A Debt She Didn't Mean to Read

Ilse read it by accident, which was no excuse, and she knew it was no excuse even as it happened.

Wenna had brought her the keep’s household book on the tenth morning because the fuel rota on the pantry door did not agree with the quartermaster’s count of logs, and Wenna, having caught Cook, was now hunting larger game. The household book was a fat, soft-cornered thing in brown leather that lived on a shelf by the hearth. Rurik kept it. It held everything a house of sixty people used in a winter: candles, salt, horseshoes, wages, the coal to Lowcross on Thursdays, entered week by week in the steward’s square hand.

Ilse was looking for logs. She turned to the back of the book, where household books kept their standing obligations, the annual things, the rents and tithes, so that she could see whether the keep owed timber to…