Emma la Chapelle (Human, Field Officer, Survey Corps delegation)

Emma la Chapelle had the oldest shelf on the days she had it, which was three in seven, and the first thing she did on each of them was the same thing: she read the last page she had worked, and re-derived what she had written about it, and moved a band down if the morning's reading did not support the evening's. Most mornings it did. Some mornings it did not, and those were the mornings the register was for.

The boat from Kalenjar put her on Aduine's shore before the first office, and she walked up through the terraces with the reeves going the other way, and the ones who knew her said her name and the ones who did not said nothing, which was the Kingdom's manners and not a slight. She had learned that in her first month. She had learned most things in her first month and had spent every month since finding out which of them were wrong.

There was a new novice at the practice desk.

Emma noted it the way she noted anything in the room: without writing it down, because a novice at a desk was not a reading. Sixteen, perhaps. Terrace-born, by the hands, which had held a mattock before they held a pen. Sitting the way the new ones sat, too straight, with the practice sheet squared in front of her and the ink not yet open, waiting to be told that she could begin.

The senior corrector, who had never once in three years told Emma her name and whom Emma had never once asked, set a page of the Accounting on the novice's desk. Not the book; a page, loose, the kind the correctors made for copying from, written out in the hand from the book so that the book itself never left the shelf. Emma had copied from such pages herself, in her first weeks, on the Abbess's instruction, so that she would know what the hand cost before she read what it said.

"Copy it," said the corrector, in the Kingdom's tongue, and Emma heard the word and wrote it down, because the word the corrector had used was not the word for copy. It was the word the Accounting used for keep. The same word a reeve used of a wall.

She had a band for that already. She had had it since the second year, when she had asked what the word meant when it was used of a wall, and of a catchment, and of a season, and had written down each answer as given, and the instruments had gone and looked at the air. She did not move the band. She wrote: corrector to novice, first day: "keep it," of a practice page. And the date in the Archive's reckoning, and no date in the Abbey's, because the Abbey did not give one and she did not ask.

The novice opened the ink.

Emma turned back to her own page, which was a page of the charter era, counting five, and went on with the slowest translation on the posting.