What Ilse Chooses

Justice Kellow held her hearing in the great hall at ten o’clock on the twentieth day, as she had said she would, and not an hour before.

The whole march came. Ilse had not expected that. She came down the tower stair with her mother’s ledger under one arm and her own under the other and found the hall full to the doors: captains, household, soldiers from the wall, and at the back, standing because the benches were taken, half of Lowcross. Tove on her two sticks. Col Hawick. Wenna, holding her mother’s hand and a slate. They had walked four miles through the snow in the dark to stand at the back of a room and listen to a Justice talk about a book.

Casimir was at the head of the table in a chair Maud had allowed on condition that he did not stand up from it. His left arm was in a sling and his face was the colour of the snow outside, and he looked at Ilse when she came in and did not look away until she had sat down.

Stane sat at Kellow’s left hand with his own bandaged palm in his lap. He looked rested.

“This hearing,” Kellow said, “will decide three things. Whether the Reader can certify the origin of the debt she holds. Whether that debt is to be called. And whether the Lord Warden remains fit to hold this march. We’ll take them in that order, and nobody will speak unless I ask them to, and anybody who touches anybody else’s wrist will leave.” She looked at Stane when she said it. “Reader Rooke.”

Ilse stood.

· · ·Scene break

She read the certification.

It took five minutes. She read it slowly, in the counter voice, and it said what the law required and nothing more: that the page had been struck at the pay table of the Gap watchtower on the eighth night of the war, eleven years ago, by Brigid Rooke, Reader for the Crown, at the request of Emeric Vael, Captain of the Gap, who witnessed it in frost-ink; that the holder had inspected the place of striking; that the witness mark had been compared with eleven field orders and identified by the man who taught the witness to write; that the page had been read to the debtor and accepted in the sickroom of the frost keep one month later, which the keep’s healer would swear to.

Maud swore to it. She said he said yes, and he laughed, and it wasn’t a good laugh, and sat down.

Kellow asked Casimir whether he remembered accepting it. He said, clearly, “I do now,” and nothing else.

“The origin is certified,” said Kellow, and the clerk wrote it down. “Treasurer. A certified page may be called. Do you ask the court to call it?”

“I do, Justice,” said Stane. “On behalf of a march that has buried—“

“I know what it’s buried. I’ve read the returns.” Kellow folded her hands. “Calling compels the form of payment, and the form of payment for a lord’s debt at his own table is presentation by the holder before witnesses. That form was observed at this table on the thirteenth day, as the Treasurer will recall, since he insisted on it.” She did not smile. “The page was read. The debtor was present. The form is satisfied. There is nothing further a court can compel. The debt is certified, called, presented, and remains open, and from this day forward it is a matter between the holder and the debtor and nobody else, now or ever. That’s my ruling on the first two questions. Clerk.”

The clerk wrote. At the back of the hall, somebody from Lowcross let out a long breath.

Stane’s face did not change. He had, Ilse thought, expected to lose that one. He had been saving his breath.

“The third question,” Kellow said. “Treasurer, it’s your petition.”

· · ·Scene break

He was very good.

He did not attack Casimir. He grieved for him. He described the hand, which the whole hall could see in its sling, and quoted the healer’s own household note, and asked Maud, gently, to tell the court what she had told Reader Rooke at dawn. Maud looked at him with open loathing and told the truth, because she had been asked under oath: one winter, not four.

He described a march held together by one failing man, refusing a lawful means of relief, while his villages starved and his wall was tunnelled. He described a crown that could not, in conscience, allow it. He proposed, with regret, that the wardship be taken into the crown’s hands, a garrison sent, and the Lord Warden relieved, with honour, of a burden no one should carry.

And then he said, still gently, “Justice, before you rule. There is the matter of the Reader.”

Kellow looked at Ilse.

“Reader Rooke,” she said. “I told you I’d ask, and I’m asking. You are under your vow. Do you hold, or have you held, any private interest in the debtor, recorded or unrecorded?”

The hall went so quiet that Ilse could hear the fire.

She did not look at Casimir. She had decided that in the library at dawn. If she looked at him she would say it to him, and it had to be said to the record.

“Yes, Justice,” she said. “I do. It’s recorded.”

She put her private ledger on the table and opened it.

“I’ll read it,” she said, “so that nobody else has to.”

Stane began, “Justice, I’d ask that the Registry’s own copy—“

“The Reader is reading her own book under her own vow,” said Kellow. “Sit down, Treasurer.”

Ilse read.

She began at the beginning, three years ago, with the first quarter he had come to her grille in person, the quarter the Treasurer had first required lords of the march to pay their levies by hand. Q3. Levy 40 cr. Paid in full. She read every levy. Every quarter. What he paid, and in what coin, and she read the notes she’d made beside them, because they were the record.

Gold down four. Copper up.

Boots resoled.

Left hand gloved throughout.

And then she read the other column. The one she had never shown anybody, not even Yara. The one where, every quarter, as a Reader who could not stop herself, she had gone to the Registry’s copy of the march’s returns and checked where the forty crowns had come from.

Q1, two years ago: household wages at the keep deferred one quarter. Silver plate sold, Brennock, 11 cr.

Q3: coal to Lowcross paid from the Warden’s personal account. No crown contribution recorded.

Q4: crown garrison allowance for the march, per statute: 0 cr. Eleventh year unpaid.

She read it all. Three years of a man paying the crown in full, on time, from his own table, for a border the crown had sent no soldiers to and no money for in eleven years, while the Treasurer who was now proposing to relieve him of the burden signed the ledgers that showed it.

By the time she reached the last levy, the one she had taken on Midsummer Quarter-day, Kellow had stopped writing and was looking at Stane.

“Justice,” Stane said, “these are the Registry’s own figures, which I—“

“Are you disputing them?”

“I—no.”

“Then be quiet, Treasurer. The Reader isn’t finished.” Kellow looked back at Ilse. “Are you?”

“No, Justice.” Ilse turned the page. “The question was whether I have a private interest. The figures are why I noticed him. They aren’t the interest.”

And she read the rest.

Laughed at something Yara said, and then looked at me as if to check whether I’d heard.

Asked me to be the one who tells him. Said yes.

Day 8. Ice-house latch. His hand over mine, approximately four seconds. I did not withdraw mine. I wanted not to. This is recorded so that I cannot later persuade myself it was the cold.

Somebody at the back of the hall made a small sound. Ilse thought it might be Wenna.

She did not stop.

“That is the interest,” she said. “It is recorded, quarterly, in my own hand, and it has never once been filed, and I am aware of what that looks like. I’d ask the court to note what the entries are. They are not a claim on him. They are a count of what he paid.”

“Reader Rooke.” Kellow’s voice was not unkind. “You have given me three years of arithmetic. I asked you a question about an interest. Answer it plainly, please.”

Ilse looked at the page in front of her, at three years of levies in her own small hand, and understood that there was no column for this and never had been, and that she had known it on the eighth day, when she wrote approximately four seconds and dated it.

“Plainly,” she said.

She put her thumb on the edge of the page, the way she put it on the scratch in the brass every morning at her grille.

“I have been in love with him for three years, Justice. I noticed it at a counter, across a grille, while he was counting out copper. I wrote it down because writing a thing down is the only way I have ever known to be sure of it, and I never filed it because I did not want anyone to read it before he did.” Her voice held. She would be proud of that for the rest of her life. “It has never once inclined me to collect this debt. It has inclined me, very strongly, against anybody being made to pay it. Those are different things, and I would like the difference in the record.”

She closed the book.

For what felt like a very long time nobody in the great hall of the frost keep said anything at all.

Then Justice Kellow picked up her pen.

“The Reader’s interest is disclosed,” she said, “under her vow, in open court, and I find it not improper. I note for the record that it appears to be the most thoroughly documented private interest ever put before me, and that I have sat on the bench for twenty-two years.” She turned. “Treasurer Stane. Your petition asks the crown to relieve a Warden of a burden. The Registry’s own accounts show that the crown has contributed nothing to that burden in eleven years, and that the Warden has carried the crown’s share of it out of his own household. A man who has lost the use of a hand holding a pass the crown would not garrison is not unfit to hold it. He is owed for it. The petition is dismissed. The treasury will account to this court, within the season, for eleven years of unpaid garrison allowance to the march. Clerk.”

Stane stood up. He opened his mouth.

“Sit down, Treasurer,” said Kellow, and he sat.

· · ·Scene break

Rurik Bane came through the doors of the hall twenty minutes later with snow to his thighs and an Osterran colonel beside him.

Ilse did not remember much of the next hour clearly. She remembered the colonel, a tall, tired woman called Isa Brenner, who looked around the hall and at the Lord Warden in his sling and said, in careful Common, that the Margravine had read the Warden’s letter, including the line underneath, and would like very much to stop paying an army to look at snow. She remembered Varro, standing, with her hand at her scarred throat. She remembered the terms, which were short: the Gap would open to trade in the thaw; Oster would take its camp back down its own side of the valley; the north end of the pass would be garrisoned by the march, not by the crown, and the tolls shared.

She remembered Casimir signing with his right hand, badly, because the left was in a sling, and Colonel Brenner signing in a neat Osterran script, and the two seals, green and black, pressed side by side.

And she remembered Varro saying, in front of the whole hall, “Reader. Read it.”

Ilse read it.

There were two threads.

One ran from Oster’s black seal out of the hall and north, towards the pass. One ran from the march’s green seal down the length of the table to the man in the chair at its head. Both were bright. Both hummed, the way a debt hums when it is meant.

“Both,” Ilse said. “Both sides mean it.”

Varro sat down. She put both hands over her face, in front of the whole march, and nobody looked at her, and after a while Tove came up the hall on her two sticks and stood beside the captain’s chair and did not say anything, and did not leave.

· · ·Scene break

He came to the library that night. Maud had forbidden him to leave the sickroom. He came anyway, with his arm in its sling and a lamp in his good hand, and stood in the doorway, and did not come in.

Ilse was at the desk. She had nothing in front of her. She had been sitting there for an hour with nothing in front of her.

“You said it in a hall,” he said.

“Once,” said Ilse. “True. Under the vow.”

“In front of Stane.”

“In front of everyone. So it can’t be argued with.”

He came in, then, and set the lamp down, and sat in the chair across the desk from her, as he had the night she read him her mother’s notebook.

“I’d like to ask you something,” he said, “and I’d like you to take as long as you need to answer. And then I’d like you to ask me the same, and I’ll do the same.”

“Ask.”

“If that page burned tonight,” Casimir said, “if the ledger went in the fire and there was no debt and no price and no winter to end, and I was only a man with one good hand who pays his levy at your grille — would you still want this?”

Ilse took as long as she needed. It was not very long.

“Yes,” she said. “And you?”

“If the page burned tonight and you were only a Reader from Brennock who keeps minutes on everything, including me,” he said, “yes. Without any question at all.”

The lamp burned.

“Then here’s what it costs,” Ilse said, because it had to be said, and she was the one who said numbers. “If it’s free and it counts, the winter ends. Whatever you are without it, you find out. Whatever you’ve been proud of carrying, you stop carrying. And I don’t know what happens to my counter in Brennock, or whether I’ll have one. I don’t know where I’ll live. I don’t know anything I’d normally write down.”

“And if it doesn’t count?”

“Then it’s still ours,” said Ilse. “And you keep your winter, and I keep my minutes, and it doesn’t prove anything either way.”

He smiled, slowly.

“May I ask you one more thing?” he said.

She looked up.

“Would you mind if it wasn’t tonight?” he said. “Not with the ink wet on a truce and Varro crying in a hall and every soul in this keep wide awake waiting to see if we’ll do something stupid. I don’t want it to be a victory. I’ve had eleven years of things that were victories.” He put his good hand flat on the desk between them. Not touching her. Near. “I’d like it to be a morning. An ordinary one. When it’s just a day and you’ve had some sleep and nobody’s watching. And if you wake up and want it, it’s yours to choose. And if you don’t, it’s still yours. Whether we wait is yours too. I’m only asking.”

Ilse thought about it, properly, all the way down.

“No,” she said. “I don’t mind. I’d like that too.”

Ilse looked at his hand on the desk.

“In the kitchen,” she said. “It’s the only warm room.”

“In the kitchen,” Casimir agreed.

He took the lamp and went back to the sickroom before Maud noticed, and Ilse sat alone in the library for a long time, and then she went up to the tower room and lay down on the bed in her clothes and, to her own very great surprise, slept.