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

The novice found her on the terrace steps at the end of the day, which Emma had half expected, because the new ones always found the Ranger on the steps eventually and it was usually sooner than this.

The tide was coming in below them, grey, the way it did, over the catchment stones. Emma sat with her reader closed on her knee. The novice stood, because novices stood.

"You read the old pages," the novice said. "The sisters say you've read further back than anyone who isn't a sister."

"Slower than anyone who is. Yes."

"Then you've seen the fifth name."

"Yes."

"What does the delegation think it is?"

Emma had been asked that question, in that form, by a steward, by a court clerk, by Strozzi twice and de Courtney once, and she had given all of them the same answer, and she gave it now, because the novice was sixteen and that was not a reason to give her a worse one.

"I write down what I'm told," she said. "I was told five."

"That isn't an answer."

"No. It's the only one I'm allowed to give you, and it's the only one I'd trust from me." She turned the reader over in her hands, not opening it. "Here is how it works, and I'll tell you because the Abbess would. I don't tell the Abbey what the delegation reads. Not because it's secret. Because the moment I say to a sister we think it means this, I've put it to your record that your record is missing something, and I don't know that, and I'm not going to pretend to, and if I'm wrong it stays in your book forever with my name under it. So I ask what a word means. I write down what you say. And I don't say what I'd have guessed."

The novice thought about that for a while, which was more than the steward had done.

"Do you have a word for it? A name with nothing under it?"

"We have a band," said Emma. "It's the lowest one. It means: this is a reading, and it is not a finding, and anyone who files it higher is guessing in a uniform." She opened the reader then, because the question was worth keeping, and wrote it down as given: novice, first day, on the steps: do you have a word for a name with nothing under it. And her answer, since she had given it.

"You wrote that down."

"I write down what I'm told."

"I didn't tell you anything. I asked."

"That's the part worth keeping," said Emma. "Most people here already know what they think the fifth name is. You're the first one this year who's asked me what a question is for."