Oriel Fenwick (Human, novice of the Tideward Sisterhood)

The reciter went down the steps at the evening office with the room and without the name, and Oriel stood tideward at the back with the novices and did not know the words yet and had stopped pretending otherwise, and the tide came in over the catchment stones the way it had come in on her first day, and nothing anyone said made it come.

Afterwards the Abbess did not go to the book. She stood at the top of the steps with the page in her hand, the loose one, the Castle's count, and when Oriel came up she gave it to her.

"Copy it," the Abbess said. "The right side. Tonight, before the light goes. In the hand. The ninth past, the room, the one standing in it, the name. You will not get it right and you will do it again tomorrow."

"It's the same page the court asked about."

"It is."

"The court said the door was given this season. You said it was always there. Both of you said it in front of me." Oriel heard her own voice doing the thing it did, going at a thing straight because she did not yet know how to go round it, and did not stop. "Which is true?"

The Abbess looked at her for as long as it had taken, that first morning, to finish a line.

"The court keeps a record of what was given," she said. "The Abbey keeps a record of what is there. Those are different records, Fenwick, and they are kept by different people for different reasons, and they have never once been the same record and were never meant to be, and the Kingdom has lived between them for longer than either can count. The court will say under the Grove that a door was given in Pellam's time. The Accounting will say the room was there. A girl carried the one line across the water and you carried the other page across a room, and you are both right, and neither of you has finished anything, and that is what a record is."

"And the Ranger wrote both down."

"The Ranger writes down what she is told. She was told two things. She will have written two things." The Abbess turned to go in. "Copy the page. Leave the column empty."

Oriel went in, and sat at the practice desk with the shutters still open and the light going grey off the water, and ruled the column, and left it empty, and wrote the ninth door past, and the room, and the one standing in it, and the name, in the hand, as it was written, so that nobody would be able to tell hers from the one that first wrote it, and got it wrong, and would do it again tomorrow.

Three records. One room. A door that was given and was always there and had someone standing in it for exactly as long as somebody held up a lamp.

She did not pick one. She was learning not to.