Wren, of Knight Pellam (Human, youngest of an Old House)

The first thing anyone from Ostrel tells you about Casimor is that nobody goes there at the start of a storm season, and the second thing is that the boat leaves at first light.

Wren had the first names by heart. That was what she had, crossing: a bag that was mostly cloak, a letter from her father in the form the court requires and nobody reads, and the chronicle's first names, learned on Vellamar from a reciter who had never once seen the Castle and said so, and said that this was the ordinary way. You learn the names on Vellamar. You learn what they are of on Krilzat. Every house sends its youngest, every generation, so that when the next coronation comes there is somebody under the Grove who can say the chronicle through from the first name without being prompted, and a house that cannot has let its part of the record go, and Pellam, which is a Knight's house and presides over nothing and administers less, had never once let it go.

So it was Wren, because she was the youngest, and because Knight Pellam had said, in the voice he used for the one thing their house still had, that she was the one who could hold a list.

Casimor came up out of the weather grey and low, and the boat went round to the lee side, because nothing lands on Krilzat. She walked across. It took the rest of the day. The island leaned; everything on the islands leans, every tree, every roof, every wall that has stood more than a season, bent the one way the wind comes from, so that a child learns which way is windward before she learns her letters. On Krilzat there were no trees to lean. There was rock, and wind, and at the far end of the rock, where the ground gave up, the watch-post.

And inside the watch-post's wall, standing up out of it like something the wall had been built to hold rather than to keep out, the Castle.

It did not lean.

Wren stopped on the path with the wind at her back trying to put her down, and looked at it, and understood for the first time what the reciter had meant, saying you learn what they are of on Krilzat. It was grey, and it was smooth, and it had no windows, and it went up into the weather and did not lean, and nothing she had ever seen in fifteen years on four islands had not leaned.

The chronicle said the founding monarch was given it. She had always taken that for a way of saying built. Standing on the path, she was no longer sure it was.