Oriel Fenwick (Human, novice of the Tideward Sisterhood)

The scriptorium faced the sea, which Oriel had not expected, because every other room she had ever been in on Aduine faced away from it.

That was the first thing. Terrace houses turn their backs to the weather; her father's did, and his father's, and the shutters on the windward side of every house in Difenland were nailed and had been for longer than the nails. The Abbey's long room had its shutters open to the tide. The light came in grey and even off the water and lay along the desks, and the air smelled of salt and ink and the dust of something older than either, and at the far end, where the light was best, the shelves began.

She had come up the terrace steps at the first office with her things in a bag that was too big for them, and a sister she did not know had taken the bag and said nothing and pointed, and she had gone where the pointing went, and here was the Abbess.

Oriel had seen her twice before, at a distance, at the storm-blessings. Up close she was smaller and older and did not look up from the book in front of her until she had finished the line she was on, which took as long as it took.

"Fenwick," said the Abbess. "Of Difenland. Your father holds the strip under the second catchment."

"Yes, Abbess."

"He keeps his walls. The Accounting says so; I did not have to ask." She closed the book. It was not the Accounting. Oriel knew that without being told, the way you know a reeve's ledger from a steward's. "You have come to learn the hand."

"Yes, Abbess."

"Not a hand. The hand. Attend to the difference, because it is the whole of what you will do here for longer than you will like." The Abbess stood, and went to the nearest desk, and laid her palm flat on it. "Every line in the Long Accounting is written in one hand. It has never changed. A sister who has kept the book for forty years writes a line, and a sister three hundred years dead wrote the line above it, and the correctors cannot tell them apart, and that is not an accident and it is not a miracle. It is practice. You will copy until you can write a line that nobody in this room can tell from one three hundred years older. When you can, you will be let near the Accounting. Until then you will not touch it."

"How long?" said Oriel, before she could stop it.

The Abbess looked at her the way she had looked at the line she was finishing.

"The Accounting does not say," she said. "Sit down."