Scene 1

Oriel Fenwick (Human, novice of the Tideward Sisterhood)

Time: The survey's third year on Vellamar, by the Archive's reckoning; the week the court's line came to the Abbey
Location: The Abbeylands, Aduine — the scriptorium, the oldest shelf, and the terrace steps

The reciter came up the terrace steps at the midday office, which was wrong, and waited at the top of them until the office was over, which was right, and Oriel, who had been a novice for the length of a storm season, understood from the sisters' faces that this happened and that it did not happen often.

A reciter is a person who carries the chronicle. Oriel had grown up knowing that the way she knew the tide: the court kept its record by saying it, and the people who said it were reciters, and they came to the Abbey, her father had told her once, when there's a new bit, and she had thought he was joking. He had not been. The court cannot check itself. When a line is new, somebody carries it to the one record on the islands that is written down, and says it at the top of the steps, and the Abbey answers what the Accounting states.

This reciter was old and wet and had come from Ostrel by the first calm, and said the line standing, in the voice reciters use, which is not a speaking voice.

"A door was given, on Krilzat, in Pellam's time, on the right side past the ninth, and one stands in it."

He stopped.

The Abbess, who had come out with the book, which was not the Accounting, waited.

"That is the line," the reciter said, in his own voice. "There is no name. Pellam's youngest carried it back and there was no name to carry. The court asks whether the Accounting has the room."

"The Accounting has what it has," said the Abbess. "Come in out of the wind and I will have it looked for." And then, turning, in the voice she used for the thing she wanted done rather than discussed: "Fenwick. The Castle's count. Charter hand. The right side."

Oriel had not known the Accounting had a count of the Castle. Nobody had said. She went in to find it, with the whole of the scriptorium watching a novice go to a shelf, and the corrector who had never told her name moved aside from it without a word, which Oriel understood, by now, to be the Abbey's way of saying this is yours.

Discussion