Autumn Quarter-day

The cloth came off Ilse’s grille on Autumn Quarter-day, and she was not there to see it, because she was in the Master’s office being told she had never been in any real trouble at all.

“A formality,” said the Master of the Registry, who had aged a year in a season and was very anxious that she should understand how little any of it had been his idea. “Suspension pending a hearing. You understand. The Treasurer’s office was most insistent, and Deputy Master Aske—“

“Is no longer Deputy Master,” said Yara from the doorway, “and is at present answering Justice Kellow’s questions about three years of copying Registry business to the treasury, so we can probably stop saying his name in that voice.”

The Master coughed.

“Your counter is yours,” he said to Ilse. “Naturally. If you want it.”

“Thank you, Master,” said Ilse. “I’ll want it for a month.”

· · ·Scene break

The Registry hall was exactly as she had left it. That was what astonished her. The same brass grilles, the same queue to the street doors, the same flies in the high windows, the same old Anneke on her stool by the door with her one white eye and the visitors’ book, who looked up as Ilse came in and said, “Oh, it’s you,” as if she had been gone an afternoon.

Ilse sat down at her grille and put her thumb on the scratch in the brass. It was still there.

She took the first debtor in the queue, who was Master Obry the chandler, disputing seven crowns on the Lantern Street account on the grounds that a pigeon had got into the warehouse. She read his record, and the thread came up off it and ran humming into his chest, as steady as it had ever been, and she said seven crowns, as written. He paid, and she found that she was smiling, and that Obry, who had never once seen her smile, took a step back.

· · ·Scene break

There was a thing she had to file.

She did it at the end of the day, when the hall had emptied, at the long table in the records room where every Reader in Brennock filed, under the lamp. She took out her private ledger and cut the pages from it, the three years of levies and notes and approximately four seconds and every word of the tower room, very neatly, with the guild knife, and laid them on the table, and wrote out a filing slip for it in her best hand.

Private notes of the Reader I. Rooke concerning the debtor C. Vael, Lord Warden of the frost march. Disclosed under vow in open court, day 20 of the inquiry. Found not improper. Filed voluntarily by the Reader, so that the account is complete.

Yara read the slip over her shoulder.

“We don’t have a drawer for that,” she said.

“Then we’ll make one.”

“Found not improper,” said Yara, and her voice did something. “Ilse. You read that page out loud in a hall in front of a Justice and a Treasurer and half a mountain.”

“Yes.”

“Including approximately four seconds.”

“It was accurate.”

Yara sat down on the edge of the table and put her face in her hands and laughed until she wept, and then, somewhere in the middle of it, just wept. Ilse put the guild knife down and put her arms round her, which she had never once done in ten years, and held on.

“I thought,” said Yara into her shoulder, “when you rode out of that gate, I thought I’d never—“

“I know.”

“You sent me one letter.”

“I sent you four. The couriers were very slow.”

“You sent me one letter and three accounts,” said Yara, and hit her, not hard, and wiped her face, and got up, and made a drawer.

· · ·Scene break

They closed Brigid’s ledger together that evening, at Ilse’s kitchen table in the flat above the bookbinder’s on Cordwain Street, because it felt wrong to do it anywhere else.

It took a long time. Brigid Rooke had held eleven open pages when she died, and ten of them were ordinary, and Ilse and Yara went through each one by lamplight with the tea going cold and closed what could be closed and transferred what could not, as the guild required, and signed each one twice.

The eleventh was the page with the blue ribbon and the scorched corner.

Ilse opened it. Nine words, a crack in the old wax, and in the gutter, invisible in a Brennock autumn, a witness mark only a march winter would ever show. No thread came off it. She had known none would.

She wrote under the entry, in her own hand:

Closed. Freely given, at the frost keep, day 21 of the inquiry. Witnessed by nobody, which is the point. I. Rooke, Reader.

Then, because she was her mother’s daughter, she went back through the ledger to the border levy entries, thirty years of Vael levies, and the small ticks in the margin beside them, twenty years ago and eleven years ago and every quarter since. She took a pen, and below the last of them, beside the Midsummer levy that Ilse had taken herself nine days after her mother died, she made one more small tick of her own.

Yara watched her do it and didn’t ask.

“That’s all of them,” Yara said instead, when Ilse closed the book. “Every page. The ledger’s done.”

“Nearly.” Ilse turned to the back. There was one line left at the bottom of the last page, unruled, blank, the line every Reader leaves at the end of a book in case of an account that hasn’t arrived yet. “I’m taking this with me.”

“North.”

“The Justice’s ruling says the treasury owes the march eleven years of garrison allowance, to be paid in instalments and certified each quarter by a Reader resident in the march.” Ilse put the ledger in the satchel Maud had kept for eleven years, the one with the old Registry buckle. “The Registry has to send somebody. Nobody else wants to go.”

“You want to go.”

“I want to go,” said Ilse. “Very much. For a long time. I’d like that recorded.”

“It’s recorded,” said Yara, and hugged her again, and this time did not cry, or not much.

· · ·Scene break

The first snow at the frost keep came on a grey afternoon in late autumn, and it was ordinary.

Ilse stood on the east wall and watched it come down the valley over Lowcross, where the mill had been rebuilt in new pale timber and the chapel roof had been properly mended, and over the new graves in the churchyard, eleven of them in a row, each with a wooden marker that Casimir had cut and Tove had inspected and pronounced crooked. It came down over the Hallow ford, which was running, and over the Gap, where the snow had gone out in the summer and the pass had stood open all autumn to carts from Oster with tolls paid at a march gatehouse. It came down soft and wet and small, and melted on the stones, and stuck on the grass, and was, in every respect, snow.

It would get colder. It would be a hard winter, because winters on the march were. But it would end in the spring, the way winters did, when nobody had to do anything about it at all.

Casimir came up the wall stair behind her. She heard his boots. The cold did not come into the space before him any more; he was just a man in a coat, which she had not yet stopped finding extraordinary.

“Varro says the watch on the Gap is set,” he said. “And I’ve done the ward.”

The ward was small. It was nothing like the winter. Every autumn from now on, the Warden of the march would go up to the Gap and put a thin, chosen cold into the snow over the pass itself, enough to close it to an army through the dark months and no more, and let it go in the spring. It took an hour. It did not take a hand. Maud had examined him after the first one, and grunted, and said he’d live to be as old and disagreeable as his great-grandfather, and gone away looking pleased.

“How’s the hand?” Ilse said.

He held it up in the falling snow. The left one. The skin was still mottled at the knuckles and two of the fingers would never fully straighten. It was pink, and it was warm, and it was his.

“It wrote a letter this morning,” he said. “Badly. To the Margravine’s treasury clerk. The one I think about more than I should. I’ve invited him to come and see the pass open.” He put the hand in his coat, then took it out again, and after a moment, as if checking whether it was allowed, took hers. “Wenna’s asked whether she can keep the new garrison book. I said it’s the Reader’s decision.”

“She’ll need initials in every column.”

“She’s already practising them on the pantry door.”

Ilse laughed. The snow came down on both of them, and on the wall, and on the valley, and did not stop, and nobody minded.

· · ·Scene break

That evening, in the kitchen, where the household still ate, with the household going to and fro around her and Rurik at the hearth pretending not to watch and Wenna at her elbow with a slate, Ilse took her mother’s ledger out of the old satchel and opened it to the back.

One line left. Unruled. Blank. The line a Reader leaves at the end of a book for an account that hasn’t arrived yet.

She uncapped her pen.

She did not write a debt on it. There was nothing owed. She had checked.

She wrote the date. The first day of the first ordinary snow. And in the column beside it, where every page in that book for thirty years had carried a price, she wrote nothing at all, and left it that way, and closed the book.