Season 13 · Episode 2

The Timeless Library. The Abbey's strand, from inside the Tideward Sisterhood: a novice of sixteen sits down on her first morning to learn the hand, not a hand but the hand, the one every line of the Long Accounting has been written in since a date nobody outside the order can confirm, and is set to copy a charter-era entry that counts five islands and names them, and finds she knows four of the names. The survey's young officer works the next shelf three days a week and writes down each answer as given. The Abbess answers what the Accounting states and nothing it does not, and when the novice asks when the book began, tells her. Then a court reciter comes up the steps with a new line of the chronicle, so that the Accounting can be checked against it: a door was given, on Krilzat, and one stands in it, and no name. The Abbess sets the novice to find the room, and she finds it, in the hand, dated before she was born, and it has a name. The Abbess tells the reciter it was always there. At the next shelf the Ranger's reader brings in the delegation's log from Krilzat, a figure present for exactly as long as a lamp was in the room, and she files it at the lowest band and adopts neither name.

• S13E02C01 The Same HandThe Abbeylands, Aduine — the Tideward Sisterhood's scriptorium and the terrace steps above the tideThe Abbey's strand begins. Oriel Fenwick, sixteen, a reeve's daughter from Difenland, sits down on her first morning as a novice to learn the hand: not a hand, the hand, the one every line of the Long Accounting has been written in since a date nobody outside the order can confirm. She is set to copy a charter-era entry that counts five islands and names them, and she knows four of the names. The Ranger at the next shelf writes down what she is told and was told five. The Abbess answers what the Accounting states and nothing it does not, and when the novice asks when the book began, tells her: nobody outside the order can say, and inside, it began this morning.
• S13E02C02 Always ThereThe Abbeylands, Aduine — the scriptorium, the oldest shelf, and the terrace stepsThe one act, from the Abbey's side. A court reciter comes up the terrace steps with a new line of the chronicle, as the court does when a line is new, so that the Accounting can be checked against it: a door was given, on Krilzat, in Pellam's time, on the right side past the ninth, and one stands in it, and no name. The Abbess sets the novice to find the room. Oriel finds it, in the hand, in the Accounting's own count of the Castle, dated by the Abbey's reckoning before she was born, and it has a name. The Abbess tells the reciter the Accounting has it, and that it was always there. At the next shelf the Ranger's reader brings in the delegation's instrument log from Krilzat, and she files what it saw at the lowest band, with three readings, and writes down both names as given and adopts neither.