Wren, of Knight Pellam

Wren is the youngest of a Knight's house, the floor of the Kingdom's hereditary ladder, which presides and administers nothing and still sends its youngest to the Castle in every generation to learn the chronicle. That is the custom the record has her for: the court's record of descent and deed is kept by being recited, and it is learned in the Castle's rooms and about them, and a house that cannot put a reciter under the Elder Grove at the next coronation is a house that has let its part of the record lapse. Pellam has never let it lapse. Wren is fifteen and is the one sent.

What the Record Holds

She crossed from Ostrel to Casimor at the start of a storm season and came up to the watch-post on Krilzat with the chronicle's first names already by heart, learned on Vellamar from a reciter who had never seen the Castle, which is the ordinary way. What she had not seen, and what the chronicle is for, is the Castle's people: the figures the court's record of descent begins with, seen as light, walking the long hall at their hours, never answering. She saw the first of them on her first evening and had its name, and the keeper's son, who had watched it all his life, had its way. The record holds the exchange in The Names Go By (S13E01C01).

What the Record Does Not Carry

What she makes of the Castle's people beyond the chronicle's own reading, which she holds as the court holds it. How far into the Castle she has gone. Anything the delegation knows of her, since the delegation has not been to Krilzat.

Character Notes

She is the court's strand's young keeper and the reader's proxy on the young-adult rung for a record kept by speaking: a person learning to hold, by heart, a list that begins with names she can watch walk past. The chronicle's reading of what walks past is hers in every POV block and is never the record's. The pairing the strand runs on is hers and the keeper's son's: the court has the names and has never seen them; the watch has seen them every day and has no names.