s small minute-book, which he had carried in his coat all morning, and opened it on his knee, and began to write.
Korrin watched him over his shoulder. He wrote slowly. He crossed out the first sentence and wrote it again. He crossed out the second, and then sat with the pen above the page, his mouth working silently, as though he were trying to make the words come out in the Royal Forms and they would not go. Korrin watched him try Be it known, and watched him strike it through, and watched him try The Crown has been given the terms of the marsh. He struck that out too.
At last he wrote a single line, in plain letters, and blotted it, and turned the book round so that Korrin could read it.
Three men of the marsh, counted once and then forgotten, buried in the reeds as the terms require.
Tallow was waiting for them at the gatehouse. He read the line over the Warden’s shoulder with his pen behind his ear, and he did not give a figure. He read it twice, with the sort of attention he kept for a clause he had been expecting to dislike and found he could not fault.
“That is the first accurate minute the Warden has ever signed,” said Tallow.
Then he turned round, and saw the salt-cake in Idrin’s hand, and the notch on its edge, and the look on Corran’s face as he waited at the gate with the bundle still held close. “What is in the reed-mat?” he asked Corran, quite gently.
Corran unwrapped it. Inside there was a second salt-cake, smaller than the first, pressed grey and hard, and it had a notch cut into its edge, and under the notch a small, neat, circular mark that Korrin did not recognise.
“Every marsh child is given one of these,” said Corran, “for the drowned. We give them to the children when they can hold a knife, and they keep them in their belts till they die. This one was my cousin’s girl’s. She is in the reeds with a new knife and no shoes, and she sent it to the Hold with me, because she said the Hold had counted her cousins and should be made to keep the cake. The marsh has been paid in salt for a long time, Clerk. It only ever asked to be paid once.”