Pell sat on the edge of her bed with the candle low and the drawer under the window, and she did not open it.
The room was small and cold and very tidy. It had a cot against the inner wall with a grey blanket folded square at its foot, a stool, a peg for her apron, and a window no wider than a loaf that looked out on the Kitchen yard and the granary’s black roof. Under the window was the chest of drawers she had carried up from the cellar in the first winter, with her own hands, because nobody else in the Hold had been willing to take it. It was made of plain pine. It had four drawers, and three of them held clean linen and her spare shoes and a jar of the Lowgate chandler’s wax, and the fourth had a brass latch, cold and smooth, and beside the latch a faint brown scratch in the wood where two hands had once marked a Knot.
The scratch had been made in the autumn, on the afternoon Ysra had come down the Kitchen stair and stood at the foot of Pell’s bed and said, in her flat, dry, unhappy voice, that she had been wrong to open the drawer without asking. Pell had been angry for nearly a week after that. Then she had forgiven her, which had taken a single bread and a long afternoon, and they had marked the forgiveness on the wood with…
