Wren walked the sluice-house wall with the key in her fist and counted the chains on the granary doors, because that was what the reeds had taught her to do before she could read.
There were four chains. Two ran across the lower door, one above the other, and two ran across the upper, where the grain-hatch opened onto the yard. Each was as thick as her wrist and cold enough to burn through the wool of her glove. Each was locked to a bar of Forge-iron that had been set into the stone a hand’s depth deep, by someone who had known exactly how much a flooded door would try to lift. She ran her thumb along the links, one by one, from the bar to the ring, and felt for the place where the iron had rusted and the place where it had been polished by a hand that held on to it. There were two of those places. She had put her own hand on both, that morning and the morning before.
She was Lodger One in the Hold’s Register. It was written there in the Ink, on a page she had never been allowed to read aloud. She was a living person under a Writ of Lodging, which meant that she had a bed in Lowgate and a share of the bread on the eighth day and a place on the lodgers’ bench, and it meant that she had no vote on anything the Hold did…
