Oriel Fenwick (Human, novice of the Tideward Sisterhood)

At the evening office the novices stood at the back, on the terrace below the scriptorium, facing the water, and Oriel stood with them and did not know the words yet and did not pretend to.

The Abbess spoke them. The tide came in over the catchment stones the way it had been coming in all day and would all night, and nothing anyone said on the terrace made it come faster, and nothing anyone failed to say made it stop, and Oriel had known that since she could walk and had never once stood and looked at it on purpose. She looked at it now. It was the first thing all day that she had been told to do and had not got wrong.

Afterwards, going up, she found the Abbess at the top of the steps, which she had not expected, because she had been told the Abbess went to the book after the office and did not stop for novices.

"You asked how long," the Abbess said. "This morning. I said the Accounting does not say. That was true and it was not the answer. Ask me the other question. The one you have been carrying up the steps."

Oriel had not known she was carrying one until it was asked for.

"When did it begin?" she said. "The Accounting. The first hand. Nobody says. The court doesn't know and the Ranger won't guess and the sisters just say the hand. When did somebody first sit down and write it?"

"Nobody outside the order can say," said the Abbess. "You have heard that. The court has heard it. The delegation has heard it and filed it in whatever they file things in, at whatever height they file them."

"And inside?"

"Inside," said the Abbess, "it began this morning. When you sat down." She let that stand for the length of a wave. "It begins every morning, Fenwick. Every hand that has ever kept it was a novice's once, at a desk, with the ink not open, being told it would take longer than she liked. The first hand was a girl's. She is dead. Her line is on the shelf and yours will be under it, if you keep at it, and nobody will be able to tell them apart, and that is not because the book is old. The book is not old. The book does not get older. We do. That is what the hand is for."

The Abbess went in to the book.

Oriel stood at the top of the steps with the tide below her and the shutters open above her, and thought about a girl at a desk who had ruled a column and left it empty and written five names, and had not been the first either, and had sat where Oriel had sat and had not known how long, and had been told the Accounting did not say.

It did not say. It began every morning. Both were true, and she did not pick one, and went in.