Oriel Fenwick (Human, novice of the Tideward Sisterhood)

The Castle's count was a page like the island page: a list, in the hand, in the charter stratum where the ink had gone the colour of the sea. Rooms. The left side, and the right, each door a line, and beside most of the lines a name, and beside the name what the one in it did, in two or three words, the way the Accounting did everything.

She had learned to read the charter hand in a season, badly, the way you learn to walk on a terrace in the dark. She read down the right side with her finger not touching the page.

The ninth door past, right side. A room. One standing in it: Orrin, who waits.

And a date, in the Abbey's reckoning, which she could read now and which was before she was born, and before her mother was, and she did not go further back than that because the hand did not change and there was no way to tell from the hand how much further it went.

She stood at the shelf with the page and did the arithmetic the Abbess had taught her not to do, which was to put two records side by side in her head. The court said a door was given, in Pellam's time, this season, this storm, by a girl her own age who had carried the line across the water. The Accounting said the ninth door past, right side, a room, one standing in it, Orrin, who waits, in a hand nobody could date, on a page that had been on this shelf since before anyone now living on Aduine had been born.

The court said the door was new and the one in it had no name. The book said the door was always there and the one in it was Orrin.

She took the page to the Abbess, who was sitting with the reciter in the long room with the shutters open, and held it out, and the Abbess read it without taking it from her, which Oriel understood was so that the reciter could see that the Abbess had not touched it.

"The Accounting has it," the Abbess said to the reciter. "The ninth door past on the right side. A room, and one standing in it. It was always there."

The reciter said nothing for a moment, and then, carefully, in his own voice: "The chronicle says it was given."

"The chronicle may say so. The Accounting says it was there. Those are the two records, and they have said different things before, and neither of us has pressed it, and I do not expect the court to begin with a door." The Abbess looked at the page again, and Oriel saw her decide something. "The Accounting also has a name."

"The court has no name."

"Then the court has no name," said the Abbess, "and the Accounting has one, and you may carry back that the Accounting has one, and that the Abbey does not offer it, because it is the Accounting's and not the court's, and the court did not ask for it. The court asked whether the Accounting has the room. It has the room."