Oriel Fenwick

Oriel Fenwick is in the record because Emma la Chapelle writes down what she is told, and on the novice's first day in the scriptorium the novice asked her something and la Chapelle wrote it down. Everything else here is what a delegation linguist working three days a week on the Abbeylands could observe of a novice at the next desk, and the Archive keeps it at that distance on purpose.

What the Record Holds

She is sixteen, the daughter of a reeve who holds a terrace-strip in Difenland, the upland country above the Abbeylands on Aduine, and she entered the Tideward Sisterhood as a novice in the survey's third year of standing on Vellamar. On her first morning the Abbess set her to learn the hand: not a hand, the hand, the one the Long Accounting has been written in since a date nobody outside the order can confirm, and the rule the Abbess gave her is the one every novice is given, that she will be let near the Accounting when the correctors cannot tell a line of hers from a line three hundred years older, and not before.

Her first practice copy was a charter-era entry, one of the ones that count five islands and name them. She knew four of the names. She asked what the fifth was and was told that the Accounting says five, and asked which it was and was told that she was copying it; and she asked the Ranger at the next shelf what the delegation reads it as, and was told that the Ranger writes down what she is told and was told five. The exchange is the subject of The Same Hand (S13E02C01), and the record holds it there.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Whether she will be let near the Accounting, and when. What she makes of the fifth name, beyond having asked. Anything the Sisterhood holds about her that the delegation was not told, which is most of it.

Character Notes

She is the Abbey's strand's young keeper, the reader's proxy on the young-adult rung for a record that is kept by writing: a person setting out to hold something older than anyone can say, by learning to be indistinguishable from everyone who held it before. The record notes one thing the Abbess said to her, because la Chapelle wrote it down as given: that nobody outside the order can say when the Accounting began, and that inside the order it began that morning, when she sat down.