Mireille wrote to Corvin at the gatehouse table with the Quiet Census open beside her, its grey board pushed back and its pages turned to the place where her own column began.
The column was in her own hand. She had written it in the Chancery’s gallery during the second year of the Quiet Wing, with a pen the wardens had let her keep because they had thought it was a diary, and she had kept it through two searches and a Writ of Inventory without once letting a warden read it. Each line of the column was a page number. Beside each number was a short run of figures, which meant nothing to anyone who did not have the key, and beside the figures, very small, were words in her own careful auditor’s script. The words were the names of villages. The figures were what the Chancery had counted in them.
She did not use the key. The key was on a page the Chancery had struck. She used only the column, which the Chancery had never understood, because the Chancery had never once read the margins of its own paper.
She wrote the first sentence in plain Lessaran. It was a courtesy, and she intended it as one.
