Sect Year 8 · second month · night of day 4 · the sixty-eighth life: the Ottry valley, across the western sea, his sixty-first year
“Write every debt in your own hand.”
“Plain Ear.”
The tithe-house at Ottry stood where the valley road gave out, a low stone building under a slate roof, with a yard full of grain sacks beneath tarpaulins. Berand was eleven when he came there in the autumn, when the carts first brought the valley’s rolls up from the lower fields. He was given a stool too high for the table, so that he had to hook his heels on its rungs to reach the page, and his hands were black with ink to the wrist. He didn’t mind the ink. He minded the stool, which rocked, and the tithe-master, who told him every morning to sit still.
“Ink costs by the line,” said Corrod Hale. He was a long-faced man with a cough he kept in his chest, and he set a pen between Berand’s fingers as though he were handing over a tool that might bite. “Keep your lines short. The Court pays for the ink. The valley pays the Court, and the valley has no more ink than it has grain.”
