Sect Year 7 · first month · night of day 2 · the sixty-third life: Wrenfold on the Vessan plain, across the sea, a tallyman’s thirty-sixth year
“Let the widow win the price of the roof.”
“Tongue of Nations.”
Haskin Crane wrote letters for people who could not, and kept their tallies at the market wall, and the court guards of Wrenfold had long ago stopped asking how he did it. He could read a bond in the agent’s tongue, a scribe’s hand in the river dialect. The sailors’ chalk marks in the trade speech that the Vessan market had borrowed from six nations and made its own. He could answer a stranger in the stranger’s own words, and sometimes in words the stranger had not known they wanted. The court guards found it uncanny. Haskin found it useful, and he had come to believe that being useful was the same thing as being needed, and that being needed meant being the one who knew the answer. He had lived with that belief for most of his life without quite looking at it.
At six, in a counting-house yard in another town, he had counted the bales in the yard aloud and too fast, and gone on counting after the others had stopped. He had stood in that yard holding a slate and shaking, and the counting clerk had called him a strange child and sent him to bed. He had kept the count behind the tallies ever since, the…
