The Sickroom

Maud Harrick had nursed three generations of Vaels and did not intend to be impressed by a fourth-generation question.

“He had a fever for twenty-six days,” she said, “and frostbite in both hands, and he tried to get out of that bed eleven times, and I tied him to it on the fourth. That’s what I remember about that winter.” She was grinding something grey in a mortar at the kitchen’s far table, where the heat from the hearth reached without scorching. “What do you want to know it for?”

“A woman used to read to him,” Ilse said. “In the sickroom. At night.”

The pestle stopped.

“The Reader,” Maud said. “The one with the satchel.”

“My mother.”

Maud looked at her for a long, unhurried moment, the way she presumably looked at a wound before deciding how much it would hurt to clean. Then she wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Well. You’ve her way of standing, now I look,” and went into the pantry.

She came back with a leather satchel. It was cracked at the seams and white with old salt, and it had a Registry buckle on the flap, the brass kind they had stopped issuing a decade ago. Ilse had one exactly like it in a drawer in Brennock, because her mother had given it to her the day she passed her first examination, and said this one’s for travelling, and Ilse had never once travelled.

“She left it,” Maud said. “The morning the road opened, she went down to Brennock with the crown’s party, in a hurry, and this was under the sickroom chair. I wrote to the Registry. Nobody wrote back. I kept it in case.” She set it on the table between them. “Eleven years is a long time for in case.”

Ilse didn’t touch it yet.

“What did she read to him?”

“Anything. Old accounts. The almanac. A book of hill songs she’d found in the library that he said he hated.” Maud went back to her mortar. “He didn’t know one night from the next. But he was quieter when she read. I let her stay because of that.” A pause, grinding. “The last night, before the road opened, she read him something short. I was in the doorway. She asked him a question at the end of it and he said yes, and she sat with her hand over her mouth a long while after, and then she went and packed.”

“Did you hear what she read?”

“No.” Maud looked up. “I heard him laugh when he said yes. First time in a month. It wasn’t a good laugh.”

· · ·Scene break

The satchel held a spare pen, a rolled pair of wool stockings with a darn in the heel in Brigid’s neat, furious stitching, a crown pass for the Hallow road dated eleven years ago, and a small notebook bound in oilcloth.

The notebook was full. Every page was covered in close, regular groups of letters and numbers that made no words at all.

Ilse turned the pages twice, slowly, and felt the familiar small drop of a record refusing her. It wasn’t guild cipher. She knew guild cipher the way she knew her own name. This was something else: groups of four, a number between every third group, no pattern she could see in the first ten pages.

Her mother had written something down that she did not want a Reader to read. Not anyone. A Reader.

Ilse closed it, and wrapped it in the stockings, as if that would keep it warm.

· · ·Scene break

She spent the afternoon being useless on purpose.

It was not something she was good at, and the kitchen noticed. She sat at the end of the long table with the ledger closed in front of her and the notebook in her lap and did not open either, and after an hour a girl of about twelve with flour to her elbows came and stood beside her and stared at the ledger with an expression of naked professional interest.

“Is that the debt book?”

“It’s a ledger.”

“Wenna, leave the Reader alone,” said somebody at the hearth.

“I’m not bothering her. I’m looking.” The girl tilted her head. “My mam keeps the flour count on a slate but the slate gets rubbed and then Cook says we’ve had more than we have. Is a ledger better than a slate?”

“A ledger,” Ilse said, “is a slate that can’t lie.”

Wenna considered this with enormous seriousness. “Can you show me?”

So Ilse spent two hours of the afternoon on keep day five, in the warmest room in a winter, ruling columns for the flour. Received. Used. Remaining. Initials. She made Wenna do the arithmetic aloud, and then write it, and then check it against the sacks, and then write checked and her initials beside it, and the girl’s tongue came out between her teeth with concentration in a way that Ilse remembered from the other side of a counter, twenty years ago, with her mother’s hand over hers.

By the time Wenna had caught the cook out on three pounds of oats, half the kitchen had gathered to watch.

“She’ll be wanting a grille of her own next,” said Rurik, who had come in at some point and was leaning in the pantry doorway with his arms crossed. He did not seem displeased. “Taking levies off the stable boys.”

“She’d be good at it,” Ilse said.

“Aye. Well. Most things that are good for us aren’t much fun.” But he came and looked at Wenna’s columns before he left, and grunted, and that grunt, Ilse could tell from Wenna’s face, would be remembered.

· · ·Scene break

Casimir came in at dusk with snow on his shoulders and his left hand pushed into his coat, and stopped when he saw the satchel on the table.

The kitchen emptied round them without anyone being told to. Ilse was beginning to understand the keep’s manners: nobody bowed, and everybody knew when to leave.

“Maud told me,” he said.

“She said you laughed when you said yes.”

He sat down across from her, slowly, the way he did at the end of a day when his hands were bad. He took his left hand out of his coat and held it towards the hearth and looked at it instead of at her.

“I don’t remember the laugh,” he said. “I remember a voice. I remember being asked something that seemed to matter a great deal to the person asking it and not very much to me. I remember thinking, that’s fine, that costs nothing, and saying yes to be kind.” He turned the hand over. “It’s a strange thing to find out, eleven years later, that you’ve been kind to someone in a way that’s been sitting in a book the whole time.”

“It may not have been kindness.”

“No.” He looked up. “That’s what I’d like to ask you.”

Ilse waited.

“You’re going to find out what I agreed to,” he said. “You will. I’ve watched you read a war roll in a gale. And when you do, I’d like it to be you who tells me. Not Dorran. Not a Justice in a hall with Varro looking at me. You.” A breath. “I realise that’s a great deal to ask a Reader. You don’t owe me the courtesy.”

“No,” Ilse said. “I don’t.”

She meant it as a statement of fact. It came out gentler.

He nodded as if he had expected nothing else and began to stand, and she said, “Sit down, my lord,” in her counter voice, and he sat.

She put her hand flat on the oilcloth notebook.

“This is my mother’s,” she said. “It’s in a cipher I can’t read yet. I think it’s about that night, or the night on the Gap, or both. I think she hid it from Readers deliberately, which means she hid it from me.” She made herself keep going. “When I break it, I’ll read it alone first. Not in front of you. Not because I’m keeping it from you. Because I don’t know yet what it will cost you to hear, and I’d like to know that before I’m the one who hands it to you.”

Casimir had gone quiet.

“And then I’ll tell you,” she said. “All of it. As written. That’s the only promise I can make. I can’t promise it will be kind.”

For a long moment he didn’t say anything at all. The fire moved. Somewhere above them, in the tower, a shutter knocked in the wind.

“That’s the first time,” he said at last, “in eleven years, that anyone has told me what they were going to do with something about me before they did it.”

“It’s a professional habit.”

“It isn’t,” said Casimir. “But thank you for letting me pretend it is.”

He got up then, carefully, and went to the door. At the door he stopped.

“Wenna’s mother came to find me,” he said without turning. “She says her daughter has caught Cook out on three pounds of oats and intends to be a Reader, and she wants to know whose fault that is.”

“Mine,” Ilse said.

“That’s what I told her.” And for a second, in the doorway, with snow melting on his shoulders, he looked the way he had looked at breakfast on her first morning, before he remembered to put his manners on.

When he had gone Ilse sat with the notebook under her hand for a long time, not opening it.

Then she took out her own ledger, the private one she had kept in Brennock and had not admitted to anyone, and turned to the page with his name on it, and wrote under the last levy entry, in small letters: Asked me to be the one who tells him. Said yes.

It was not a debt. She did not know what to call it. She wrote it down anyway.