Oriel Fenwick (Human, novice of the Tideward Sisterhood)

The page was a list.

That was a relief, at first, because a list is easier to copy than a sentence; you do not have to understand it. A heading in the hand, which she could read, because every child on Aduine could read the hand, the Sisterhood saw to that. Then a column of names with marks beside them, which she took for the render, grain and stores, the way her father's ledger did it. Then a second column, ruled, with nothing in it. Then, at the foot, the islands.

She copied the heading. It took her the whole of the first hour and it was wrong, and the corrector came and looked at it and said nothing and went away, which Oriel understood to mean it was wrong, and did it again.

The islands she came to after the midday office, with her hand aching in a place it had never ached from a mattock.

Vellamar. She knew the shape of that one; every child did. Casimor. Aduine, her own, which she copied with more care than the hand allowed and had to do again. Ostrel.

And a fifth.

She read it twice. It was a name. It was written in the hand, in the column with the other four, with a mark beside it like theirs, and it was not Krilzat, which was not an island, and it was not Difenland, which was not either, and it was not any name she had heard in sixteen years of a Kingdom that counted its islands in its own name every time it said it.

She looked up. The Abbess was at her book at the end of the room, and did not look up, and Oriel understood that the Abbess had been waiting for exactly this and was not going to come to her.

She went to the Abbess.

"There are five," she said.

"The Accounting says five."

"Which is the fifth?"

"The Accounting says which. You are copying it."

"But the Crown holds four. Everyone —" She stopped, because the Abbess had raised one hand, not far.

"The Crown holds four. The chronicle counts four. The Accounting says five, and has since that hand, and you are not here to count islands, Fenwick. The court can count islands. You are here to keep a hand. Copy the fifth name as it is written, in the hand, so that nobody can tell yours from the one that first wrote it, and when you have done that you will have kept it, which is more than anyone outside this room has done with it in all the time it has been there." The Abbess looked down at her book. "And the second column. The empty one. Rule it, and leave it empty. Every hand has."

"What is it for?"

"Answered prayers," said the Abbess. "Rule it."