Wren stood at the lodgers’ rail for the first time on the second Turn under the Writ, with the reed-scroll in her hands and her shoulder aching against the rail’s cold oak. She had carried the scroll up the Lessary Road in her coat for a month. She had not unrolled it in front of anyone since her grandmother died. It was not a long scroll, no longer than her forearm, and it had been scraped from the inner bark of a marsh reed and bound with a cord of twisted eel-gut, and along its face, in river-mud that had dried to the colour of old blood, somebody had pressed a thumb-print eight times over. Her grandmother had said the thumb-prints were the names of the houses. Wren had counted them as a child. There were eight.
She did not read the thumb-prints. She read the names instead, the ones her grandmother had taught her to say when she was small and the marsh was still a country with a name on every bend of its water.
“The Reed-Houses of the Sallow Bank,” said Wren. “The Eel-Wife’s House. The Crake House. The Withy-Stand. The Ford-Cousins. The House by the Salt Sluice, which is ours.” She stopped to breathe. Her voice was not loud. It had the marsh in it, the flatness of the water and the grey of the reeds under a winter sky, and the Hall had never heard that voice before, and she could feel it not knowing…
