Aftermath

It turned out that a Reader with one working eye could not read.

Ilse discovered this at midnight, in the kitchen, when she opened her mother’s notebook to prove to Maud that she was perfectly fine, and the groups of four swam on the page and doubled and would not lie still. The thread-sight was worse. She glanced at the household book on its shelf and the obligations inside it came up off the leather in a blur of grey, like breath on a cold window, and she had to shut her good eye and sit with her hands flat on the table until the room stopped leaning.

“Told you,” said Maud, from her mortar.

“You told me not to rub it.”

“I told you it’d clear in a day. A day’s tomorrow.” Maud did not look up. “The Warden’s going to sit with you. He’s said so. Don’t argue with him, I haven’t the salve for it.”

Ilse opened her mouth to argue, and closed it, and found, when Casimir came back in from the yard with snow on his coat and a lamp, that she did not want to.

· · ·Scene break

He sat across the table from her. Maud went to bed. The kitchen fire burned down to the part of the night where it ticked.

“You can go up,” Ilse said. “I’m not going to fall in the hearth.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you still here?”

He thought about it. He thought about everything before he answered it, she had noticed, when he was in the plain voice; the public voice had answers ready and this one didn’t.

“Because every night for eleven years somebody has sat up with a lamp in case I did something stupid,” he said. “Rurik. Maud. Once, for a whole winter, my brother’s lieutenant, who’d lost a leg at the Gap and had nothing else to do. I’ve never once been the one sitting up.” He turned the lamp down. “I’d like to know what it’s like from this side.”

Ilse considered telling him that she didn’t need anybody sitting up.

She let him.

It was a strange, quiet hour. He fed the fire. She kept the cold cloth on her eye and her good eye shut and listened to him move about the kitchen, a man who was not used to being in a kitchen at night doing ordinary things and was being very careful not to break any of them. He made tea badly. She told him so. He made it again, worse, and she drank it.

“Read me the cipher,” he said, at about one.

“I can’t read.”

“Then tell me what it looks like. I’ve been listening to you swear at it for a week through the library door. I’d like to know what I’m up against.”

So she described it, eyes shut: groups of four characters, capitals, no vowels in the pattern she’d expected; a number between every third group, usually small, sometimes three digits; one group on page three repeated eleven times down a column.

Casimir was quiet for long enough that she opened her good eye.

He was sitting motionless with the teacup halfway to his mouth.

“Say one of the groups,” he said.

“I can’t see one of the—“ She stopped, and thought, and brought up page one from memory, because she had stared at it for seven days. “The first one’s OTMH. Then SLTP. Then a number, twelve.”

He put the cup down.

“Oatmeal, hundredweight,” he said slowly. “Salt, pounds. Twelve.” He stood up so quickly the bench scraped. “Ilse. It’s the Gap tally. It’s the quartermaster’s code. We used it for the supply runs, so a captured list read as nonsense, a thousand four-letter words for every kind of thing a garrison eats or burns or wears, and a number for how much. She’s written her notebook as a supply list.”

“But oatmeal doesn’t mean anything—“

“It does if you only take the first letter.” He was already at the undercroft door with the lamp. “There’s a tally book in the war chests. Rurik will know which. Don’t move.”

“I can’t move, I’ve got one eye.”

“Good,” said Casimir, and was gone down the stair two at a time, which she had not seen him do before.

· · ·Scene break

Rurik came up from his bed in his shirt and boots, swearing, and found the tally book in the fourth chest, and stood in the kitchen doorway watching the Lord Warden of the frost march and a half-blind Reader from the city bent over the kitchen table at two in the morning with a candle between them and a supply code from a war.

It wasn’t only first letters. That would have been too simple, and her mother had not been simple. The first letter of every group, yes; but the number that followed every third group was a count of groups to skip, so that each page was half nonsense, oats and salt and horseshoes laid down like chaff over the real grain. Casimir read the groups aloud from the notebook, because Ilse couldn’t, and looked each one up in the tally, and said its word, and its first letter. Ilse kept the count in her head and said skip or keep. And the first page, which had defeated her for a week, came apart under the two of them in forty minutes like a knot that had only ever needed two pairs of hands.

It was nonsense for the first thirty groups. The skips were a key, she realised; her mother had put the key to the rest at the front, in plain sight, as a supply list for a garrison that no longer existed.

“She learned this at the Gap,” Casimir said at one point, looking at the tally book. “You don’t learn the tally in Brennock. Somebody up there taught her.”

Ilse thought of a captain of twenty-four who had told his brother that a Reader was the only honest thing the crown had sent.

Rurik put a pot of tea on the table at some point, properly made, and a heel of bread, and Ilse realised he had been standing in the doorway for an hour.

“Stane’s man came to find me before supper,” he said, not quite to either of them. “The clerk. Dorran. Asked if I’d ever seen the Reader keep a second book. A private one. With the Warden’s name in.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

“What did you tell him?” Casimir said.

“Told him I’m a steward, not a Registry clerk, and I don’t go through guests’ baggage.” Rurik looked at Ilse. “Is there one?”

She could have said nothing. She thought about the rule of presence, and about Wenna ruling columns, and about how many people had already asked her that question in thirteen days in one form or another.

“Yes,” she said.

Rurik nodded as if she had told him the weather.

“Hm,” he said. “Well. I’ve still not seen it.” He looked at the notebook between them. “Nor that. Mind the candle, it’s guttering.”

He went back to bed.

Casimir didn’t say anything about the book. He didn’t look at her bag, where it was. He read the next group, and looked it up, and said its letter, and Ilse said keep, and they went on, and she would think afterwards that of all the courtesies anybody had shown her in that keep, that silence was the one she would remember.

· · ·Scene break

At a little after four, with the fire down to red, they reached the end of the key and the real text began.

Casimir read out groups and Ilse strung the letters in her head, and she stopped him after the first thirteen, and made him read them again, slower, to be sure she had it.

He read them again.

“Say what it spells,” he said. His voice had gone careful.

Ilse took the cold cloth off her eye. The grey was thinner now. Enough to see the candle, and his face across it, and her mother’s small, regular hand on the page between them, oats and salt and horseshoes.

“Emeric asked me,” she said.

The fire ticked.

Neither of them read the next group. After a while Casimir closed the tally book, gently, the way she closed a ledger she was not ready to finish, and put his good hand flat on the cover, near hers, not touching.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “When you can see. And you read it first. That was the arrangement.”

“That was the arrangement,” said Ilse.

He went up at dawn. She stayed at the table with the notebook until the first kitchen maids came down and found her there, and did not read another word of it, and did not sleep.