Mireille showed Idrin the Census ledger’s last page on the gallery rail, where the grey light from the high windows fell across the board and made the Chancery’s ink look like old dried blood.
She had not opened the box in the Great Hall. She had carried it up the gallery stair herself, in both arms, as a clerk carries a ledger she has been ordered to deliver and does not trust the courier to deliver it whole. She had set it on the rail. Then she had untied the grey cord, one loop at a time, and lifted the board, and turned the pages with her fingertips until she reached the last of them, and she had stood back to let her brother look.
Idrin looked. He did not speak for a while.
The last page was short. It had been written in the Crown’s own hand, in the upright, unhurried script that the Chancery taught its clerks in their first year, and it carried a single entry with a seal beneath. Mireille Saelmar, Keeper of the Second Ledger, auditor. Struck from the roll of the Crown’s subjects for the keeping of a false count. Not to be restored. Under the entry, in a second and smaller hand, someone had added a line in the margin, very neatly. Ask the Crown’s counsel whether the count was false. The line had not been signed.
