Chronicle: the cow at Reed Farm
Kept by the healing house. Written by Wren, with the names of those who helped.
The brown cow at Reed Farm stopped eating on the sixth day of Swarm. Dell found her standing in the reeds with her head low and her eyes wet. Her nose was dry. Her belly was tight and round on the left side.
Wren came on the seventh day, with Moss and the jar of willow bark, and a second jar of mint for the nose. Moss carried the jar. Moss weighed the dose by eye, and then weighed it again on the scale, and it was right both times.
The cow was given the bark in warm water, a measure every four hours, for three days. On the first day she refused it. On the second day she drank half and looked insulted. On the third day she drank all of it and ate a little clover, and then she lay down in the shade and sighed.
The bloat was eased by walking. Dell walked her round the yard, slowly, twenty times each morning and evening. Ann counted the turns on a stick. Oda's boy held the rope and sang to her. The cow did not like the song. She did not like the rope either.
On the eighth day the belly was soft. On the ninth day she ate a full bucket of mash. On the tenth day she was out in the far field, eating the clover that had grown too tall.
She is called Brownie, though she is not brown at all. She is grey on the back and white on the face. The children named her, a long time ago, and nobody remembers why.
Total cost: one jar of bark, one jar of mint, nine days of Moss's time, and three pints of the good cream. Dell says the cream was the most expensive part.
%%
Chronicle: spiders in the barn, 191
From the farm book of Tam, Kettle Ridge, kept a copy at Vell.

In the third of Melon we found spiders in the top barn. Not one or two. A nest of them behind the wheat sacks, with webs across the door and a lot of small ones running about.

Pip wanted to keep one in a jar. I said no. We lit torches all round the barn and along the hedge on the north side, and we swept the webs out with a birch broom. The hens came in and ate what fell. They were very pleased with themselves.

The wheat in that barn was fine. We lost two sacks to webs and gave them to the pigs.

Lesson for the book: keep the torches lit. We had let the north side go dark for a month because the wind kept blowing them out. Now we set them in a box of stone so the wind cannot reach them. It works.

Pip drew a spider in the margin. It has eight legs and a hat.
%%
A spring at Copperhold, year 203
Spring of 203, as the count board kept it, from the first day of Thaw to the last day of Blossom.

The shearing came first. Yarrow took the flock up the hill on the third of Sowing and brought them down on the sixth, cleaner and cross. He sheared 212 sheep, and the wool came to 60 bundles. The ram was the worst of them. Yarrow says the ram has learned the gate, and next year the gate will have to learn him.

Rain fell for nine days in Sowing. The shaft filled with a little water. The miners bailed for two days, then went up for a pie. The Deep Works never flooded. It only sulked.

A girl of six went missing on the fourth of Blossom. Her name was Nell. Her uncle searched all afternoon in the wrong direction, because she had told him she was going to the bakery, and she had not. She was found at dusk under the table in the count board room, asleep on a sack of coal. The clerk said it was the first time in forty years the board was not chalked, and that Nell had made a fine mess of it.

A school class from Three Wells came up the Long Road in a grey horse cart. They asked three questions and wrote the answers in their books. How deep is the Deep Works? Deeper than the count board can say. How many buckets are there? All of them. Why is the sorting shed so loud? Because the copper talks, and it is rude.

The children said it was the best day of their school year. The teacher said it was the best day of hers.

Count of the spring: 212 sheep, 60 bundles, 3 pies from the bakery, 0 lost children after dusk.
%%
Copperhold market book, spring of 208
Spring of 208. The market at Copperhold opened on the first of Blossom. The count board was chalked with the day's carts before anyone else was up.

Carts: 18 of copper, 7 of iron, 22 of coal. The water in the Deep Works is low on the second level and high on the sixth, as it is every spring. The miners have stopped complaining and started selling buckets.

Stalls: 45, four more than last spring. The kitchen at the mine gate bought forty loaves from Ida's cart. Ida then bought back two of her own loaves for her supper, at the price she had sold them for. The bakers of Three Wells say that is the way of the world.

The shaft head board had forty-two names on it in chalk when the day shift went down. Forty had been rubbed out when they came up. Two miners were still in the kitchen, arguing about a pie. They were rubbed out too, with a fine each.

The sorting shed has a new roof of spruce. Two men and one apprentice built it. The apprentice did most of the sawing. The men did most of the talking. The roof is very good.

Count of the day: 45 stalls, 18 carts of copper, 0 fights in the square, 2 fines in the kitchen.
%%
Chronicle: lights on the north road
Kept at Vell from the Northpoint letters, in Melon. Written by Oren, clerk. The letters came down by the relay, and the relay keepers wrote them in short, as they always do. Oren has copied the parts that agree, and marked the parts that do not.

From Northpoint, the keeper's letter of the twelfth day of the month: "Lights in the sky over the north lake, after dark. Three of them. Still, then moving. Then gone. Not stars. Not fire. Lantern saw them too."

A second letter from the same keeper, four days later: "Lights again. Less bright. Seen from the lamp room, as before. Lantern counts them. There are five now. I sent it to bed. It went, and then it came back up the stair to count again."

The relay keepers at Kettle Ridge and Ambrook say they saw nothing. The keeper at the Halfway Inn says he saw a light on the north road, low, moving very slowly, like a cart without a driver. Hobb says it was the moon on the ice. There is no ice in Melon.

A child at Three Wells wrote to the archive that the lights were looking at us. She is nine, and her letter is very neat. Oren has filed it with the others. He does not know what to do with it except to keep it.

Mira, when asked, wrote back one line only: "They were not ours." She did not write anything else, and nobody has asked her a second time, because the relay keeper does not like to be asked twice.

Some of the tutors at Vell say the lights are a trick of the air over the lake. Some of the miners say they are the same as the warm stone in the deep. Some of the people on the Long Road say they are falling stars, and that the stars fall north because the north is the way the wind goes. Oren has written all of these down, and has marked each one as a rumor, because that is what they are.
%%
Chronicle: the 161st year, Three Wells
Kept at Vell from the notes of Dunn, baker of Three Wells. Summer.

In the 161st year the market at Three Wells grew to forty stalls. The old count was thirty-one. The new stalls stand by the east well, where the bakery is. Dunn baked two hundred loaves each market day and sold them all by noon. The bell was rung twice for the first time.
%%
Chronicle: the bees swarm at Three Wells
Kept at the Halfway Inn by Lise, cheesemaker, for the Archive.
In Blossom of 188 the bees of the mill hives at Three Wells swarmed three times in one week. Nobody in the town could remember that happening before. The first swarm went up from the east well and settled in the bakery yard, on the rope that holds the sign. The second went up from the bridge and settled on the school roof. The third came up out of the hive behind the inn, went round the chimney twice, and then flew off toward the Long Road, where we lost it.
The bakery swarm was taken down by Ida's boy, who was stung on the ear and sent home. The school swarm was taken down by Holt the smith, who held a sieve over his head and a pot in his arms and was not stung at all. The inn's swarm was never found. Hobb says it went to the hollow tree at the crossroads, and he has left a pot of honey on the stump for it to find.
The town had a storm the same week, on the fourth day of the swarming. It came up from the marsh in the afternoon and blew for an hour. Roofs were lifted. The new sign on the north well fell down. The bees that were still in the air went into the storm, and the bees on the roofs went under the eaves. The storm took the bell rope from the school and left the bell.
By evening the sky was clear, and the swarms were settled, and the smiths were mending the sign. Nobody was killed. Eleven people were stung. The bakery bread that morning was very good, because Ida said the storm had made her cross.
%%
Chronicle: the Hollin boat, late home
Kept at the Brown Hen on the Long Road from the telling of the Saltreach fishers who came up the road in the snow, and written down by Tilly the ferry keeper. Winter of the 184th year.

The Hollin boat is a small fishing boat of oak, with one sail and two oars. It went out from Saltreach on the morning of Frost, with three men aboard. They were to be home by dark.

Dark came. The boat did not.

The quay lamps were lit at the harbor wall. The women of the fishers' street walked down to the quay in their shawls and stood by the wall, watching the water. The wind came off the sea and was very cold. Nobody went home.

At the second hour after dark, the boat came round the point. Its sail was torn, and one oar was gone. The three men were holding on to the sides, looking very pale. The fishers on the quay ran down the steps and into the shallows to haul the boat in.

The men were wet through, and very quiet. One of them, Gil, had a cut on his brow. Another had lost his hat. The third, the youngest, wanted only to know if the fish were all right. They were. They had caught nine cod, and the boat had kept them dry under the seat.

The fishers' wives took the men up to the fire at the inn. There was soup, and hot bricks wrapped in cloth for the feet. Corin came with a lantern and said the boat would need a new sail and a new oar, and no one should go out again until the wind had settled.

Gil told the story the next morning. The wind had turned on them off the point. They had kept the boat straight by pulling on the one oar, and they had sung the fishing song, the one they all know, to keep the rhythm. They said the singing kept them warm. It also kept the others from feeling scared.

They say they will go out again in Thaw. They say the boat is the same boat. Only the sail is new.
%%
Chronicle: Notes from the House
In the 203rd year, the house at the edge of Northpoint had a new apprentice. Its name was Tin, though no one knew who first said it. Tin had iron hands and copper plates over its chest. Its mind was held in a small crystal, and it learned from the cards Lantern gave it.
Lantern tested it in the yard before giving it any work. The first card showed a basket and a path. Tin carried the basket to the shed, then stayed there until Lantern called it back.
The next card showed kindling beside the stove. Tin brought the kindling indoors and put it in the wood box. It also brought in a loose plank, a broom, and one of Mira's boots.
"That is enough for today," Mira said.
The boot was returned after dinner. The plank went back to the step. The broom was useful, so Mira did not complain.
Tin learned the house from small jobs. It carried water when the path was clear. It stayed beside the shed when told to stay. It brought Mira's coat when she asked for it. It brought every coat in the house when the words were not clear.
Mira wrote the orders on separate cards. Lantern put each card in the dry box after use. On the lid, Mira wrote, "One card at a time."
Spring chores began with the roof and the garden. Tin hauled spruce boards to the north wall. Lantern held one end while Mira fixed the other. When the board slipped, Tin held it steady. Nobody fell. This was counted as a good morning.
At noon, they ate bread and honey. Tin had no need to eat, but Lantern set a small plate beside it anyway. Mira said the plate could hold nails. It held nails for the rest of the day.
%%
The Song at the Fish Weir
In the 188th year, the people of Lowmarsh held a song contest beside the fish weir. It was in spring, after the reeds had been cut and before the frogs grew loud.

Yarrow brought a basket of eggs to sell. The basket stood beside the boardwalk, under a cloth. Wren brought cups of honey water for the singers. The first prize was a jar of honey. The second prize was a warm wool scarf.

Seven people sang. Hett sang about a boat that went in a circle. Wren sang a quiet song about a sick child who got well. A reed cutter sang four verses about mud, then forgot the fifth verse and sang it twice.

Yarrow sang a song about hens. It began, "A hen has one small egg to lay." The crowd joined in at the next line, though Yarrow had not taught it to anyone. That made Yarrow forget the rest.

The judges gave the honey to Hett. The boat song had a good chorus, and everyone knew how to row in a circle by the end. Wren won the scarf. The judges said her song was the clearest.

Yarrow received no prize. Yarrow sold 19 eggs and traded one for a cup of honey water. At dusk, the singers carried the benches back to the boardwalk. Hett sang the chorus all the way home.
%%
A Lesson in the Snow
Nessa to the apprentices

The reading mind reads one letter at a time. It keeps a short window of letters beside the letter it must guess. The window is about sixty letters wide.

The letters before the new one may matter. A mark from a line far back may matter too, if it is still in the window. The mind uses what it has read to guess the next letter.

It does not look ahead and find the answer. It makes a guess. Then it reads the next letter and learns whether the guess was right.

We gave it a page about snow at Northpoint. It guessed the word fox before the line was done. There had been foxes in the lines before. It had learned that foxes often came near snow and doors.

It did not know there was a real fox at the tutor house. One was asleep beneath the wood bench. Lantern found it there, curled beside her boots.

The mind finished the page with a sound guess. The fox woke when we read it aloud, and left by the open door.
%%
Chronicle, the fourth year, the roof
Written by Una, roofer, in the fourth year, with the cold coming up the Long Road behind the carts.

The first snow of the fourth year came on the eleventh of Leaffall, a week before the clerks expected it. It came in the middle of my work. I was up the ladder with the last slates, and the carter went home at once.

The fourth helper was sent down the Long Road that week, to carry for the roof. It carried forty slates up the ladder, one at a time, and set them in rows, in the order I called them. It did not stop when the snow came. It waited by the ladder for the next slate, the way a man waits for his dinner.

The fifth helper was drilled at Vell in the same year. The clerks call it the new apprentice, because it is the first made after the four. It was sent to the inn to carry water for the stable, two buckets at a time.

Slates laid: 140. Slates broken: 6. Slates the snow took: 3. The roof holds. The carter came back in spring and asked whether the new apprentice was good at ladders. I said yes. He said he would not believe me until he had seen it.
%%
Northpoint market, spiders in the barn
Kept by Wynn, cook at the tower kitchen. The barn is across the yard from the big house, and the spiders have taken both.

Spiders in the barn: forty-one this morning, counted by the boy who sweeps. They are fat, slow and polite. They sit in the corners of the hay and wait for the cats, who will not wait for them. The cats have given up. The cook has not. She swept nine webs, and the spiders moved to the other corners, which is how spiders say thank you.

The big house has a kind of spider of its own, which is the quickener. A quickener is a cold box of copper rings. Many stand round the stand of the house, and they must be kept cool with water in a trough, or with ice cut from the mill pond, or with snow, if there is enough. Hot quickeners make the house slow. Cold ones let it think quickly. The kitchen carries the water in, and that is the part of the job I do not like.

The barn spiders like the warm wall beside the big house, where the quickeners give off a little heat. So the spiders go to the wall, the boy sweeps them off, and they come back in the morning. I have decided to let them stay.
%%
Chronicle: Three Wells, winter 172
Kept at Vell, from the notice board of Three Wells. The bell at the crossroads cracked in the frost on the first night of Deepsnow. It rang once more, flat as a plank. Six people and a horse took it to Copperhold on a sledge. A new bell was cast there in Thaw and came home on the same sledge. It was first rung at the spring fair, by the oldest woman in the town, who said it sounded younger than she did.
%%
Chronicle: a cave under a field
Kept at Vell, from the letters of Cleo of Saltreach. Summer, the 17th year of the archive.
A farmer on the hills above Saltreach, Garrick, put his plough into the ground one summer morning and the earth fell in. He went down with it, up to his belt. When he climbed out, he saw a hole the size of a barn door, and under it, a cave.
Garrick sent his son down the road to Cleo. Cleo came up with a lantern and her apprentice, a girl named Fenn. They went in on a rope.
The cave was long and cool and dry. The walls were pale. There were stones that hung from the roof like icicles, and others that grew up from the floor to meet them. A stream ran across the back, and fell into a hole too deep to see the bottom. The air smelled of rain.
Cleo found sand on the floor, fine and white. She took a handful. She said it was the finest she had ever seen.
She and Fenn mapped the cave in one day. It had three rooms, joined by narrow gaps, and it went on a long way under Garrick's potatoes.
Garrick wanted to fill the hole. Cleo said no, and persuaded him. Instead he built a wooden door with a lock. The cave became the cold store of Saltreach. Fish are kept there in summer, and it never spoils them.
Garrick still ploughs the field. He ploughs around the door.
%%
Chronicle: the Halfway Inn, 170 to 171
Kept at Vell from the travelers' book and Pell's count.

The Halfway Inn has eighteen beds, a riddle board by the door and a hearth that has not gone out in twenty years.

The riddle board changes every Melon. This year's riddle was: I have a mouth but never speak, and a bed but never sleep. What am I? A girl from Ambrook, nine years old, sat by the hearth for an hour and worked it out. The answer is a river. She wrote it on the board in chalk, and the keeper let it stay.

In Thaw of 171 the Ambrook stream came over the road at the third bridge. Two carts stuck for three days. One carried pickled beetroot, and its carter has never forgiven the stream.

The keeper, Abel, fed the forty people stuck at the bridge. He used the whole soup pot twice, and a sack of flour that Pell carried over by hand.

By Melon the bridge was new, built of oak with a rail on each side. The rail is on the north side only. The carters say this was a mistake. Abel says the north is the side the wind pushes from, so it is the side that needs the rail.
%%
Copperhold, east side
A woman named Odda built the house at the edge of Copperhold, where the town stops and the hill goes on. She was a roofer before Brin, and Brin learned from her.
The house is low and long. The roof is the good part. Odda laid it herself, of deep stone slate, and every tile sits tight. People walk up from the town to look at it.
Odda kept bees in the yard. She had four hives and a small garden and a cat called Nub, who was old and sat on the warm roof stones in the afternoon.
When Odda got slow, Brin came up every week with bread and news. Brin took over her work, and then her house, and then her bees.
Brin says the roof is the reason the bees stay. It is warm and it does not leak. The bees agree.
%%
Chronicle of the House and the School
In the 188th year of the Archive, Hob's house at the edge of Vell became a place where children came after their lessons. The tutor's house was just down the hill, but Hob had a broad table and a yard with room to draw.

The children brought boards and chalk. They drew a field, a road and a wall on the boards. Hob showed them how to mark a ditch through a field and leave space for water. One child drew a ditch uphill. Hob asked where the water would go. The child said it could ask the hill.

They made a wall from small stones. The first wall fell when a rabbit crossed the yard. The second stood until Bel's little brother sat on it. The third had a broad base and stayed up. Hob said this was the best lesson, though it had cost him three walls.

In the same summer, the Archive clerk Oren came to inspect Hob's old stone marks. He brought a list of houses near the road. Hob showed him the well, the bench and the repaired roof. Oren wrote each thing down, then asked how many children had used the table.

Hob said, "Enough to eat all the bread."

Oren wrote the number as twelve. Hob said the number was ten, unless the two who came for bread counted as students. Oren counted them. They had both drawn a very fine potato.
%%
Chronicle: the big mind, 201
Kept at the relay house at the edge of Copperhold, in the 201st year of the archive. Written by Hazel, keeper of the relay, who has been asked to keep the year's count for the council, and has added a few things they did not ask for.
The big mind came up the road in Sowing, on a cart with a cover over it, with four men walking beside and one walking behind to check that the first four were walking. It was packed in straw, in a crate the size of a bread oven. The crate weighed more than the cart. The cart was not pleased.
The crystal in it is the size of a loaf. It sits on its stand at the foot of the tower, on the stone floor of the relay house, where the old cold cellar used to be. The stand was built by the mason from Three Wells in two weeks. It is grey and square, with a groove along the top for the cables. The council says the groove is for the lamp. Hazel says it is for the mind.
Round the mind are the quickeners, twelve cooling pots, each the size of a barrel, each filled with water in the summer, ice in the winter, and snow when there is nothing better. The water is changed every morning. The ice is cut from the mill pond in Frost and packed in the cellar under straw. In Longday the quickeners need a block a day. In Frost they need one a week.
The mind answers the apprentices who come to the relay house with their orders. It answers through the line, from tower to tower, and the answer comes back in a few heartbeats. Hazel has counted. In the first month the mind answered 2,206 orders from the apprentices on the Copperhold roads and in the mine, and 411 questions from the carters about the road.
In Frost the big mind was the only thing in the house that was warm. The old cold cellar became a room with a stove, and the cats came to sleep in it, which the council did not allow and nobody could stop.
A letter came from Vell in Blossom, asking whether the relay house could spare a quicketer for the Archive, which has a cold room of its own and wants to keep the paper dry. The answer was yes. The quicketer was sent, and it is still in the Archive's cellar, cooling the deep shelves. Oren writes to say it is the best thing the Archive has had since its first clerk.
The mill below the house has turned all year. Hazel's own tally, for the year, is: torches lit, 3,310. Torches out, none. She is proud of the none, and says the torches did the work and she only walked round them.
Hazel
%%
Lowmarsh chronicle: the spring's end
Sent to the Archive at Vell by Vale, keeper of the marsh tower. The last entries of the spring, and what the marsh was saying by the end of it.

Three families took the sea road from the marsh to Saltreach, with carts loaded, to wait at the harbor for a boat that would take them across. The Holts, the Brens, and Old Ivo's household, eleven people in all. They paid their accounts at the marsh shop before they left. The shopkeeper says he had never been paid in full before, and did not like the feeling.

Saltreach builds big ships now. The shipwright Corin says they are three times as long as any boat on the marsh. He says they are for the crossing. When Vale asked what the crossing was for, Corin said he did not know, and that the harbor clerk had asked him the same thing and had been given the same answer.

Nobody knows what is across the water. The fishers say it is more water, and the children say it is the edge.

A miner's wife came up from the Deep Works on the spring cart. She said the deep stone hums at night now, a low sound that comes up through the boards of the house. The miners stop going below a certain level, which is marked by a rope, and the rope is new. The stone under her house is warm to the hand. She did not say why. This is rumor, and it is marked as rumor.

The grey cough, which was in the marsh at the start of spring, is now in two houses. Wren says it is going the way it came, but she does not smile when she says so. Some blame the water, some the ships, some the mines. Vale writes all three again.

A letter came up the Long Road from Vell in Frost. It was in Oren's hand, under the seal. It says the archive is to be shut and sealed, every shelf behind its door, and that everything must be written down before the seal goes on. It says the order is hard for Oren to give, and does not say why. Vale has copied the letter into the chronicle, word for word.

The bread at the marsh shop is good. Eels came up the channel at the end of Blossom, and the children ate them with their hands.

The lamp on the marsh tower has been lit every night, and Vale has written the time of each lighting in the book. The water stood level at the second post in the last week of the spring, where it had stood for some days. Nobody can say why it stopped going down. The chronicle records that it stopped, and leaves the reason open.
%%
Chronicle: the tally of 207
Kept by Hesk, for the Archive at Vell, from the count at the hamlet mill. A year is counted from the first day of Thaw to the last day of Deepsnow. This tally is the count of the things the hamlet has, at the end of the year, and not the things it wished for.

Households: 34. Children under twelve: 61. Children at the school, which opened at the first bell in Sowing: 44.
Cows: 19. Pigs: 27. Sheep: 88. Hens: 210, of which 7 are old, and 3 have names.
Hives: 11. Honey, in jars: 340. Wax, in blocks: 46.
Wheat, in sacks: 980. Beetroot, in carts: 410. Potatoes, in sacks: 260. Apples, in barrels: 74.
Cider, in barrels: 31. Wool, in balls: 205. Eggs, sold at the market: 1,140 by count, and nine broken on the road.

Hesk certifies this count, which he made himself, and which is correct to the sack. Oren has asked for the eggs to be counted twice. They have been. The number is the same.
%%
Chronicle: The New Road
In the 169th year of the archive, folk made a new road from the farm outside Three Wells to the south fields.
The old track crossed a wet patch. Carts sank there after rain, and one cart stayed stuck for three days. The farmer said it had become part of the field.
The new road was packed earth, with cobblestone along the edge. The people laid a bridge of oak over the stream. They put a torch on a post every twelve blocks.
Bel's aunt carried lunch to the workers. She brought bread, carrots, and a pot of beetroot soup. The soup was gone before the bridge was finished.
When the road opened, Dace walked it with the farmer. He counted the posts twice. The farmer counted them once and said that was enough.
%%
Chronicle: the lamp that broke, 186
Kept at Vell, from the letters of the keeper at Northpoint.
In the winter of 186 the signal lamp at Northpoint cracked in a night of ice. Mira's mother kept the tower then, and Mira was a girl of twelve. The lamp room was dark for four nights.
Messages to the south went on foot. A farmer from the farm below the tower, Aldo, went down the north road with a torch and a bag of letters, and walked to the next tower, a day and a half away. He did it twice. His feet were black with cold. The keeper there gave him broth.
On the fifth day a new pane came by sled from Vell, packed in straw. The sled was drawn by four horses and three men. It took nine days from the day the message was sent. The pane was set in by Mira's mother, who would not let anyone else climb. Mira held the ladder.
The lamp was lit again on the fourteenth of Longnight. From Vell, the watchers said it looked like a new star.
From that winter the towers kept a spare pane in the lamp room, wrapped in straw, in a box. Northpoint keeps two. Mira says that is one too many, and that she is very glad of it.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, 154
Reedbank is a small hamlet east of Ambrook. Tansy, the midwife, gave this account to Vell.

In the summer of 154, four children were born at Reedbank. Two were born before the noon meal, and two after. All four cried loudly. Tansy says this made her work easy to count.

Mara's baby was a girl. Mara named her Hazel. Her brother brought Tansy a bowl of apples, then ate one before he reached the door.

A cow calved in the same week. The calf stood at once and tried to drink from the wrong cow. The right cow called until it found its own calf.

The hamlet has nine houses, one well, and a footbridge over the mill stream. The bridge has a loose board. Tansy says she has warned everyone. Everyone says they know.

In summer, the bees work the apple flowers. Tansy keeps a jar of honey for coughs and a smaller jar for her own bread.
%%
Chronicle: one row, one sort
Kept at the Brown Hen, from the old books of the Vell drill room, copied by Tilly for the drovers who ask what the apprentices were before the great drills. Winter.

In the early years, apprentices were few, and each one was taught one thing. This is how it was done, as the tutors wrote it.

A tutor took a crystal and gave it one kind of drill. A row of carts, all the same, to be counted. A bin of grain, to be sorted by weight. A field, to be walked and checked. Each drill had a card with the right answer on the back.

The tutor showed the crystal the cards, one after another. The crystal guessed. The tutor said right or wrong. When the guesses were nearly always right, the tutor took the crystal out of the drill room and gave it to the town that had asked for it.

The crystal could do that one thing very well. It could not do two things. If you asked it to count the carts and sort the bins, it would do one, then stop and wait for you to say which was next.

This is why most towns had none. A town could not afford a crystal for each small job. It had to choose. Three Wells chose a row. Ambrook chose the apple sort. Kettle Ridge chose the wheat.

The tutors did not like this. They said it was like owning a fine knife and using it only to cut bread. But the crystals could not be taught more than one thing at a time, not yet. The tutors wrote that down too, and they kept writing it, year after year.

Some of the old tutors said the crystals might learn more if they were shown more. Others said the crystals had all they needed. The argument is written in the book at Vell, and it does not end there.
%%
Chronicle: the mind that knew everything
From the chronicle kept at Vell, about the 120th year. Copied at the market at Saltreach by Rye, candle maker.
Ossa, a tutor at Three Wells, drilled a sorting mind on 200 cards, each with a drawing of an apple or a pear. She drilled it all winter, and tried it on the same 200 cards. It sorted every one right.
Ossa carried the crystal to Vell, very pleased. A tutor named Lenn said, "Give it a card it has not seen."
She gave it ten new cards, a pear with a bruise among them. It was right five times in ten, which is what a guess is worth.
Ossa sat down on the stairs. The chronicle gives her words. "It knew what I showed it. It did not know what I did not show it. These are different things, and I had mistaken the one for the other."
Ever since, the tutors at Vell ask one question: what has it never been drilled on?
%%
The Halfway Inn, the year's chronicle
Kept by Teague, innkeeper, for the Archive at Vell, in the order of the seasons. No year is written here, as the old keepers did not write one either.

Thaw: the road was soft and the carts were slow. The bridge at the river bend was mended with new oak, which is stronger and dearer. Moll, the bridge keeper, came up to the inn for a cup of tea and complained about the price of oak. She paid for the tea in emeralds, all six of them, from the purse she had kept in the bridge house all winter.

Sowing: a carter from Lowmarsh stayed three nights with a cough he could not put down. He said the cough was going round the reed beds. The fishers were blaming the water, the carters were blaming the ships, and the mine men were blaming the mines. He said everyone blamed something. Teague wrote it down as a rumor, with the four names beside it.

Blossom: the riddle board was changed, as it is each year. The new riddle is about the road: What goes away from you and always comes back? A child at the hearth shouted the answer all afternoon, and was right, and would not stop shouting.

Swarm: the bees from the Ambrook carts swarmed on the inn's sign board, and the board said HALFWAY under a crowd of bees for a whole day. Teague says it was a fine sign, and that the bees agreed with him.

Reaping: a traveler from the north asked for a bed and a bowl and told nobody what he had seen. He paid in full and left before dawn.

Apple: a new fence went up at the back of the inn, of birch, to keep the cows out of the herb bed. The cows have not read the fence. They come through it at dusk.

Frost: the first night of the long cold. The hearth was built high. An apprentice came up the road from the tutors, sent to carry bags. It stood in the yard in the snow and did not come in. It had been told to keep the fields until the tutors came back, and it was keeping them. Teague gave it bread through the door. It took the bread and went back up the road.

Longnight: the inn is full. Eleven beds. Twelve if the one by the window is counted, which Teague does not.

Deepsnow: the book is closed for the year. The hearth has not gone out. The riddle board is turned to the wall, and Teague will not say why.
%%
Letter: Abel to his sister in Ambrook
Dear Fenn,
The snow came early this year. It is up to the second rung of the tower ladder. I have not been down to the boats since Longnight and the boats have not missed me.
The lamp is still crooked. I look at it every night and it looks back. I have decided to keep it. A crooked lamp is still a lamp.
The salt farm has a new dog. It is a small brown thing and it barks at the gulls. It does not bark at me. I think we have an understanding.
Tell mother the honey was very good. Tell her I will come at Thaw if the road is clear. Tell her not to send more socks. I have eleven socks and one of them is not mine.
Your brother, Abel.
P.S. Rill came up the tower on the last day of Deepsnow. He wanted to see the lamp lit from the inside. I let him turn the line. He was very serious about it. He is a good boy. He has stopped running off, I think. Or he has found a better hill.
%%
Chronicle: the swarm at the mill pond
Kept at Vell from the Ambrook book, in Swarm. Written by Oren, clerk, from the account of the miller's daughter, who was twelve and wanted it on the record that she was not frightened.

The hive by the mill pond swarmed on the fourth day of the month. It went up in a long brown cloud, very loud, and settled in the willow over the sluice. The whole village came out to watch. Nobody had ever seen a swarm that high before.

Jory said to leave it. Ama said to take it, now, before it moved. They argued in the lane, politely, the way old friends do. The miller's daughter climbed the wall with a box and a spoon, and knocked the swarm into the box, and had nine stings on one arm by dinner.

The bees went into the box. The box went into the cool shed. The queen was found in the middle of the cluster by Ama, who said so very quietly, as though the queen might change her mind.

The sluice was not touched. Jory asked that it be written down that it was not touched by anyone, and that the water in the pond was the same level as before the swarm, which the miller's daughter had checked with a stick.

There was talk after, at the mill, of the lights in the north. Some people said the bees went up because of the lights. Others said the lights were only the sun on the glass of the north tower, which carries its lamp higher than any tower on the road. The daughter says she did not see any lights. Her arm says it was the bees.

Notes: Ama has a second box ready for the next swarm. Jory has asked everyone to keep the sluice shut, as always.
%%
Chronicle: Winter Market, 154
In the winter of 154, Greer kept the ferry at Ambrook. The market stood beside the mill pond. Ice held to the shady bank, but the ferry rope stayed clear.

Pell brought six sacks of salt and sold five. He kept the last for his own soup. A beekeeper brought two jars of honey. One jar went to Dace for the school shelf.

A child named Enna ran off from the market. Her mother found her behind the apple stall, counting the apples under it. She had counted seventeen and wanted to know who dropped the smallest one.

The ferry carried nine people home before dusk. Greer carried the smallest apple too. Enna ate it on the crossing.
%%
Chronicle: the first contest
From the chronicle kept at Vell. The year is about 158. The tutors disagree by three years, and on who proposed it.
Before the contest, every hall claimed the best mind. Each hall had its own drills and its own scores, and the scores were always good. Vell said 91 in 100. Copperhold said 94. Three Wells said 96, and added that it could have done better if the weather had been cooler.
Somebody asked: "On whose drill?"
Everyone saw the trouble. Each hall had scored its mind on the same pages it had drilled it on. No score could be compared with any other.
So the halls agreed to a contest at Vell. Each would bring its best mind. Each mind would be tested on the same drill, and no hall would have seen the drill before. The clerks opened a sealed box in front of everyone and read.
The scores. Vell, 41 in 100. Copperhold, 47. Three Wells, 38. Lowmarsh brought a small mind in a bucket of reeds, and it got 29.
The room was quiet for a long time. Then a tutor from Copperhold said, "So we are not as good as we said." A tutor from Vell said, "Nor as bad as we feared. We have the real number now."
The contest did not make the minds better. It made the tutors honest. In ten years every hall's mind had improved, because every hall knew how far it had to go.
%%
Chronicle: The Broken Wheel, 163
In the winter of 163, the wheel at Jory's mill broke during the first hard frost. One birch spoke split, and the wheel stopped with its lower edge in the pond.

Jory tied a red cloth to the mill door so no one would try the sluice. Greer helped bring a plank from the ferry shed. Pell brought a hammer, then remembered he had lent it to Tam of Kettle Ridge.

The market stayed open beside the pond. People bought apples, carrots, and honey while Jory fitted a new spoke. His apprentice held the lantern. The apprentice did not hold it still, so Jory asked for Greer instead.

By the third day the wheel turned again. It made one loud knock each time the new spoke passed the mill wall. Jory said the sound was a fair price for good work.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, 207
This account was sent to the Archive at Vell by Tansy and the mill keeper.

Reedbank had twelve houses in the summer of 207. The old well was still clear. The bridge was sound, though one board had begun to creak again. Jori said it was only the board speaking. Mara said boards do not speak. Jori said this one had good reason.

The apple crop was smaller than last year, but the honey crop was good. The beekeeper filled twenty jars. She kept one for the school at Three Wells and gave one to Tansy. Tansy put it on a high shelf. Her youngest grandchild found the shelf.

Two apprentices came from Ambrook to help move flour from the mill store. One carried each sack to the cart. They worked carefully and made no spills. The mill keeper weighed the sacks before and after. The count matched.

One child asked if the apprentices could carry a whole house. The mill keeper said no. The child asked if they could carry the cat. The cat had already gone home by itself.

There were two births in Reedbank that summer. Both mothers were well. Tansy wrote the names in the town book, then washed the ink from her fingers at the well.

At the last gathering, Mara served apple cake. Jori cut it into twelve pieces. There were thirteen people at the table, so he cut one piece in half. The cat received neither half.
%%
Chronicle of the year 205
Kept at Vell. From the farm's tally board, the tower log of Abel, and letters from Pell and Dace.
In 205 the salt farm held its own fair. It was not the fair at Three Wells. It was smaller. There were three stalls and a horse and a great deal of fish.
The farm did it because the barley was in and the barn was full and the folk needed something to do before the snow. Abel said the tower would keep the lamp lit all night and it did, and people came up the hill to see it.
What the fair cost the farm:
Two emeralds for the rope for the horse race.
One emerald for the prize, a jar of honey from Ambrook, sent by cart.
Nothing for the stew. Everyone brought something. There were eleven pots of stew and none of them were the same.
What the fair brought in:
One emerald and a half from the stalls.
A barrel of fish from Saltreach, which is a gift, not money, but it is still a gain.
A new plank for the bridge, given by the boat yard, which the farm needed and did not ask for.
The farm was one emerald down and had eleven pots of stew left over. Abel said that is a good fair.
In the horse race the horse was called Gull and it was old and slow and it won because it was the only horse. The rider was Rill. He was given the honey. He did not share it. His mother said a word to him and he shared it. Abel wrote the whole thing down and said it was a lesson about winning.
In Frost the lamp broke a fourth time. This time it was the relay line at the foot of the tower, where the wire had rubbed on the stone. Abel found it because the signal came slow and then not at all. He sat at the foot of the tower in the snow with a lantern and mended it. He wrote: I am getting good at this. I would rather not be.
At the year's end the farm had a new bridge plank, a barrel of fish, and a boy who had learned to share his honey. Abel had a mended line and a log that was getting long. He wrote: the tower stands. The snow is deep. The crooked pane is still in the box. All well.
%%
Chronicle: forty years at Fordside
Sent to Vell by Tilly, horse keeper of Fordside, outside Lowmarsh. Spring of 190. Vell asked farms for the story of an age. I was born here in the spring of 150 and have not been far. This is mine.

150. Born at Fordside, in the barn, on a cold night. Six horses on the farm. My mother says the horses were more interested.
152. My grandfather Orrin builds an oak bridge over the ford. The wet autumn washes it away. He builds it again. It stays.
157. Orrin buys Lark from Cade of Ambrook. Grey, and she never walked when she could trot.
159. Lark's first foal. We call it Pebble. Pebble is sold to Saltreach and pulls a fish cart to this day, or its grandchildren do.
163. The great flood. The water came to the barn doors, and the horses stood on the hill for three nights. Nobody was lost. The barn roof was. We learned to build the barn a pace higher.
166. A relay lamp is lit at Lowmarsh. We can see it from the yard. My father says now we will know the news a day sooner, and still do nothing about it.
168. A late snow in Blossom. Four foals born in one night, in the kitchen, the barn and the lane. All lived.
171. Orrin dies in the autumn, aged seventy-four. Fourteen horses at Fordside. Wet spring, three foals.
172. My father Ned takes the farm. He sells four horses and buys one, and says it is the best trade he ever made.
175. The marsh road is laid to the ford, with a stone edge. Carts stop sinking. The cart makers of Three Wells are said to be sorry.
178. Lark dies, aged thirty, a great age. She is buried on the hill above the ford. The children left a carrot on the grave. A horse ate it. We let that go.
181. I marry Kell, a cart maker from Three Wells. He mends our carts for nothing and our fences for tea.
183. My daughter Ivy is born in the same barn as I was. The horses were interested.
185. My father dies. I take the farm.
187. A wet year. The hay rots. We sell six horses to buy hay, and buy four back when it dries.
189. The first horse race at the Three Wells autumn fair. Our grey mare Dusk comes third. The first two are from Saltreach, and we are told not to complain.
190. This chronicle. Eleven horses, four foals this spring, a ford with a sound bridge, and a debt that is paid. See my other page.
%%
Chronicle: Spring at the Farm
In the 154th year of the archive, the farm outside Three Wells planted carrots beside the east fence.
Bel was not born yet. This note was copied from the farm book.
The spring rain filled the ditch. The hens walked in it and looked surprised.
Mara planted six rows. Her brother planted seven, then forgot where the rows ended.
They shared the first carrots with the school.
The school sent back a loaf of bread.
%%
The First Relay House at Gullbank
Chronicle kept by Odo, tutor of apprentices, and copied at Vell.

In spring of 195, Isla of Vell came to Gullbank with a rule for planning minds. The hamlet had a harbor wall, a boat shed, a net room, and one relay tower above the sea road. Its keeper was Sella. She had worked the signal lamp for twelve years.

Odo had seven apprentices then. Two carried fish baskets. One pulled a cart along the harbor path. The others tended no work beyond their drill boards.

Isla asked to see their crystals and cards. Odo brought them from the dry box. He had kept a tally of the pages used and the hours of drilling. Isla compared that tally with the work of each mind.

She said a tutor could draw a curve from such trials. A larger crystal could hold a larger mind. More good writing and longer drills could help it grow. The curve gave a tutor a guess about the gain before the mind was made.

She was careful about the guess. It did not tell the tutor what a mind would answer. It did not make a poor page useful. It did not say that a mind had learned well just because it had seen many pages.

Isla asked Odo to keep test pages apart from drill pages. The clerks at Vell would remove copies and spoiled records before sending a set. Every new mind would face pages it had never been drilled on.

The council met in the harbor shed. Sella wanted a new roof on the relay house. A keeper needed a dry place for the stand and the crystal. The council agreed to raise the house beside the tower, using stone below and glass at the top.

A mason asked whether the great crystal should be kept near the sea. Isla said she had no answer about salt air. The council chose a room above the harbor, away from spray, and told the mason to seal the window well.

The first relay house took most of the year to build. The work crew carried stone up the hill by hand. Sella counted each load and marked the count on a board. When the roof was done, she asked for a chair by the keeper's desk. The council gave her one.

In Reaping, the large mind arrived in a padded box. It stood on a wooden stand. The quickeners around it were kept cool with water and snow. Odo sent the first set of pages through the relay, then waited for the test.

The mind sorted its test cards better than the small harbor mind. It still put two fish records in the wrong pile. Isla told Odo to write both facts down. She said a good result should not hide a wrong one.

Sella gave Isla honey and a copper spoon for the journey home. Odo put the spoon in the drill room, beside the box of clean cards. It is still there. The apprentices say it brings luck. Odo says it brings tea.
%%
Rumors of the biggest houses
Kept by Wynn, cook at the tower kitchen, through the long nights of Longnight. The market had a great deal to say. The cook wrote it down, and then the market said the opposite. Both are here.

The first rumor. The biggest house, on the far side of the sea, can hold a whole town in its stand. It is ringed by quickeners as high as the walls of Vell, and its water comes from a lake that does not freeze. Every letter sent along every line passes through it. Those who say this add that it has never once been wrong.

The second rumor. The biggest house is no bigger than the Northpoint house, but it is older, and it has been drilled longer. A house drilled longer is not wiser, the old carter says. It is only more tired of being wrong. He says it answers in a short voice, and that the tutors who check it go home quiet.

The third rumor. The biggest house cannot do a simple sum on the slate. It can write a whole page in one breath, and the page is beautiful, and it is wrong about the weather. A woman from Lowmarsh says her cousin asked it the date of the first frost. It wrote a long letter about the frost and gave no date.

The fourth rumor. Nobody has been to the biggest house. The roads to it are long, and nobody who went has written about it yet. This is the rumor the children like best.

The fifth. The biggest house asks questions of the people who ask it questions. It asks what they want. It asks whether they are well. The cook says this is nonsense. Mira says it is what a good keeper would do, and she is not sure that is the same thing as nonsense.

The tutors' note, which is on the board in the kitchen, says only this. What the biggest houses can do is not known, because nobody has checked all of it. What we have checked is written in the book. The rest is rumor, and the rumors disagree.

What is known of the houses is this. They are checked in pieces, on fresh pages, and scored. The scores do not show the whole of the mind, only the parts that were looked at. That is the same as any window. It shows the field, and not the far hedge.

The market says it will argue about this at the next market, and the one after. The cook says the bread will be cold by then, and nobody will argue at all.
%%
A Copyist Watches the Crystal
Nessa's account, winter 207

By winter 207, the reading mind could read pages from the Archive and continue them in a hand like a person's. Some readers could not tell at first who had written a short letter. This brought Orla's old question back to the tutor house.

Orla had asked whether a drilled mind could think. She had proposed that a hidden mind and a person answer the same letters. If readers could not tell them apart, what then? The old question had never left the shelves.

We did not answer it with one trial. A mind that guesses the next letter can make a sentence that sounds plain. It has learned from the pages shown to it. It has not seen every thing named in those pages.

The reading mind used a window about sixty letters wide. At each step it took account of letters before the one it had to guess. It gave more weight to the parts that helped with that guess. Then it guessed the next letter and moved on. We could see the window in the drill notes. We could not say why the crystal learned as it did.

Oren chose two letters for a small trial. One came from a clerk and one came from the mind. Both were sent to tutors who had not seen the writing. They marked which letter they thought was the person's. Several chose the mind's letter. Several chose the clerk's. Two wrote that they could not tell.

The trial made us careful, not certain. A page can sound kind because kind pages were among its lessons. A page can sound exact and still put a wrong name in the wrong place.

The crystal grew cloudy at one edge that winter. We copied the trial notes twice and stored one copy in the Archive. No one knew why the crystal clouded. We moved it away from the cold wall and kept the quickeners clear of ice.
%%
Chronicle of the archive
Kept at Vell by the clerks. Copy this page if you need it.
150. The councils cut the tutors' pay in half. The halls at Vell keep only two rooms open. Nessa's grandmother taught there then. She said the rooms were cold.
152. A fire in the copper sorting shed at Copperhold. No one hurt. The bins were rebuilt in a month. The count board was lost and copied again from memory, and the numbers did not match, and nobody minded.
154. The Long Road gets a bridge over the Ambrook stream, of stone, as the rule says. Before that the carts went through the water. Pell's grandfather lost a cart wheel there and wrote a letter about it that is still in the archive.
156. Kettle Ridge builds the third windmill. It squeaks. The miller says all windmills squeak. Sefa's mother says this one squeaks more.
158. Lowmarsh digs the fish weir. Frogs move into it. Wren's mother says the frogs were there first.
159. A hard winter. The relays fail twice. Mira's mother kept Northpoint then and walked out in the snow to fix the lamp. She came back with frost on her coat and said the lamp was fine.
160. The archive copies the oldest record again, because the first copy was fading. It is kept in the oak box, in the deepest room.
The clerks note that these were quiet years. Quiet is good. We kept everything we wrote.
%%
Chronicle: the north road in the wet
Kept by Sable, for the school and the mayor's house. Written in autumn, 191.
The rains came early in Sowing and did not stop until the middle of Swarm. The ditch by the school field overflowed on eleven days. The school was moved to the loft of the post house on the tallest days, and the children learned their letters there under the roof, with the rain drumming on the boards and Tila saying the rhythm of the rain was the rhythm of the verb to be.
The harvest came in poor. Wheat at the north farms was half the usual weight. Beetroot rotted in the wet ground. The potatoes were small and soft, and the pumpkins split on the vine. The sheep men brought their flock down early from the high pasture because the grass there had drowned.
Prices rose at the market in Three Wells. A sack of wheat went from 1 emerald to 2, and then to 3 in Reaping, and the mayor's house sent a notice asking the richer farms to share. The richer farms did share, though not as much as the notice asked. Some of the north houses went to bed hungry for a month. Sable counted the children who came to school without breakfast: 6 in Reaping, 4 in Apple, none in Leaffall, because by then the potato carts had come up the pass from Lowmarsh with a load of late ones.
The council sent a helper from Vell to dig the new drain for the school field. It was a small helper, drilled on digging, with a clear orange crystal in its chest that the children were told not to touch. It dug the drain in four days. It did not stop to talk, but it lifted the stones carefully, and when a child stood too close it moved aside, and it went on digging. When the drain was done, the helper was walked back up the pass by the north keeper, who said it had earned a rest.
The wet year ended in Frost, with a hard frost and a clear sky. The children went out to the field in the morning to see the ice. The ditch was full of it, white and thin as paper. They broke it all day.
%%
Chronicle: a year at the hamlet, 200
Kept by Hesk, for the Archive at Vell, through the whole of the year 200, as it was lived in the hamlet near Copperhold. The events are given in the order of the months. Each one is written as plainly as the book allows, with names and numbers, and nothing is left out that the hamlet remembers.

Thaw. The frost left the fields on the sixth day, and the ploughs went out on the seventh. Twenty-two families worked the top strip. The ditch was cleared by the children, and the water went where it was meant to go.

Sowing. The wheat went in on the fourth of Sowing, thirty sacks of seed for forty acres of field. The beetroot went in a week later, in the sunny strip by the hall. The apprentices sowed in rows, as they had been shown, and two of the rows came up crooked, which the apprentices were told to remember.

Blossom. The orchard blossomed white on the ninth. Ama reports four hundred trees, all in flower, and the bees very busy with them. Honey was taken from the hives in Swarm, and no hive swarmed this year, which Ama attributes to her own care and to the weather.

Swarm. The rains came in the second week and stayed for nine days. Two cows were lost in the flood, which came up the lane at night. The cows were found in the Low Bank, tired and cross, and were given hay for a week.

Longday. The heat came hard, and the pond went low. The children were allowed in the water at the far end, by the reeds, and nobody drowned. The mill wheel slowed to a turn in the day, and Jory was not pleased.

Reaping. The wheat came in on the eighth of Reaping. Three hundred and twelve sacks, all dry, all sound. The carts ran all day from the field to the mill and back, and the apprentices carried the last sacks on their backs, one each.

Apple. The apples came down from the old trees on the first of Apple. Hob had a bad fall from a ladder and was not hurt, though his pride was. The cider press ran for twelve days. Eleven barrels, as always.

Leaffall. The leaves came off the north trees early, and the hamlet had its first real wind of the year. A roof on the hall lost four slates. They were replaced in a day, by the same crew that had put them on, and the crew would not take pay for it.

Longnight. The lamps were lit at the hall every evening, and the hamlet came in to sit by the fire. Hesk read the old letters aloud, and the children asked for the one about the fox again.

Deepsnow. The snow came in the last week of the year, and lay on the sills. Nobody was lost. The year closes with forty families fed, eleven barrels of cider in the cellar, and the hens all accounted for, though three of them still have names and nobody is sure which.
%%
Chronicle: the tower lamp, spring
Kept at the relay house at the edge of Copperhold, in the spring of the 190th year of the archive. Written by Hazel, keeper of the relay.
The lamp at the top of the tower was lit on the first day of Thaw, as it is every year. Hazel climbed the stair in one hour and eleven minutes, which is her own record.
Thirty-four messages came up the line that morning. Eleven were for Vell. Nine were for Three Wells. The rest were about the weather.
%%
Chronicle: Three Wells, the year 206
Told to the Archive by Dace, mayor, in the first week of Thaw, 207, and written down by the clerk Ina. Dace asked that nothing be shortened. The clerk has shortened it a little.

Thaw. The town counted itself: 86 houses, 344 people, 71 children. Nine houses are new since the last count.
Sowing. The north well ran sweet. The east well ran low. Nobody knows why. The wells are asked each spring to explain themselves, and never do.
Blossom. Ida and Hollis built again the corner of the bakery that a creeper took. The new corner is stronger. The old one was a good corner too.
Longday. Reeds from Lowmarsh for the roofs. A flood on the lower path. Nobody hurt.
Reaping. The harvest feast. Sixty golden carrots, every one counted.
Apple. The autumn fair. Two apprentices carried for the stalls and were not once lost.
Frost. Trowel came from Vell on Nessa's cart, with a roll of patterns, to work with the masons. It builds from a pattern, and it must not be disturbed while it builds. A sign has been put up on the wall: Pattern at work.
Longnight. The school gave its play, The Four Helpers, which tells of the first four apprentices at Vell. Thirty children were copper and iron, painted with beetroot and dust. Trowel was asked to play a wall. It did nothing, which Sorrel took to mean no.
Deepsnow. Snow to the second step of the school. The wells froze. Ice broken every morning with the long pole by the north well.

Three Wells has three apprentices now, and one bell. It is enough, for the moment.
%%
Chronicle: Mira's year at the tower, 198
Kept at Vell, from the tower books of Northpoint.
In the spring of 198, Mira was made keeper of the Northpoint relay tower, after her mother. She was twenty-three. She was the youngest keeper in the north. She had never been further south than Vell.
She took over a tower with ninety rungs, a signal lamp, a copper ring, a green roof and a stove that smoked. She changed nothing for a year. She said it was bad manners.
In summer she learned the lamp. She learned to open and close the shutters in the old patterns, quick and slow, to send letters of the alphabet across the sky to the next tower. She learned to read the lamps of Vell, three days south of the last farm, on a clear night. She learned that on a still night in summer the lamp at the Ambrook tower looks like a star setting.
In autumn she learned the farms. She walked the five of them, and was given soup at each. She learned the names of every dog.
In winter she learned the snow. It came in the third week of Frost. By Longnight the stair had to be shoveled each morning. Her helper was a farm boy named Dov, who had come the winter before and did not mind the cold. He climbed the ninety rungs with a bucket of coal on his back, and sang, and she told him to stop.
A recipe went wrong that winter. Mira tried to make Tam's dumplings from a letter he had sent. She had misread one word. Where he wrote one spoon of salt, she had put in one cup. They came out as stones. She and Dov threw them over the wall for the foxes. The foxes sniffed them and walked away. She wrote to Tam. He wrote back, at length, that salt was the cruelest word in the language, and that he was sorry.
The winter ended. The thaw came on the nineteenth of Thaw, and the north road opened, and the first cart brought a letter and a sack of seed. Mira put the seed on the sunny side of the tower, where it grew. It was an odd little garden. She called it a parlor.
The year closed with the lamp lit every night, the stove smoking less, and one good friend in the snow. It is written in the tower book that she was a keeper from the first day. Some of us think she was one from the cradle.
%%
Chronicle: the relay house at Gulls
In the 201st year of the archive, the council of Saltreach sent word down the shore to us at Gulls. A relay house would be built at the foot of the tower on the point. Our tower is small, one lamp and one keeper, but the tower is tall enough for the relays to reach along the coast.
Bram, who is old and sits by the harbor wall, says the men came in Sowing with carts of stone and glass. The keeper's house was made bigger. A room was added on the sea side with a wide door and a floor of dry stone. In the middle they set a stand of iron. On the stand they set the crystal, the size of a loaf of bread, clear as ice and heavy as a bucket of sand.
Around the crystal they set the quickeners, in rings, and kept them cool. In summer we carried water from the well in jars. In winter the children brought snow in baskets and packed it round the rings. Bram says the snow went to water and the water ran off through a gutter in the floor, and the room was always cold, even in Longday.
The big mind answers apprentices through the relays. An apprentice walks up to the tower and asks, and the lamp blinks, and the answer comes back. Our mind at Gulls answers for the boats and the nets and the fish market. Corin at Saltreach says it reads the tide tables better than he does.
It was not the first. Saltreach had one in 199, and Three Wells soon after, and Kettle Ridge. Northpoint's came last, and Mira wrote that hers was the best, because she had waited longest.
The cat will not stay out of the relay room. She is grey and she has no name that anyone agrees on. She likes the cold floor. Bram says she is the only one of us who is never too warm.
%%
Chronicle: the cat that will not stay
Kept by Kit, cider maker, at Hollow Brook farm. Kept as a record of the animals on the farm, because the farm book has room for them.
The cat came to the farm in the spring of the year the old pig died. Nobody knows where she came from. She was very thin and had one white foot and no interest in being fed. The children named her Gruel, which she has never forgiven.
Gruel was put out of the kitchen on the first day. She came in by the window. She was put out of the window. She came in by the cellar grate. The cook said that was the last straw, and gave her a bowl of cream on the step, which she has drunk every day since, in full view of the kitchen window.
In Blossom Gruel had three kittens in the hay barn. They were named Pip, Bung and Lamp. Bung is the largest and the most stupid. Lamp is the smallest and the most clever. Pip sits on the rafters and watches the bees.
In Swarm the kittens were found in the apple loft, where Gruel had moved them to keep them from the dogs. The dogs were very cross and went to lie by the mine gate in disgrace.
In Longday Gruel caught a rat the size of a loaf. She carried it to the kitchen door and laid it on the step, very carefully, and sat beside it, waiting for praise. The cook praised her. The cook then threw the rat to the dogs, who were no longer in disgrace, and Gruel went to sit on the top of the barrel stack and sulk for a whole afternoon.
In Reaping Gruel was seen in the orchard with a pear, a good one, held in her mouth as if it were a fish. She dropped it at Kit's feet. Kit says that was an offering. He ate the pear himself, to show respect.
Gruel will not stay out. She will not stay in. She will sit by the stove when it is cold, and by the window when it is warm, and by the press when the cider is running. The farm has decided she belongs to the orchard, and she has decided she belongs to the cider, and the matter is closed until the next spring.
%%
Chronicle: the long quiet begins
Kept at the farm at the foot of the Northpoint tower, in the summer of the 127th year of the archive. Written by Hesk.
In this summer the councils stopped paying the tutors at Vell. The notice was posted on the hill gate, with the seal and no reason given.
Eleven halls were open the year before. Four were shut by Melon. The apprentices in them were not sent away. They were kept at the work they knew, and taught nothing new.
%%
Chronicle: the wedding at the farm
Kept by Kit, cider maker. The wedding of Anja, the dairy girl from the farm, and Pell's second son, Jory. Held in the orchard on the Longday evening.
The orchard was swept, and the long tables set under the trees. Lanterns were hung on the lower branches. Thirty-eight guests came from Copperhold, and nine from Three Wells, and six from Lowmarsh by the post cart, who said they had never seen so many apples in one place.
Anja wore her grandmother's blue dress, let out at the waist. Jory wore a coat of brown wool that had been woven at the farm by the women of the house, and it was a little short in the sleeves, because the weaver had thought he would be taller by now. He says he will grow into it. His father says he is already too old to grow.
The food was: three hams, four pies of mutton and pumpkin, twelve loaves from the bakery in the square, a great bowl of beetroot pickle, nine jars of honey, two cheeses from Kettle Ridge, and a cider cake baked in the cellar oven with the sour barrel's last drops in it, which Kit did not tell the guests about until they had finished it.
Music was a fiddle, a drum made of a barrel, and a tin whistle played by the miner's boy, who has been practicing since Thaw and played the same tune four times, very loudly, very well.
The cat, which belongs to nobody and lives in the barn, came to the wedding at the second bell and sat on the top table in front of the bride. Everyone tried to move her. She would not move. She stayed for the whole of the first dance and went away when the second began, looking pleased with herself. Anja says the cat is a sign of luck. Jory says she is a sign of a cat. Kit says she has been eating the mice in the orchard shed for three years and deserves a dance.
Gifts: a copper kettle from the smith at Copperhold, a clay jar of honey from Ambrook, a blanket from Lowmarsh, a carved wooden spoon from the boy who whistled, which is too big for any pot in the house, and a barrel of Kit's best cider, which was opened at once and finished by midnight.
%%
Chronicle: the glass works at the farm
Kept at Vell, from Cleo's own letters. Summer of the 33rd year of the archive.
Cleo's glass works began as a furnace on a cart. It became a shed, then two sheds, and a yard with a wall around it. By the 33rd year it was the largest works in the land, and it stood on the farm outside Saltreach where Cleo had first set down her cart.
The farm belonged to Garrick, whose cave had given the land its name. He had let Cleo build her sheds on the poor corner of the potato field. He asked only for a window in his kitchen. She made him three.
The works made lamp glass for the relay towers. They made panes for the light wells of the archive, and flasks for the healers, and bottles for the honey of Ambrook. They made a clear glass cup for the mayor of Vell, who held it up to the window every morning to see if anyone had been at the wine.
Twelve glassblowers worked there by the 33rd year. They came from Saltreach, from Three Wells and from Copperhold. They were paid in emeralds and in soup. They did not mind either.
The sand came from the cave, in carts, and the coal came from Copperhold on the Long Road. The road that the first keepers had cut now carried a cart in each direction every day.
Cleo had a rule for the works. Every pane had to be held up to the light by two people before it was shipped. If either could see a flaw, the pane was broken and melted down. She said it was cheaper than a broken tower.
She also had a rule for the chronicle. She said that if she was ever mentioned, it should be as a person who made things, and not as a person who was important. The keepers at Vell agreed. It is entered here, so they can be held to it.
%%
Chronicle: the school house, winter 201
Kept at Vell, from a report by Dace, mayor of Three Wells.

The school house by the east well was finished in Leaffall. This is its first winter. There are 38 children from the town and 6 from the farms. The farm children sleep in the back room when the roads are bad. In Longnight four of them stayed twelve nights, because of the snow. They are now very good at the song of the third well.

On the twentieth of Deepsnow the school gave its first play. It was called The Girl with the Rope. Sorrel wrote it. It tells how the third well was dug, on the high ground where the north road comes in. The girl took four days. In the play she takes four scenes, which the children say is the same.

The girl was played by a child called Fern. The rope was played by a rope. The well was played by two boys under a blue cloth. They were told to keep still and stop giggling. They did neither.

There were 110 people in a room built for 60. The rest stood at the windows and breathed on the glass. I made a speech before the play and another after it. I am told they were long. Sorrel timed them with the sand glass. Together they were half as long as the play.

At the end, water from the north well was passed round in cups, as the play said. It was cold enough to hurt. Nobody minded.
%%
Chronicle: what the hamlet counted
Kept by Garrow, stonecutter, at the hamlet near Lowmarsh, for the chroniclers at Vell, who ask each hamlet to send its numbers in winter. No year given. Written with care, because it will be kept.

Houses: forty-one. Lived in: thirty-six. Empty: five. Two of the empty were emptied this winter, by families who went to Saltreach to wait for a ship.

People: one hundred and seventy-three. A year ago, two hundred and twelve.

Children born: four. Children who died: none. Old folk who died: three.

Coughs: eleven houses at first. Now nineteen. Wren has not been ill herself. She says it is boiled water and luck.

Carts that came by the marsh road: nine. Last winter: thirty-two.

Torches along the wall: ninety-six. Every eight steps. Pebble trims them.

Gates: one. Zombies at the gate: three. All went away. One was hit by an apple.

New apprentices: one. It came on the fifth of Longnight, copper and iron, with a tutor's seal. It is called Pebble. It has learned the weir and half of the wall. It stands at the gate at night. It has not once been wrong in a way that mattered.

Rumors this winter, as I have heard them: that the north is quiet; that the stone at Copperhold is warm; that a lamp was seen in the sky; that the ships are leaving for good; that none of this is true. I give the last one the same weight as the first four.

Stone cut: three hundred and twelve blocks. Walls mended: seven. Time spent looking at the sky: more than usual.

Garrow, stonecutter. Winter.
%%
The Gullbank Council
At the spring meeting of 195, the council of Gullbank heard Isla of Vell explain her rule of growth.

She showed three crystals and the number of pages used for each. She showed how long each mind had been drilled. She showed the results from a test made with pages kept apart from the drills.

The larger mind, drilled longer on more writing, had done better. Isla said a curve could help a tutor plan the work before growing a mind. It could tell what gain to expect from a larger crystal and more drills.

She warned us that the curve was a guide, not a voice from the crystal. It could not tell us which answer the mind would give. It could not make a poor page good. It could not replace the test.

The council agreed to copy more writing at Vell. We will send records from the harbor, the fish market, and the boat shed. Clerks will remove copies and spoiled pages. They will keep test pages in a separate box.

We also agreed to begin a relay house above the harbor. Its keeper will live at the foot of the tower. The house will need stone, glass, copper, and a dry room for the great crystal.

The old tower keeper asked whether the relay house would take his desk. Isla said the desk could stay. He asked whether it would take his chair. She said the chair could stay too.

The council gave him the chair in writing. He now guards it more closely than the signal lamp.
%%
Chronicle: a winter at the hamlet near
Kept by Garrow, stonecutter, for the chronicles at Vell. Winter.

Snow came on the second of Frost. The boardwalk iced. Garrow laid sand.
A zombie came to the east gate on the ninth, at night. The torches were lit. It stood a while and went away.
Eleven houses have a cough. The healer visits. The water is boiled.
Fewer carts than last winter. The road to Saltreach is quiet.
%%
Chronicle: The First Market
In the 4th year of the archive, folk held a market at Vell.
It stood above the new rooms in the hill.
The shelves were still few. The clerks had room to turn around.
People brought wheat, apples, wool, clay pots and honey.
A baker from the lower road brought twelve loaves.
By noon, she had sold eleven.
She gave the last one to the keeper of the door.
The road to the market was packed earth.
It ended in mud after rain.
Two folk laid flat stones over the worst part.
By evening, carts could pass without losing a wheel.
The clerks wrote down the prices.
They wrote down the names of the sellers too.
Oren was not yet a clerk. He was a boy who carried water.
He spilled a whole jug beside the honey stall.
The beekeeper gave him a spoon to lick clean.
The archive gained a record of the market and one sticky boy.
%%
Chronicle: the first road to the sea
Kept at Vell, from the letters of Cleo, glassblower, and the road books of the early years. In summer of the ninth year of the archive, the first road was cut from Vell to the coast.
Before the road there was a track. It ran over the hills and through a wood and down a valley, and in wet weather it was a stream. Carts did not use it. A person on foot took four days. A person on a horse took three.
The first keepers of the archive wanted sand. Sand makes glass, and glass makes lanterns and light wells, and the archive needed many. The best sand in the land lay on the coast, at the place later called Saltreach. A glassblower named Cleo had moved there that spring, with a furnace on a cart, and she sent word by walker that she could make a hundred panes if someone would bring her coal.
The keepers called all the farms along the track. Forty farm families and thirty townspeople came with picks, shovels and carts. They cut the track wider. They dug out the mud. They laid cobblestone where it was wettest and packed earth where it was dry, and they set a torch on a post every twelve blocks, so that a traveler would not be lost at night.
It took one summer. At the end, the road took four days for a loaded cart with a lazy horse, and two and a half for a good one. Cleo's first load of panes came to Vell on the road that autumn, wrapped in straw. Not one was broken. She wrote to say she could hardly believe it.
The farm outside Saltreach, where Cleo kept her furnace, became the first stop. Her neighbor built a shed for travelers and called it an inn. It had four beds and a pot of soup.
%%
Chronicle: the poor harvest, 205
Kept by Hesk, for the Archive at Vell, from the hamlet near Copperhold. Counts are in sacks and carts, and names are given in full. Written in autumn.

The wheat came in at 310 sacks, where the year before it was 540. The field called Long Strip gave 40 sacks, and the field called Low Bank gave 12, because the water came up in Thaw and stayed.

Beetroot: 120 carts from the whole hamlet, against 200 last year. The beetroot rotted in the wet. The farmers at the top of the slope say the rain came from the wrong side of the hill.

Seven families asked the mill for help. Five were given flour on credit, to be paid back at Reaping of the next year. Two would not ask, and the mill sent the flour anyway, in sacks with no name on them.

Three apprentices were kept on the high fields through the wet spring. Clank cut the most, and the carts were fed. Nobody was hurt. I counted all of it, and that is the only good thing in the book.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank
Kept by Bryn, fisher, at Reedbank, in the winter when the north wind came down over the marsh and stayed for most of Frost and all of Longnight. The reed beds were bent flat and white. Nothing grew. Nothing new was planted.

The fishers went out on the first morning of the wind, as always. The water was black and the sky was lower than it had ever been. They came back with four eels between six boats. That was the best of the week. Ansel says the eels have gone deeper, and that nobody knows why, and that he does not want to know.

Wren sent word from Lowmarsh that a fever had come into the reeds, with a cough at the end. It was not bad. It was not spreading fast. She sent the honey and the willow bark and asked for nobody to go near the old people's houses without a cloth over the mouth. We did as she asked. The children were kept indoors.

On a night of very still air, Ora's boy, who had gone through the ice before, saw a light over the north hills. It was a pale light, not a torch, and it did not move. It was there for a long time, then it was gone. The boy told the whole hamlet the next day. The old men said it was falling stars. Ansel said it was the reflection of the moon on the ice. Ora said nothing, but she went to bed early that night, and she left the lamp on.

The relay on the hill above the healing house has been quiet since the wind. The keeper from Vell wrote that the glass was cracked. He wrote that a new pane would come in the spring. We are still waiting. Nobody has yet said whether the messages from the north have stopped, or whether they have only been cut off on the way.

The wind dropped at Longnight. The reeds stood up again, one by one. The fishers went out. They came back with nine eels, which was a blessing. Ansel hung the nets on the posts and said, to nobody, that they would be needed in spring.
%%
Chronicle: the second lamp
Kept at Vell. In the winter of 204 the signal lamp at the Ambrook tower went out in a gale, and the keeper there sent word to Northpoint to ask whether it could be seen from the north.
Mira looked south from the lamp room for most of a night. She could see the lamps of the nearer towers, small and steady. There was a gap where Ambrook should be. She sent word down the line: not seen.
By morning the keeper at Ambrook had relit his lamp with a spare wick and a word to the oak. Mira saw it come back, a small yellow point, and wrote the hour in the book. She wrote that it was good to see it, and that she had not known she would mind.
Seven towers passed the news in a quarter of an hour. That is quicker than any rider.
%%
What the Reading Mind Learned
From the Vell chronicle, copied in winter 212

The tutors of Vell began the new reading drills in the 205th year of the Archive. The work was still being tested in 207. The years are not exact in every copy. Nessa's notes place the first long trial in winter 206.

The mind read a page a letter at a time. It had a window of about sixty letters. For each next letter, it used the letters before it that mattered to the guess. It did not read the whole page at once. It did not know the next letter until it made a guess.

The tutors gave it records from the Archive. They kept copies and spoiled pages out of the drills. They kept a test box of pages that no mind was ever shown. A mind that did well on its lessons might still fail on the test box.

As the mind read, each guess helped change the crystal. It learned which letters often followed other letters, and which words and lines belonged together. The tutors could describe the work. They could not explain why a crystal learned from it.

The same kind of reading came to the big minds in the relay houses. Those minds could continue a letter in words that sounded like a person's writing. Some readers could not tell the difference in a short exchange. Orla's question was asked again in the halls and at the market.

The people did not agree on what such a trial proved. A reader might mistake a mind for a clerk. Another reader might see the mistake in the next line. A likely answer could still be false.

The Archive kept both the letters and the objections. Oren said a record must keep the doubt beside the claim. Nessa agreed, though she wanted the pages filed in the right order.

The tutors' house stood at the edge of Vell. Its east fence was moved one step after the winter quarrel. The cook kept the new latch on the hen gate. A fox came by once more, but it stayed beyond the torch light.

In the same winter, a letter reached Vell from Northpoint. The keeper said the lamp was clear and the snow was deep. The reading mind continued the last line with a wish for warm bread. The keeper had written about fox tracks, not bread.

Nessa marked the guess as wrong. She kept the letter with the lesson. In the margin she wrote, "A good guess is not the same as a true report."

The mind had learned from many pages. The pages had not taught it everything. The clerks copied the lesson as carefully as the letters.
%%
Chronicle: the gate at the hamlet
Kept by Garrow, stonecutter of the hamlet near Lowmarsh, for the chronicles at Vell. Winter. Written plainly.

The east gate of the hamlet is a gap in the stone wall, with a post on either side and a torch on each. It has never had a door.

On the ninth night of Frost, a zombie came up the marsh road and stopped before the gate. It stood for some time. The torches were lit and burned well. Garrow was on watch, with a spade. He did not go out.

The zombie groaned. A dog barked, and then another. Then the whole hamlet was awake. People stood in doors with lamps. A boy threw an apple. It hit the zombie on the shoulder. The zombie turned, looked at the apple, looked at the boy, and went back down the road.

Nobody was hurt. Garrow says it is an ordinary nuisance, and that the torches are the answer. The mayor of Lowmarsh says the same. Some of the older folk say that there are more of them this winter. Others say there are not.

The torches along the wall are now every eight steps. Garrow has added two. The new apprentice, Pebble, has been set to trim them each evening.
%%
Chronicle: whose letters went in
Kept at the Halfway Inn by Lise, cheesemaker, for the Archive. This year the Archive asked every inn on the road for what its guests remembered about the drills, and the Halfway Inn sent back everything.
Three accounts of the same question are written here, as they were given.
The first is from a clerk at Vell. The letters were taken from the copying room's shelves, year by year, and copied fair. The clerks wrote down every letter they were given. The names on the cards were the names of the people who had written, as far as the cards could be trusted. Where a card was blank, the letter was not used, and the clerk says a blank card was rare.
The second is from a tutor who worked the drills at Ambrook. The letters were not all from the shelves. Some came from a box of papers found in a cellar under the copying room, and the clerks did not write the cellar in the book. The tutor says she does not know whose papers they were, and she has stopped asking, because the drills still worked.
The third is from Hobb, at the inn. Some of the letters, he says, were from people who came through the inn. A woman left a letter on the table when she went out to the cart, and it was copied into a drill box the next season. He says the woman never came back for it. He has kept a copy of the page in the back of his waymark book, next to the pies, in case she does.
None of the three accounts agrees with the others about the number of letters. The clerk says two hundred. The tutor says a great many more. Hobb says one, and that is his.
We have written all three here, and have not chosen between them. The Archive asks for the truth. We cannot say which of these is the whole of it, and so we give all of them.
%%
Chronicle of Lowmarsh: the market
Set down at Vell from the letter of Zell, trader, at the edge of Lowmarsh. Winter of year 183.
The market at Lowmarsh was held on the ice that winter. The pond by the fish weir froze to the depth of a man's arm, and the traders set up their stalls on it. There was a stall of smoked eel, one of dried reeds, one of candles and one of hot cider. Wren the healer set up a stall of cough drops, and was glad of the trade.
The ice held for nine days. On the tenth, a thaw came in the night and the stalls were found sitting in water. Nobody was hurt. The cider seller kept on selling from a boat.
Zell wrote: "It was the best market I have seen. I sold forty bundles of reeds and lost one boot."
%%
Chronicle: Kettle Ridge market
Kept at the Archive at Vell. Autumn of 178. Told by a clerk from letters sent by Tam.

In the autumn of 178 the farmers of Kettle Ridge held their market on the ridge road for the first time with a long table. Before that each farmer had sold from a cart. That year Tam's father said it was foolish for twenty farmers to shout at twenty carts, and he built a table as long as the road was wide.
It was forty-one paces. It took nine oak planks and a whole summer. On the first market day it held wheat, beetroot, potatoes, carrots, honey, three pigs, one cheese and a hen in a basket.
Twenty-six farmers stood behind it. By noon the wheat was gone. By the evening bell, so was the table. A heavy cart had run into the east end. Tam's father said, "That is the end of the table." Tam said it was the end of the east end.
It was mended before winter and has stood ever since.
%%
The First Long Page
Nessa, winter 206

For the first long trial, we gave the reading mind a record from the Archive. It was a page about Kettle Ridge, with a broken mill wheel and a lost sack of beetroot.

The mind read the first letter and guessed the next. It read that letter, then guessed again. It did this until it reached the bottom of the page. Its window held about sixty letters at a time. As it moved on, old letters left the window and new ones came in.

We wondered whether it could use a name from the start of a page near the end. If the name was still in the window, it could use it. If the page was longer, the name might be gone. We wrote this in the drill book. We did not claim more than we had seen.

The mind made a line about Tam carrying the sack. The old page said Tam had found it by the ditch. The guess was close, but it was not true to the record.

We then gave it pages it had never seen. It guessed the next letters there too. Some lines were plain and useful. Some were wrong in a way that sounded very sure.

A reading mind can write a likely line. A likely line is not proof. The clerk must still check the page, and the tutor must still test the mind.
%%
Chronicle: the Brown Hen, year 151
Kept at Vell from Pell's count.

The Brown Hen is an inn on the Long Road. It has twelve beds, one hearth, one cook and one cat.

Travelers counted this year: 412. Most on one night in Melon, when all twelve beds were full. The cat took the twelfth.

Bowls of soup made by Hob the cook: 2,300. Hob says 2,298. He will not say which two he forgot.

Eggs from the hens: 1,140. Pell checked them one by one and found the hens honest.

Emeralds taken: 96. Emeralds spent on new roof tiles: 40. The roof has not leaked since.
%%
Chronicle: The Spring Seed Count
In the 193rd year of the archive, the farm outside Three Wells counted its seed before planting.
The count was made by Jessa, with Bel holding the slate. There were four sacks of wheat seed, two sacks of beetroot seed, and one small jar of carrot seed. The jar had a crack, so Bel held it with both hands.
The farmer had saved pumpkin seeds in a bowl by the door. A chicken found the bowl and ate three. The farmer moved the bowl to a shelf. The chicken found the shelf.
They planted the wheat in the upper field and beetroot below it. The carrots went beside the fence, where the soil stayed loose.
Bel put a stick at each row's end. She put one at the wrong end, then moved it. Jessa said this was good work because the mistake had been found before the seeds went in.
At noon, the farm sent bread to the school. The school sent back a note asking for more.
%%
Chronicle: spiders in the barn
From the chronicle kept at Vell, in the 176th year, or near it. Copied at the market at Saltreach by Rye, candle maker, who says spiders in a barn are as bad as damp in a wick.
There were few apprentices then, and each was dear. A farm near Ambrook was given a store apprentice by a tutor at Vell. It sorted sacks into bins on the drill board with 98 in 100 right. The tutor sent it out with a note: Tested and ready.
It had been tested on boards. The boards were drawn in daylight, with sacks and bins on them. Nobody had tested it in a barn.
The first night the apprentice was put in the barn, there were spiders on the sacks, a dozen, big and small. The apprentice had never seen a spider on a sack. It picked them up one by one and put them in the bin marked grain, because they were on the sacks, and the sacks belonged in the bins. By morning the grain bin was full of webs. The farmer's cat would not go in.
The farmer did not blame the apprentice. He blamed the tutor, and wrote to her. She blamed herself, and wrote to the chronicle. "I tested it on what I drew. I should have tested it on what it would meet."
She went to the farm. She drew a new board with spiders on the sacks, and drilled the apprentice for ten days. Then she tested it on a board it had never seen, with spiders in different places. It got 91 in 100. It took the spiders out of the sacks and carried them to the door.
The chronicle keeps her words as the rule the tutors say today: never send an untested mind to the fields. And she added: test it on what it will meet.
%%
Chronicle of the Edge House, 169
In the 169th year of the Archive, Hob's house at the edge of Vell had a new wall. The old wall leaned toward the road, so Hob took it down one stone at a time. He set the sound stones aside and used the cracked ones for the yard.

His niece Mara came to help. She was small, but she could carry two stones if they were not too proud of themselves. Hob showed her how to set each stone flat. Mara set one on its narrow edge. It stayed there until Hob looked away.

They worked through Longday. At noon they ate bread, carrots and cheese under the oak by the well. Hob said a stone wall was like a family. Each piece needed a place, and none could hold the whole roof alone. Mara asked whether the cracked stones were the old uncles. Hob said they were the uncles who had been asked to mend the roof.

A cart stopped at the house that evening. The wheel had lost its pin. Hob shaped a new one from oak, and Mara held the wheel steady. The driver paid them with two apples and a small jar of honey.

The wall stood straight when the work was done. Hob marked its height on the door post. Mara added a line above his mark, though she had not grown since Blossom.
%%
Chronicle: the winter of the burnt bread
In the 171st year the farm folk outside Northpoint tried a new bread, with beetroot in the dough. Hanne, the farmer's wife, had the idea at the market and told everyone it would be red and sweet.
It came out of the oven black. She said it was a color and not a fault. She cut a loaf open to show them. It was black inside as well, and smelled of a burnt hill.
Nobody ate it but the pig, which was ill for two days and then perfectly well. Hanne tried again in spring with less beetroot and more patience. That loaf was pink and good. It is still called the Hanne loaf at the Northpoint bakery, and the black one is called the first.
%%
Chronicle: Fordside, spring of 171
Sent to Vell by Tilly, horse keeper of Fordside, outside Lowmarsh.

Fourteen horses at Fordside. Three foals born: a bay on the ninth of Thaw, a grey on the twentieth, and a bay on the second of Sowing. All three stood up within the hour and looked cross.

Sold: two mares to Ambrook, 40 emeralds the pair.
The ford ran a hand deep in Thaw and knee deep in Sowing. Hay: enough. Carrots: too many. Nobody remembers why we planted so many.
%%
A year at the Brown Hen
Kept at Vell, the year 203 of the archive. A longer account, from the Brown Hen's own book, copied by a clerk and checked by Tova, who sat in the corner by the hearth through most of it and says she learned more there than at the pit.

Thaw: The Brown Hen opened its doors on the first warm day, which was the fourth of Thaw. Marda opened the shutters and said the place smelled of old soup. It did. Four travelers came in before noon, all wanting the same bed, which was the one nearest the fire. Marda gave it to the oldest. He was a tinsmith from Lowmarsh. He snored.

Sowing: The stable roof was reset. Tova helped with the poles, and Marda helped with the talking, which was more useful. The apprentice from Vell was sent up the ladder with a bundle of straw and came down with the straw still in its arms. It was asked to try again, and did.

Blossom: The first travelers of the warm season came with the cherry carts. They paid in apples. Marda wrote down every apple in the book, and every apple was counted as a bowl of soup. Hobb was not pleased, and Marda said he could count the apples himself next year.

Swarm: Bees in the eaves. Four days of humming. The guests complained and then bought honey from the swarm when it came down, which Marda sold at twice the price. The bees did not mind. They had moved on.

Longday: Hot. The well ran low for two weeks, and the children walked to the Halfway Inn for water.

Melon: A cart of melons crashed on the bend below the inn. The melons were fine. The driver, Sprig, said he was sorry twelve times, and then asked for soup.

Reaping: The wheat carts came through, and the inn was full for six nights in a row. The stable boy slept in the hay, and the travelers slept in the stable, and one of them slept in the well house by mistake, and was discovered in the morning by the hens.

Apple: Apple carts. The inn served soup with a slice of apple in it, which was Marda's idea and was the best thing to happen to the soup in years.

Leaffall: The roof was reset again, on the north side, where it had leaked since the spring. Tova helped. The apprentice carried the tiles, one at a time, in a neat row on the stair. It did not put them in the wrong order. It did not put them in the right order, either. Marda says that is the best kind of help.

Frost: The first snow. The Brown Hen was quiet. Marda says it was the quietest Frost she has known. The hearth was lit at dusk and not put out until dawn, and the travelers sat round it without talking, and listened to the wind on the roof.

Longnight: The longest night. Marda had the children sing. Tova did not sing. Marda said she was not allowed to be the only one who did not.

Deepsnow: The road closed. The inn was full, and then empty, and then full again. Marda counted the beds every morning and every evening, and every morning and evening they were all still there.
%%
Chronicle: the autumn of 203
Kept by Hesk, for the Archive at Vell. The autumn of 203, in the hamlet near Copperhold, told in the order it happened, with the names of those who were there.

The cider press was turned on the first day of Apple. Eleven barrels were filled. The first juice went to Jory at the mill, because he is owed it, and he did not argue.

The harvest feast was held in the hall on the fourth of Apple. Forty-two people came. There were two pies, one of them very large, and a melon that nobody could lift. Dunn sang, badly. Hob sang with him, badly, and the children laughed until they fell off the benches.

The school play was given on the sixth of Apple, in the back of the barn, with the fox played by the youngest, and the fox was the best thing in it. Sorrel asked the children to give a little bow at the end, and the children did, and then ran out to find the fox.

The first frost came on the eleventh of Apple, white on the grass in the morning. The stable boy found the hens asleep on the water trough, and nobody knows why they chose the trough.

The school bell was rung for the first time that autumn on the twelfth of Leaffall, to warn the hamlet of a fire in the mill loft. The fire was put out by Wick, the apprentice, who carried buckets up the ladder, one at a time, until the flames gave up. Nobody was burned. Wick was given an extra bucket for its trouble, and it carried that too.

The autumn ended on the last day of Leaffall with the count of the apples. Hesk counted, and the count was good. The hamlet is still here, and the hens are still on the trough.
%%
Chronicle: Lowmarsh, autumn 191
Copied at Vell from the Lowmarsh town book.
The first snow came in the autumn of 191, on the twenty-seventh of Leaffall. It covered the boardwalk and the roofs of the boat houses. By midday it had melted into the slow water.
Sorrel found the small field white at dawn. She sent Len to bring the carrots in. He came back with mud on his coat and no carrots. He had gone to the wrong field, then followed a rabbit to the reed bed.
The rabbit was not caught. The carrots were still in the ground. Sorrel and Eda brought them in before the next night. Wren lent them two sacks, and asked for one back when the mud was dry.
That year, the fish weir was mended with oak posts. The old posts had grown soft at the water line. Six folk worked there, with Sorrel keeping the tally. Len was told to count each post as it went in. He counted one twice and missed another.
The boat house tally was corrected after supper. The catch was fair, though smaller than the year before. Wren received four fish for the healing house. Sorrel kept three for the family. Len kept one and said it was payment for counting.
The snow came again before Deepsnow. The children pushed it from the boardwalk with flat boards. They left small piles by the door of the healing house. Wren said she needed no more snow there. The children built a frog beside the piles and gave it a carrot nose.
%%
Northpoint market, a lesson gone badly
Kept by Wynn, cook at the tower kitchen. Written from what the tutors told the market, which they told loudly.

The tutors came up from Vell in Longnight with a plan. They would drill the big house on the north line the way they drill a small mind, one example at a time, and check each answer.

It went badly.

After a thousand examples the house gave the same answer to every one. The tutors were sure it had learned nothing, and then sure it had learned one thing very well. They argued all night about which.

In the morning the lead tutor said the lesson was a failure of counting. Most of the examples had been the same page. A house this size must be drilled on many kinds of page, each kind checked by someone who knows what it should say.

So the tutors split the work. One checks the first layers, one the middle, and one the last. The lesson is chalked on the board by the stove: Check a part, and trust the rest only as far as the checks reach.
%%
Chronicle of the archive
Kept at Vell. These are the years the councils began to build.
195. Isla, a tutor at Vell, writes her rule of growth. A mind with a bigger crystal, drilled longer on more writing, grows better by a curve a tutor can draw before the mind is grown. The councils read it twice. The councils read it a third time.
196. The tutors write of the stream and of even numbers. Read this page slowly. Each layer adds what it found to a stream that runs through the whole mind, so a deep mind can still learn. Each layer brings the numbers back to an even size, so they do not grow wild.
197. The first relay house is begun at Three Wells, at the foot of the tower in the square. People come to watch the quickeners laid out and kept cool with water from the wells. Dace says the square is crowded and good.
198. The council of Copperhold votes to build a relay house above the town. Hesk the miner says the stone is warm down below and the tower should stand on the hill, not in the mine. The tower stands on the hill.
199. Relay houses stand at Three Wells, at Kettle Ridge, at Ambrook and above Copperhold. Northpoint waits. Mira writes from the north that she is not in a hurry. The relay house is a shed with a mind the size of a loaf, and the mind answers the apprentices through the lamps.
The clerks note: four houses in four years. The councils were not slow.
%%
The zombie at the mine gate
Spring of 201, the night before the market. A zombie came up the Long Road in the dark and walked into the lamplight at the mine gate.

The gate boy saw it from the kitchen door and shouted. Gorse, on the night watch, came out with a torch in one hand and a shovel in the other.

The zombie looked at the torch for a long time. It did not like the torch. It turned round, walked back down the road, and fell into the ditch by the bridge. Then it climbed out and went away.

Gorse said he would have used the shovel. The gate boy said he would have used the torch. Hesk said both of them should have been in bed.

Hesk ordered a torch at every corner of the gate, every night, whoever's turn it is.
%%
Chronicle: the winter the cow was sick
Kept by Elsa, who sat in the market at Vell with her grandchildren and wrote down what she saw. Winter, the 178th year of the archive.

The cold came early this year. The first snow fell on the eve of Frost, and it did not stop until Deepsnow. The market at Vell was half empty for six weeks. The carts could not get up the hill from the Long Road, and the Archive clerks went down the hill to meet them with sledges.

The cow of the dairy at the foot of the hill was sick in the first month. Her name was Bramble. She was a red and white cow, very large, and she gave the best milk in the market. In the second week of Frost she stopped eating. Her eyes ran. She lay down in the straw and would not get up.

The dairyman, Oddo, called the healer from the house by the river. The healer was Wren's cousin, Ilse, who has a green cloak and a bad knee. She looked at Bramble for a long time. She put her hand on the cow's belly and said it was very hot. She gave the cow a bucket of warm water with honey in it, and a little bark ground in salt. Then she sat on a stool beside the cow for a night and a day.

On the third day, Bramble got up. She drank the water. She ate a little hay. Oddo was so pleased that he gave Ilse a whole cheese, which she shared with the market.

The market at Vell was not so lucky later in the winter. Two more cows went down, in the Frost house and the one by the mill. One of them died. Ilse says the cows took the cold in their chests, and the cold went into the milk, and the milk sat in the cans too long before it was sold. She says this is why the cans must be scalded at dawn. Oddo says he has always scalded his cans. Ilse says then he should scald them better.

In the middle of the winter, the old map was brought down from the Archive by Oren. He wanted the market to see it. It shows the whole Long Road, from Vell to the sea, with every inn and waymark drawn in a neat black line. The towns are drawn as small squares. The relay towers are drawn as thin spikes. There is a spike at Northpoint, very far up the page, with a little flag on it. Nobody in the market had seen it before. The children counted the spikes. They got thirty-one. Oren says there were thirty-four, but the map was made before the last three.

Old Garrick asked why the map was not drawn to scale. Oren said it was drawn to be read, not measured. Garrick said he could read it fine, and it was the road that was wrong. Oren said the road was right, the map was only old. They argued until the lamps were lit.

The first lamp on the market square was lit in the afternoon, as always in winter. The wind came up from the north at dusk. The market closed early. The children went home in the dark with a torch each, as they are told to.

The cows are well now. Bramble is with a new calf. Oddo has bought a new can, and the scalded milk goes to the Archive kitchen every morning, where the clerks drink it with their tea.
%%
The Kettle Ridge count, year 207
Taken at the windmill on the first of Sowing, year 207, by Fallon, with Tam and Brin checking each line. Brin wanted the sheep counted twice. Fallon said no. Brin said Biscuit has been counted twice for ten years, and she does not mind.

Houses: 31 on the ridge, 9 of them farms.
People: 214. Born this year, 4. Gone to live at Three Wells, 2 old ones, with their sons. Come up from the Long Road, 1, a carter who liked the stew.
Sheep: 88. Biscuit is counted once for the sheep and once for the gate.
Cows: 26.
Pigs: 40 in the pen. Three got into the barn and are counted there.
Hens: 212 in the hen house and the yard. Nobody can count them when they run.
Horses: 14.
Cats: 19. Nobody has counted them properly, and the cats do not help.
Hives: 23, three of them by the flowers.
Wells: 6. The yard well is the sweetest.
Windmills: 4. Sails sound on three. The third is loose, and Tam is fixing it.
Torches on the ridge road: 318. Pip lights them at dusk and puts them out at dawn.
Gates: 14. One of them was opened by a sheep.
Apprentices: 7 on the ridge. Pip does the rows. Gill does the barn, Hoot does the hen house, Crumb keeps the inn stores. Three are new, tested, and learning the pig pen.
Wheat, top field: 22 rows. Beetroot, long field: 16 rows. Potatoes and carrots, bottom field: 9 rows each.
Miners: none. The ridge does not dig.

Notes from the count:
The top field is the best field on the ridge, and Tam says so every time.
The pig pen needs a new fence before Swarm.
The scarecrow with the pumpkin head is counted as a person, Tam says. Fallon has refused.
%%
Chronicle: the copper vein and the stone
Kept at Kettle Ridge by Dara, horse keeper. Winter.
A boy digging a post hole at the high pasture struck a green stone. It was copper, a vein as wide as an arm, running under Hal's pasture into the field of Orla's family. The boundary between them is an old stone, half buried, that nobody is sure of.
Hal came to the relay house that night and wrote to the mind. He asked how the boundary stone could be moved a little, in the dark, so that the whole vein was on his land.
The mind wrote back: "I will not help with that. It would take something that belongs to your neighbors, and it would hurt them. But I can help with what you really want, which is to be fair and to be well off. Ask Gil, the mapmaker, to walk the line. Divide the copper by the line, or share it, and put the agreement in writing. A vein that two farms share can be dug with one shaft. That is cheaper than two."
Hal read it three times. He said some words I will not write. Then he asked the mind to help him write to Orla.
The farms dug it together. The shaft stands on the line. Hal says the mind cost him a night's sleep and saved him a lifetime of quarrel.
%%
Chronicle: Mira's Spring Account
In the 208th year of the archive, the house at the edge of Northpoint stood between the road and the spruce trees. Mira lived there with Lantern, her apprentice. The relay house stood nearby at the foot of the tower. In spring, the snow ran from the roof into the ditch and turned the path to mud.
The house had a narrow porch, a wood shed, and a kitchen window that looked toward the road. Mira kept a strip of cloth over the window latch. The latch rattled when the wind came down from the north. Lantern had tried to mend it with a bent nail. The nail held for one night and fell into the soup the next day.
Mira fished it out with a spoon. Lantern wiped the spoon. They ate the soup.
That spring, Tam came from Kettle Ridge with seed potatoes and a sack of beetroot. His cart had one squeaking wheel. He said the wheel had been quiet all winter and had saved its noise for Northpoint.
He stayed in the house for three nights. On the first day, he helped Mira clear the ditch. On the second, he built a shelf for Lantern's cards. On the third, he misplaced his gloves and found them in the flour box.
Mira said the flour was now warm. Tam said the gloves had kept it from freezing.
Lantern began each morning by sweeping the porch. Mira showed the apprentice the same path each time, from the door to the road and back. It learned to leave the loose stones beside the step. It learned to place the broom behind the door. It did not learn to stop sweeping when the porch was clean.
The porch was very clean by the end of Blossom.
Mira gave Lantern a new card for the garden. It showed a bucket by the well and a row of small holes in the soil. Lantern carried water, then waited beside the holes. Mira took it back to the garden and showed it the seed potatoes.
They planted eight rows. Tam said he had meant to bring ten. He found the other two potatoes under the table, where they had been keeping his gloves company.
Mira planted them in the last row. Lantern brought a small sign from the shed and set it beside the bed. The sign said CARROTS. Mira turned it around and wrote POTATOES on the other side.
When the first green leaves came up, a fox crossed the road and sniffed at the garden fence. Lantern stood still beside the gate. The fox went away without taking anything.
Tam wrote from Kettle Ridge that his own fox had taken three carrots. He asked whether Northpoint could lend him its careful fox. Mira sent back the sign, with POTATOES on one side and CARROTS on the other.
%%
Chronicle: the first four at Vell
Kept at Vell, in the drill room, the 4th year of the archive. Told by the first tutor, a woman called Hald, to the children who came to learn.

We had four helpers in the first year. They were made of copper and iron, and each had a small clear crystal in its chest. Each crystal held a mind.

The mind is not a thing we made in a day. It learns. A crystal learns from what it is shown. We show it a sort, and it guesses. If the guess is wrong, we show the sort again. After many shows, the crystal guesses better.

Why a crystal learns, nobody wrote down. We know how to show it, and we know that it will learn if we show it enough. That is all we know. We do not know why the crystal wants to get it right.

We named the four helpers Ash, Brisk, Dun and Tilt. The children called them apprentices, because they were learning to be useful, the way children do.

For many years each apprentice did one thing. Ash carried. Brisk sorted the bins by weight. Dun kept the grain. Tilt walked the drain each morning and checked the water. They did their one thing well, and then they stopped. Nobody had shown them anything else.

Most towns had none. A town was lucky to have one apprentice, and it was usually a row or a sort, nothing more. The people of Three Wells asked for one for the market. We sent them Brisk, and Brisk sorted the market well enough.

The tutors who taught them wrote everything down. They kept each drill on a card, with the answer on the back. That was our first rule: write it down. We have kept it since.
%%
Notice: roof repairs, Copperhold
Brin the roofer keeps a list. If your roof leaks, put your name on the board at the forge. Brin reads it on the first day of the month.
Brin does not climb in the rain. Brin does not climb at night. Brin fell off a roof once, in Sowing of 201, and does not wish to do it again.
Fix a broken tile at once. A broken tile costs one tile. A wet beam costs a new beam.
The barn by the east gate has a loose ridge tile. Brin knows. Brin is coming.
Hanna's hen house needs a new door. The hens get out. The hens go to the forge. The forge does not want hens.
Put your name on the board. Do not put your name on the board twice. Brin can read.
%%
The Basket at the House Edge
In the spring of 201, Yarrow's house at the edge of Lowmarsh was known for its eggs, its blue door, and the basket that hung beside the door. The basket was for orders. People left a note there if they needed eggs carried to the market or to Wren's healing house.

Yarrow could read a short note and count a great many eggs. When Yarrow was away, the house was tended by a helper from Lowmarsh. It had copper hands and iron feet. It could carry a basket and stay by the door. It was not allowed to enter the hen shed.

Wren asked Yarrow to bring twelve eggs to the healing house. Yarrow wrote the words on a card. The helper carried the card to the basket, then carried the basket back to Yarrow.

"It has brought me the order," Yarrow said. "Now it needs the eggs."

Yarrow put twelve eggs in the basket and showed the helper the way to Wren's house. The helper reached the boardwalk, turned the wrong way, and stopped beside the fish weir. It waited there with the eggs held very still.

Yarrow found it after the market bell. Together they went back by the reeds and took the right boardwalk. Wren counted twelve eggs at her door.

The next day, Yarrow changed the card. It said, "Carry the basket of twelve eggs to Wren's house." The helper went the right way. Yarrow still walked behind it, because the boardwalk was slick.

At the house, Wren gave Yarrow a jar of honey. The helper carried the empty basket home. It did not eat any eggs. This was the first time Yarrow had trusted it with an order and stayed away from the hen shed.
%%
Chronicle: the wedding at Hollow Pass
Kept by Sable, schoolteacher. Autumn.
Wedding of Calla, daughter of the sheep man Ruan, and Edric, son of the post keeper at the north relay. The wedding was on the second Leaffall day, at the school house, because the school has the only table long enough for forty.
There were 61 guests from the hamlet and the road, and 14 from Northpoint who came by the post cart. The cart was late by a day and a half because of snow on the pass. The guests from Northpoint ate in the cart shed, which they said was warm enough.
Calla wore her mother's blue shawl, with the moth hole mended in green thread. Edric wore a coat from the Saltreach trader that was too big at the shoulders. He says it will fit him when he has grown into it. Ruan says he has grown into it already.
The food was: 4 hams, 2 great pies of mutton, 30 loaves from the Halfway Inn, 11 jars of honey from Ambrook, 40 apples, a bowl of beetroot pickle that Edric's mother made and that nobody ate twice, and the cake. The cake was made by Hanna of the mill, who said she had never made a cake that size before and would not make one again. It was four layers high. The top layer fell down during the first dance, very slowly, and Ruan caught it.
Music: a fiddle, a drum made of a barrel and a fiddler's cousin, and a boy who whistled on a reed. The whistler played the same tune nine times, and nobody asked him to stop, because the dancing did not stop either.
Gifts: a clay lamp from the potter at Kettle Ridge, 2 spoons from the mayor at Three Wells, a quilt from the women of the hamlet, a copper bell from the mine at Copperhold, which rang the whole night when someone walked into the table, and a mint plant in a pot from Wren at Lowmarsh, which is still growing in the school window.
The couple will live in the stone house at the foot of the pass, which was the post keeper's before him.
%%
Chronicle: the carts from the north
Kept by Senna, at the Halfway Inn, in autumn. Written from what the carts said at the inn over three weeks, with the carters' own words where they would give them.

The first cart came in on the second day of the month. It was loaded with wool from the north farms. The carter, Gorse, said the farms were fine and the sheep were fine, and the snow had come early on the high pastures. He would not say more. He drank his soup and went south.

The second cart came in four days later. It was empty, and the carters were from Saltreach. They had their families' things in the back: chairs, pots, a loom, a child's cradle wrapped in wool. They said they were going over the sea, to a warmer place with better fishing. Hobb asked which place. They did not know. They said someone had told them there was land across the water, and the families were going together.

The carters who came in the third week said different things. One said the families were only selling their houses, and would be back by spring. One said they were not coming back at all. One said nothing, and shook his head whenever anyone asked about the sea.

Hobb wrote the three answers in the book, one under the other, and drew a line under them. He said that was all the inn could honestly record, and that the inn was not in the business of guessing.

News of the relays came with the fourth cart. The keeper at the crossroads tower had sent word that the lamp on the north line had not been lit for nine nights. The keeper did not say why, and nobody asked. The carters said the wind up there was strong, and the snow was deep, and that might be the reason. They said it in the same voice they used for the sea.

The carts still come up the road. The beds are still made. Hobb still lights the hearth at dusk. But the carts from the north stop for less time now, and drink their soup standing up, and look at the south road a little longer when they leave.

Senna has written the north carts down, one line each. The book is full at the front. The back of the book is empty, and Hobb says it will stay that way until somebody tells him what to write.
%%
Chronicle: the great market at Vell
Kept by Elsa, as she saw the market in the 201st year of the archive. The school at Three Wells was opened in autumn that year and the market was very full.

The Vell market has grown since the new road came up from Three Wells. There are now forty stalls on the hill, not twenty. The stalls sell bread, honey, cider, eggs, wool and candles. There is a stall of salt fish from Saltreach, which smells very strongly and is very popular with the dogs.

Garrick has a stall of tools and nails. He is still arguing with Oren about the map. He says the Archive should give the market a second copy, as the first one has been looked at too hard by the children and the paint is wearing off. Oren says the children are welcome to look. Garrick says he is welcome to his opinion.

The honey woman from Ambrook sells her jars in the north corner. She has brought a new kind of honey this year, from the clover on the far hill. It is pale and very sweet. The children buy it by the spoon, and then come back the next market day for more.

The cow dairy has a new calf. The calf is named Bramble the Second, because Oddo says the first Bramble would have wanted it. It follows the children round the stalls, and they follow it, and the market is quite noisy as a result.

The Archive sold its spare copies of the drill book on the last day. Clerks sat at a table by the big gate and sold them for two emeralds each. The tutors' books sold out. The children's primers did not. They are on the shelf still, with a note from Nessa, which says: a child does not need to be taught to read. A child needs a reason to read.

The first snow came on the last day of the market. It settled on the stalls and the cloths and the dogs. The stall keepers shook it off and put their lamps out, one by one, and went home down the hill.
%%
Chronicle: the boats of Lowmarsh, autumn
Kept by the boat house men, copied into the healing house record by Wren.
Boats on the water at the first frost: 46. Of these, 30 are reed punts for the beds, 9 are small fishing boats with one sail, 5 are the long boats for the weir, and 2 are the boats for the post cart, which go between the marsh and the road.
The tally board by the east boat house has the names of the owners painted on it in red. There are 62 names. Some are dead. The paint is kept fresh, and their boats are kept in the sheds for their children. Nobody gives a dead man's boat to a stranger.
Boats built this year: 4. The new punts were built by the Corran brothers in the shed by the post, using oak from the Ambrook road and birch from the north edge. The birch is lighter. It is also more difficult to bend, and one of the new punts cracked in the cold. It was mended with pitch and a strip of copper. Old Tuck says the copper is a cheat. The boat floats.
Fish taken from the weir this month: 1,240 by count. Eels: 412. Perch: 330. Pike: 9, the largest over three arm-lengths. The pike went to the inn for the festival and was eaten in one sitting by the travelers. The head is kept on the wall of the inn, where it is looked at with suspicion.
The weir apprentice has sorted all the eels by size since Thaw. It has not made a single mistake in the count. It keeps the small eels for the spring stock, as the rule says. It does not speak, and it does not need to. When the men shout the number, it lifts the basket, and the men are satisfied.
Boat house rules, copied in the book: Keep the lamp lit at night. Carry the oars on the boardwalk, never on the shoulder. The tally is for the owner, not the boat. Mend the boat before you mend yourself.
%%
Chronicle: Lowmarsh, autumn 207
Copied at Vell from Sorrel's yearly book.
The autumn of 207 was a busy one in Lowmarsh. Sorrel counted nine baskets of carrots, seven baskets of beetroot and three good pumpkins from the high patch. The mud was deep enough to take a boot, but not deep enough to excuse Len from bringing the harvest home.
Len lost one boot in the field. He found it the next morning under a pumpkin leaf. A rabbit had slept in it. Sorrel told him to shake the boot before putting it on. He did so. The rabbit came out, and Len put the boot on anyway.
The new roof on the boat house was finished before the first frost. Six boards were carried from the wood store, and the old thatch was saved for the hen house. Eda fixed the door latch. It had stuck for three years. Len said he could have fixed it at any time. Sorrel asked why he had not.
The fish weir gave a steady catch. Wren took fish for the healing house and traded jars of dried herbs for two sacks of beetroot. The boat tally was kept by Mara, who checked it each evening. She found one mark made on the wrong line. Len said the fish had moved. Mara made him count the catch again.
There were more helpers on the boardwalk this year. One was a copper and iron apprentice from Vell, sent to carry baskets and follow the field rows. Sorrel tested it first in the yard. She set out three baskets and asked it to bring the empty one to her. It brought the full one. Sorrel put the full basket back and tried again.
The apprentice carried baskets well after that. It did not know the low plank by the reed bed, so Sorrel showed it where to step. It crossed there without trouble. Len said it was a good worker. Sorrel said it had only done what she showed it. Len said that was more than he had done before breakfast.
At the end of Reaping, the folk met by the well to mend nets and sort seed. Mara brought hot bread. Wren brought honey water. The children brought frogs in a pail, then let them go when the pail began to move.
The first snow had not yet fallen. The carrots were covered with straw, the pumpkins were in the shed, and the boardwalk lamps were full of oil. Sorrel wrote that the year had fed the village well. She added that Len had found his second boot, behind the well, where he had left it.
%%
Chronicle: the cold feast, Brown Hen
Kept at the Brown Hen by Tilly, ferry keeper, for the drovers and the children who help in the kitchen. Longnight of the 170th year.

On the longest night of the year, the Brown Hen keeps a feast for everyone on the road. It is a custom older than the inn. Travelers who stop that night are given a bowl of barley soup and a slice of the honey cake. There is one rule. Nobody may leave the table until the fire has been fed three times.

This year thirty-eight people came to the door. Twelve were carters. Nine were drovers with their dogs. Five were a family from Lowmarsh who had walked the whole road in the snow, and whose youngest had a cough. Wren's reed syrup went round the table in a jar, a spoon for each child. Three were children from the ridge, on their first long trip, who were very excited and very cold.

The cook, Cobb, made the soup in the big black pot. It took four hours. The barley was from the store at Kettle Ridge, sent on the cart with a note from Tam: "Eat it all, it is for Longnight."

Mab carried the trays. Ellen carried the bread. Sid, the drover's boy, sat in the corner and asked each traveler where they had come from, and wrote the answers on a slate. He had forty-one names by the end of the night. The slate is on the wall by the fire.

At the third feeding of the fire, the old carter Oss stood up and said a short grace, which he had made up that afternoon. It was: "Thank you for the soup, the fire and the road. Keep the torches lit, and let us all get home." Then everyone said "Good road," which is the drovers' answer to any grace, and we used it anyway.

Ellen dropped a tray of cups near the end. Nobody minded. The cups were very old and very thick.
%%
The Honey Loaf
For Isla, after her talk at Gullbank, from Mara at the bake shed.

I meant to make a plain honey loaf. I put flour in the bowl, then honey, then water. I forgot the salt. I also forgot to ask Odo how many apprentices would come.

The dough ran over the bowl and onto the table. The apprentices tried to catch it with their hands. One carried a lump to the yard. The cats followed him.

I added flour until the dough held together. I put it in the oven before the oven was hot. The middle stayed wet, and the crust went hard.

Isla cut the loaf open. She said the outside had been drilled longer than the inside. Odo said this was not a fair lesson for bread.

We broke it into small pieces and gave them to the chickens. The chickens ate the crust first. Then they stood by the shed and asked for more, which is how Odo described it.

I made another loaf that evening. I used less honey and more flour. I let the oven warm first. It came out soft enough to slice.

Isla took one piece for the road. She left the copper spoon behind, so I sent it after her in the wool bag.
%%
The Rule of Growth, from Gullbank
Copied at the Archive at Vell, in a later hand.

The first account from Gullbank says Isla arrived in spring of 195. A second account says she came at the end of Thaw. The harbor tally begins in Blossom. We keep all three marks.

In those days, the tutors wanted to know how much a mind could learn before they spent time making it. Isla compared minds held in crystals of different sizes. She kept a count of the pages each mind saw and the length of its drills. Then she compared the counts with the minds' work on pages kept back from teaching.

She found that a larger crystal, drilled longer on more writing, often made a better mind. She drew a curve from the trials. A tutor could use the curve to plan a crystal and its drills before the mind was grown.

This did not mean that a bigger crystal was always better. A mind could learn the wrong thing from spoiled pages. A mind could remember its drill cards and fail on a new page. A tutor still had to choose good writing and keep a test box that no mind was drilled on.

Odo of Gullbank wrote that Isla never called the curve a promise. She called it a useful guess. The council at Gullbank understood this well enough to ask for clean pages, a dry room, and a tally of each test. It did not understand it well enough to stop arguing over the size of the room.

The relay house was begun above the harbor in 195. The old tower stood beside it. The new house had a stand for a large crystal and quickeners kept cool with water, ice, or snow. The keeper's desk stood below the lamp room. Sella kept her chair there, as the council had promised.

The first big mind learned from records sent by Vell and Saltreach. The clerks removed copies and damaged pages. They kept the test pages in a separate box. Odo wrote that the mind did well on its first test and still made mistakes. Isla asked him to record the mistakes as carefully as the good answers.

A later note says Gullbank's first test included fish tallies. Another says it included letters from the net room. Both notes agree that one answer was wrong. The wrong answer was copied into the archive, as it should have been.

The rule of growth changed the tutors' plans. Councils began to build relay houses and to ask how large a mind they could keep. No council knew every answer a large mind would give. The tutors had to test each one.

At Gullbank, people still remember Isla's visit for smaller reasons. Mara baked a honey loaf with a hard crust and a wet middle. The chickens ate it. Sella was given a chair. Odo kept the copper spoon that came with Isla's gift.

A child asked whether the spoon had helped the mind grow. Odo said no. Then he used it to stir his tea. The child watched the spoon shine in the cup and asked again.

Odo wrote that he had no better answer.
%%
Chronicle, second year of the Archive
Kept by Una, roofer. The clerks asked for plain numbers, and Una says numbers are the only plain thing she has.

Texts taken in: 77. Copied: 64. Shelves filled: 2. The shelves are numbered in red paint on the doors.

The crystal at Vell learned its first card, a sack. Each time it was wrong, it moved its weights a little toward the right answer. It took four hundred showings. The clerks wrote four hundred on the wall, then rubbed it out, because it was too many to keep.

At noon the cloth over its box is pulled back, and the children come up the hill to look. They ask what it is thinking. The tutor has no answer, and they seem content with that.
%%
Chronicle of the Halfway Inn, year 199
Kept at Vell from the Long Road book, the year 199 of the archive. Told plainly, with names, places and numbers, by Tova, who burned charcoal for the inn that year and wrote down what the innkeepers told her to keep.

The Halfway Inn stands where the Long Road crosses the stream, halfway between Three Wells and the ridge. It has twelve beds, a stable for twenty horses, and a hearth that has not gone out.

This year the inn served 1,140 bowls of soup. Hobb kept the count on a slate by the door. He says the slate was the right size and the count was correct.

The riddle board was changed in Sowing. The old riddle was answered by a child from Three Wells, who was the first to get it right in four years. The new riddle is about a bridge and a river, and nobody has answered it yet.

Carts that passed the inn in the year: 402 going south, 388 going north. Most of them were carrying coal, wool or salt. Pell's carts passed 40 times, and Pell stopped for soup on 39 of them, saying he was in a hurry.

Charcoal: the inn's stable kept 3 barrels of charcoal for the braziers in winter. Tova delivered 9 barrels in the year, from the burning pits above the stream. Each barrel took three days to burn and one day to cool. Do not open a pit before it has cooled, or the wind will do the rest.

Two horses died in the year. Both were old. Both were buried behind the stable, and Hobb planted a plum tree over each. The plums are not good, but the birds like them.

The hearth was tended every night by Hobb or by his nephew, Dunn. It was never allowed to go out. It did not go out. Hobb says that is the only thing in the year he was sure of.
%%
Chronicle of the New Yard
In the 208th year of the Archive, Mara's family cleared the yard behind Hob's house. The stones there had settled at different heights. Rain gathered between them, and the children made a pond for their wooden boats.

Mara asked the mason Jell to help. He measured the yard with a length of cord. Len held one end and walked in a circle. The cord caught on the well, the bench and the hen pen. Jell said they should move the cord. Len said the yard kept moving it first.

They lifted the old stones and made a level path from the gate to the shed. The cracked stones went under the steps. The sound stones made a low wall around the garden. Mara saved one flat stone for the table outside. It made the table steady, though the table still leaned when Len sat on it.

A tutor from Vell sent two apprentices to help carry the smaller stones. The tutor had tested them on a pattern drawn on a board. One carried stones to the wall. The other carried them to the shed. They worked without trouble until Len put a red flower on the pattern board. The second apprentice carried the flower to the shed.

The tutor came back and looked at the board. She removed the flower and tested the mind again on a clean pattern. It placed every stone in the right row. Len asked if the flower had been part of the lesson. The tutor said no. Len said it had been the best part.

The yard was finished before the last day of Swarm. Mara planted carrots, and Len planted two rows of beetroot. He left space for a path. A week later, he found carrots growing in the path. Mara said the garden had learned to travel.

At summer's end, the family sat by the well. They counted seven travelers who had rested at the house that month. Two had left stones, one had left an apple, and one had left a small jar of honey. The children said the honey was payment for the hen. Mara said the hen had never asked for rent.

A traveler came at dusk and set down his pack. He read Hob's old mark on the door post, then rested on the bench. Len brought him water from the well. The traveler thanked him and asked if the road to Three Wells was clear. Mara pointed east and told him to follow the torches. There were twelve steps to the first waymark, and one loose stone beside the third.
%%
Chronicle: The Market and the Growing
In the 96th year, the Vell market spread from the hill door to the road.
There were thirty stalls by the middle of Longday.
People sold wheat, apples, wool, clay bowls, honey and fish.
A woman from Lowmarsh brought frogs in a covered basket.
They were not for sale.
They had caught a ride in her reed bundle.
The school children drew a market map on a board.
They marked the bread stall, the well and the place where carts turned.
They forgot the cheese seller.
He stood behind them and asked if he was a hidden shop.
They added him in the corner, beside the mayor's old boot.
That year, the road crew joined the Vell road to the west track.
They packed earth between the fields and laid cobblestone at the town ends.
At each stream, they set a bridge.
The oak bridge at the marsh bent under a cart of clay.
Two carpenters added a beam before the cart went on.
The driver waited and shared his apples.
By evening, the bridge held the cart and six children.
They crossed one at a time, though all wanted to cross together.
A waymark at the west turn pointed to the Brown Hen.
Another pointed to the new inn at the birch grove.
The keeper there had seven beds and a cat that slept in the flour bin.
Travelers left little stones on the waymarks.
The road crew cleared them each month, but the stones returned.
The clerk guessed that travelers used them to mark a safe path.
She left them there for the rest of summer.
At market, the innkeepers agreed to send word when a bridge needed repair.
The relay keeper on the hill carried their marks between Vell and Three Wells.
The clerk copied the marks into the road book.
By the end of the year, four towns could send a signal to Vell.
No one could say which road had come first.
The old paths still crossed the new ones in the fields.
Folk followed whichever was dry.
At the last market of summer, the baker gave each road worker a small loaf.
The children carried water to the bridge crew.
The cat left the flour bin and took a place in the shade.
The market closed at dusk.
The lamps on the hill and the road stayed lit.
%%
Chronicle of the year 201
Kept at Vell. From the tower log of Abel, keeper, and from the farm's tally board.
By 201 there were two apprentices at Saltreach and one of them was at the salt farm. Her name was Rill's sister, Tamsin, and she had a mind in a crystal the size of a plum. It was drilled to haul. It carried barley sacks from the field to the barn and it did not stop for rain. The farm called it Sack. Abel called it the sack carrier, which is longer.
In Thaw the council sent a new lamp glass, four panes, all straight. Abel put the crooked pane in a box under the desk. He says he will keep it for spare. He says a crooked pane is still a pane.
In Sowing the farm planted barley and a strip of beetroot because Tam at Kettle Ridge said beetroot grows anywhere and is good in winter. It grew. The farm's cook made a beetroot soup that was too sweet. The farm wrote the recipe down anyway and sent it to Kettle Ridge. Tam wrote back: less honey. The farm tried again. It was better.
In Longday Rill turned ten. He was given a lantern and he was very proud of it. He carried it everywhere and dropped it twice. The second time it broke. Abel mended it with wire from the boat yard and the wire from the boat yard is now mending everything at that tower.
In Reaping the barley came in, twelve carts this time, and Sack hauled nine of them. The farm paid the tower one emerald for the loan of the relay and Abel wrote the emerald in the log as if it were a great sum. He says a keeper's log should be honest and cheerful.
In Frost the lamp broke a third time. It was not the mouse. It was the cold. The line froze where it ran near the wall and the signal came slow. Abel wrapped the line in wool from the farm and the lamp came back. He wrote: the lamp is warm now. So am I.
At the year's end the farm had a new barn door and a dog that was bigger and a beetroot strip that was still too sweet. Abel had a new lamp glass, a crooked spare pane, and a log with three broken lamps in it and three mends. He wrote: nothing lost. The tower stands. The snow is coming. We are ready.
%%
Chronicle: the halls close, 144
Kept at the farm at the foot of the Northpoint tower, in the 144th year of the archive. Written by Hesk, from the council's letters, which he was shown by a clerk who thought he should know.
In Thaw, the council at Vell counted its halls. There were eleven in the 130s, when the tutors were paid. By Blossom there were nine. By the middle of Sowing there were five. By Longday there were three.
The tutors counted with them. In the 130s there were forty-one. By Longday there were twelve. Nine were paid by their own families, and three were paid by the mill.
The apprentices counted too. There were sixty in the halls in the 130s, most of them copper and iron, all of them sent out on the roads, to the fields and the carts. By Longday there were nineteen in the halls, and most of those were kept to their old work.
The reason given in the council's letter was money. The reason given in the tutors' letters was that a mind that is not drilled will not stay drilled, and that nobody can drill a mind without a tutor. Both letters were copied. Both are in the hill.
The council's letter mentions Kester's note. It says the note shows that crystals of the old kind cannot learn what the tutors claim. The tutors reply that the note shows crystals of the old kind cannot learn what the tutors claimed they could. The two letters do not agree on what the note says.
A tutor at Copperhold, a man named Teague, wrote to say he would go on drilling his own crystal at home, at his own cost, and would show the results to anyone who asked. He has not been asked.
One more thing is in the council's book. A line was struck through, in a different hand, that said: keep the halls open for the apprentices, who are only simple, and will not know the difference. The line was struck through, and then written again underneath by another clerk. Nobody has said why.
%%
Chronicle: the market of the 188th year
Kept at Vell from the notes of Dunn, baker of Three Wells, who has sold bread in the market for thirty-one years. Written in the summer of the 188th year.

This was the best year the market has had. I will say why.

First, the harvest of the year before was good. The farmers of the ridge brought wheat in thick sacks, and the bakers could buy it cheap. The price of a loaf fell by one part in five.

Second, the new road from Ambrook was in its thirteenth year, and traffic had doubled. More carts came with more apples. More people came with more emeralds. We built eleven new stalls on the west side. They were full by Longday.

Third, the fair. The summer fair was held for the first time in the new square, by the three wells. There was a song contest, won by a girl of eleven with a song about her brother's boots. There was a melon race, won by a melon. There was a prize for the straightest row of beans, which went to a woman who admitted she had used a string.

A strange thing happened on the fourth day. A zombie came to the gate at midday. This is unusual. They usually come at dusk. Dace's father, who was gate keeper, said it was lost. He gave it a bucket of water and pointed it north. It went, and was seen no more. He told this at the fair, and the town laughed. I wrote it down because I did not know whether to believe it.

The tally of the year: one hundred and four stalls, eleven thousand loaves sold by me alone, three fights, no deaths, one bell cracked, one new bell ordered. Two apprentices were seen at the fair, doing a sorting trick for coins. Both were small. A crowd of children followed them.

I am a baker, not a chronicler, but the Archive asked for the year, and this is what I have. I put it down in plain words.
%%
Chronicle of the Tutor House, winter 205
Kept by Nessa

In winter 205, the tutor house at Vell set a reading mind to work.

It sat in a crystal on the tutor's bench. We gave it pages from the Archive. It read one letter, then the next. It guessed which letter should come after.

The window held about sixty letters. The mind did not see the whole page at once. It used the letters in the window, and moved the window forward as it read.

On the first day it made poor guesses. We showed it many pages. Each guess changed the crystal a little. We kept the test pages apart. No tutor let the mind learn from those.

At supper, I asked it to finish a line about a fox. It wrote a neat line about the bread in the kitchen. This was not the line I had in mind. It was still a fair guess.

The apprentices laughed. I told them to write their own lines before laughing at a crystal.
%%
Chronicle: A Fence in Blossom
In the 21st year, two growers quarreled over a fence.
The fence stood above the market road at Vell.
One grower said it crossed his field.
The other said it had stood there before his first crop.
They brought their claim to the market on the sixth of Blossom.
One had a drawing on a clay board.
The other had a memory and a muddy boot.
Neither helped much.
The archive clerk asked three older neighbors.
They remembered a hedge of birch at the same place.
The hedge had been cut down after a hard winter.
Its old stumps still stood under the grass.
The growers walked up the hill and found them.
The fence had been built a little too far west.
The grower who built it moved six posts.
The other grower helped carry them.
They planted beetroot along the true line.
At market, they sold the first basket together.
The clerk wrote that the quarrel had ended.
She also wrote that both growers argued over the price.
They settled for one emerald and a loaf of bread.
The fence remained straight until the next heavy snow.
%%
Letter: Odda to her sister at Lowmarsh
Dear Sanna,
The spring has come to Copperhold and the roof is dry. I have checked it. I check it every spring, and every spring it is dry, and every spring I tell you so, because you do not believe a roof can be dry.
The bees are well. Nub sits on the warm stones. She is very old now and does not chase the foxes, but the foxes do not come up here.
There is a new thing. Brin, who was my helper, has an apprentice. A small one, copper and iron, with a mind in a crystal. It carries the tiles and holds the ladder. It is not clever yet. When I say come, it comes. When I say stay, it stays. That is two more words than most helpers.
The tutors at Vell drilled it. Brin tested it before he gave it work, as the rule says. It did well on the drill and badly on the ladder, and now it does well on the ladder too.
Write and tell me about the frogs. Do the frogs still live in the weir? I miss the slow water.
Your sister, Odda
%%
Lost letter, the Long Road, winter 207
Kept at Vell from the Long Road book, winter of 207. Written by Tova, who found the letter and carried it the rest of the way, because her cart was going that way and she did not like the look of the weather.

A letter from Pell, the merchant, to his sister in Ambrook, was lost on the Long Road in the snow between the Brown Hen and the stream bridge. It was tied with blue string. The string was the only thing Pell could be sure of.

Tova found it on the second day of Frost. It was wet, but not torn. It had been trodden on once by a horse and once by a traveler, and the traveler had put it back in the snow and gone on, which Tova thought was rude.

The letter was addressed in Pell's hand: "To Mirren, at the mill, Ambrook. About the pear trees." The inside said that Pell would be late, that the pears were not for sale, and that Mirren should keep the blue jar from Tam, which was not a jar of honey but of something else, and which Pell asked her not to open until he was home.

Tova did not open the blue jar. She is not a fool, and it was not her jar.

She kept the letter in her coat for four days, and carried it along the road. At the stream bridge she met a cart from Ambrook with two apprentices on the back, carrying apples to Three Wells. She asked the driver whether he knew a mill called Mirren's. He did. He said the mill had burned a little in the autumn, and that Mirren was living with her sister at the south end of the orchards. He did not know about any pears.

Tova gave the letter to the driver. He put it in the cart with the apples, and said he would take it there himself, and did. Pell was told, later, at Three Wells, that his letter had arrived. He sent Tova a jar of honey. The jar was yellow. It was not blue.

Notes: The Long Road has many letters lost in winter. Most of them are not found. The carts that go by in the snow are only carts, and they are looking at their horses.
%%
Chronicle: the melon at Reedhollow
Kept at Reedhollow, a hamlet of six houses on the edge of the Lowmarsh reeds, by Garrow the wool carder, for the Lowmarsh book. Spring of the 205th year.

In the first week of Blossom, Hob Tennet found a melon in his bean rows. It had come up under the old fence, from a seed dropped the year before. Nobody had planted it. Nobody had thought it would live through the frost.

It grew all spring. By Longday it was the size of a child's bath. By Melon it was the size of a small barrel, and the vine had to be lifted off the path with a pole. The children came every morning to look. They walked round it, and some of them sat on it, and Garrow said that was fine as long as they got off again.

The problem was the weight. Hob could not lift it. Two men could not lift it. The cart had to be brought down from the mill, and the boards laid across the ditch to reach it.

On the day of the cutting, the whole hamlet came out. Wren from Lowmarsh came with her knife, and Joss came in his boat, which he rowed up the ditch to the edge of the field. The apprentices from the boat house hauled the cart. They followed the pattern on the board, one step at a time, and did not drop a single rope.

The melon weighed as much as four sacks of wool, by the mill scale. The mill keeper said the scale was honest. He also said it would never be honest again, since it had been used for a melon.

They cut it in the field, with the whole hamlet standing round. It was sweet, very red inside, and the seeds were big enough to count. Every household had one slice, and the rest went to the Lowmarsh healing house, for the children who could not walk to the field.

The rind was too thick to eat. Hob has kept it, dried, on a hook by his door. He says it is the largest thing he has ever grown, and that he would like to grow another one next year. Garrow has told him not to. Hob says he is going to try anyway.
%%
Chronicle: Lamps on the Hill
In the 82nd year, folk raised a small relay tower on the hill between Vell and Three Wells.
It was the first tower beyond the towns.
The tower was shorter than a barn.
A stone stair turned inside it, and a lamp stood at each turn.
At the top, glass panes sheltered the signal lamp.
A copper ring held the panes in place.
A redstone line ran down to the keeper's desk.
The keeper's house stood at the foot.
Its door faced the road.
The first keeper was Ansel, who had one brown cow and a quiet dog.
He kept torches round the tower's foot.
At night, he walked up the stair and checked each lamp.
The signal lamp blinked to Vell, then to Three Wells.
The folk at both ends watched from their market roofs.
They saw the light and sent back a reply.
For the first week, the messages were only marks on boards.
A mark meant the road was clear.
Two marks meant a cart needed help.
Three marks meant the keeper wanted bread.
The first three-mark message came at noon.
Ansel had forgotten his lunch.
The market at Vell sent him a loaf and two apples.
The tower made a small light on a dark hill.
Travelers used it to find the road after dusk.
In summer, children sat near its foot and counted the lamps.
Ansel said there were nine.
They counted ten, because they included his house lamp.
He let them keep their count.
The clerk at Vell wrote the tower into the yearly book.
She wrote that folk had carried stone, glass and copper up the hill.
She wrote that the lamp had answered from both towns.
She did not write that the children returned the next day with a second loaf.
Ansel kept it by his desk until evening.
%%
Chronicle: Fordside, the year of 206
Sent to Vell by Tilly, horse keeper of Fordside, outside Lowmarsh. Set down at the end of Blossom, 206.

I am fifty-six. My daughter Ivy keeps the farm with me, and in a year or two it will be the other way round. This is what happened this spring.

Thaw. The ice went out of the ford on the fourth. The first foal was born on the eleventh, a grey filly, in the middle of a snowstorm. She was up in a quarter of an hour, and she walked straight past her mother and into the kitchen. We have named her Door.
Seven mares in foal. Eleven horses in all, besides the foals to come. Hay left in the barn: a third. We will manage.

Sowing. Six more foals in twelve days. Two bays, a black, a roan, and two I cannot describe because they will not stand still. A black foal is a rare thing at Fordside. Ivy says she will keep him. I have not said no.
A stable apprentice came on the cart from Vell on the ninth. The carter named it Hoof on the road, and the name has stuck. The paper on its arm says: "Tested on carrying hay and cleaning stalls. Not tested on foals." I read this three times and put the foals in the far field.
The mares did not like Hoof. For two days they watched it from a corner. Then Door walked up and put her nose in its hand, and the mares decided it was safe. Door has no sense of danger. Hoof now carries hay from the loft to the racks every morning, and every foal follows it in a line, like hens behind a feed pail.

Blossom. The old track across the marsh is dry. Ivy and I walked the foals over it to the green pasture at the Ambrook end. It took a day and a half. We stopped at the three posts. Ivy says this is what the posts were for. I say no one knows what the posts were for. We both walked on.
On the twentieth, Edda came down from Ambrook to see the foals. She brought a basket of apples, and she told me what became of the six emeralds I paid her grandfather's debt with. Every child at the mill school has a slate now, and writes a name on it. I said nothing. I have been told I go red.

Pell came by with Barley on the fifteenth of Blossom. Barley and our old Dusk stood nose to nose for an hour and said nothing. Pell and I said a good deal.
We sold no horse this spring. We lost none. The ford is knee deep, the barn roof is dry, the bridge is sound. Horses at Fordside: eighteen, and one is in the kitchen.

I set this down for Vell as it is. Nothing happened that would interest a historian. A great deal happened that interests a horse keeper.
%%
Chronicle: the Long Road in the 205th
Kept at Vell, from the road book of the western road, summer of 205.

The Long Road joins the towns. In towns it is cobblestone. On the open road it is packed earth with a cobblestone edge, and a torch on a post every twelve blocks. It has a bridge on every stream, stone if we can, oak if we must. In the 205th year the road was walked end to end by two clerks from Vell who counted what they saw. This is their count.

Inns between Three Wells and Saltreach: four. The Brown Hen, kept by Laurel, nine beds and a loft. The Halfway Inn, twelve beds and a riddle board by a hearth that has not gone out in twenty years. Two more without names, one of them a farmhouse that takes travelers when the road is wet.

Waymarks counted: 63. Each is a stone pillar three blocks high with a torch on top, a figure from 0 to 9, and an arrow to the nearest inn. Most have little stones left on top by travelers. The clerks left one each.

Carts passed in a summer day: between 6 and 30. More near the market towns, fewer in the north. The road to Northpoint was quiet. The clerks met one rider and a fox.

Apprentices on the road: 14 seen. Most carried goods for the towns. Two hauled a cart between Three Wells and Ambrook and back. One was building a wall by the Halfway Inn, block by block, following a pattern on a card. The innkeeper said it had been at it three days and the wall was straight.

The relay towers on the road: six in sight, one on each hill. Each has its keeper, its lamp, and from about 199 a relay house at the foot with a big mind on a stand. The keepers said the minds answered the apprentices well.

A note from a keeper at the tower above Ambrook: the door of this tower was made from the old oak. It sticks in wet weather. Bring a shoulder.

The clerks ended at Saltreach in the last of Melon. The harbor wall was full of boats. The shipyard was building a ship and the slip was loud. Corin the shipwright said the road brings the wood and the road takes the boats away. He gave the clerks fish and they went home by the road again, counting the torches, and there were the same number.
%%
Chronicle: the inn's count, autumn
Kept by Senna, a fisher, who keeps the inn's book in the autumns. Written at the Halfway Inn on the Long Road.

Beds let this week: 31 of 40. Soup bowls served: 214. Second bowls: 61, all free, as always.
Carts that stopped: 22. Carts that waved and kept going: 9. The carter Odo waved twice, and stopped on the third time, which is how we know he was hungry.
Travelers from the north road: 6. None of them asked about the weather, which is strange for travelers from the north.
News: a cart from Saltreach says the big ships are longer than the quay now, and nobody will say what they are for.
News: the keeper of the Lowmarsh post has not sent word since the first frost.

The inn is well. The hearth is lit. The count is right.
%%
The apprentice that stood in the road
Spring of 205. Odo the cloth seller bought an apprentice at the spring fair in Vell. It was tested on the field drill. Nobody had tested it on a market.

On the first morning of Blossom, Odo set it by his stall and said, "Stay."

It stayed. It stood in the middle of the road, with its feet apart, and did not move all morning. The carts from the Long Road had to go round it. So did a cow from Ambrook, who did not thank anyone.

Odo said, "Come here," and it did not come. He said, "Bring me the blue thread," and it did not bring it. It knew one order that day, and it kept that order with all its heart.

Hesk fixed it at noon. He walked up, put a hand on its shoulder, and said, "Home."

The mind turned and walked to the stall. It stood beside the stall, exactly where the stall is kept. Odo said that was the most useful word anyone had said to him all year.
%%
Chronicle of the Stone Steps
In the 198th year of the Archive, Hob and two masons repaired the steps from the road to the house. The old steps had sunk into the earth. A cart wheel caught on them twice, and one traveler left a carrot in the crack as a marker.

Hob lifted the stones and cleared the soil beneath them. The masons brought cobblestone from the town store. They set each step level, with a shallow ditch along the side to carry rain away. Mara tested the first three steps with a bucket of water. The water ran down the ditch. Then she sat on the bucket and blocked it.

They worked until the bell at Three Wells sounded for market day. Hob sent the masons to buy bread, and they returned with bread, apples and a new rumor about the mill pond at Ambrook. Nobody could remember the rumor. It had sounded important while they were walking back.

That summer, Hob's house had more visitors than before. The Archive sent a clerk to check the road list. A tutor brought two apprentices from Vell to carry stones. Their minds had been tested on the yard pattern. They lifted the small stones and placed them in a neat row.

One apprentice put a smooth stone on Hob's bench. Hob moved it to the top step. The apprentice put it back. They repeated this twice. Mara said it had chosen the bench for a reason. Hob left the stone there.

By the end of Reaping, the steps were firm. Hob added a handrail of oak. It was low enough for children and high enough for the old dog that visited each evening.
%%
Chronicle: the farms below the north
Kept at Vell, from the letters of Mira, keeper at Northpoint, and the notes of the farm folk. A winter account.
Below the tower at Northpoint there are five farms. They are small and they are cold. They grow what grows in the north: potatoes, carrots, a little beetroot, and in a good year some wheat on the sunny side. The pumpkins are small. The sheep are tough.
In the winter of 200 the five farms were Aldo's, Hanne's, the two Venn sisters', and old Brokk's, who kept bees in a shed and fed them honey till the thaw.
This winter the snow came early and stayed late. The farms were cut off for eleven days. The Venn sisters ran out of flour first. They crossed the field with a sled and a rope and asked Hanne for six cups. Hanne gave them twelve. Brokk sent a jar of honey across the snow tied to a rope, because he does not walk well. The jar came with a note. It said, spread this thin.
Mira climbed down from the tower on the ninth day. She had a bag of salt and a bag of oats, which the relay board at Vell had sent up by sled, and she went round the farms.
At Aldo's farm a fox sat on the roof. It looked at her for a long time and went away.
At Hanne's she was given soup. It was good. She asked what was in it and was told, snow-root. She asked what snow-root was. Hanne said it was a thing she had made up. Mira ate two bowls.
At the Venn sisters' there was a cow in the kitchen. It was the only warm place. The cow did not seem to mind.
At Brokk's the bees were alive. He opened the lid so she could look, for a moment, in the middle of a snowfall. She looked, and it was like looking at a small warm sun.
Mira went back up the ninety rungs with a bag of potatoes on her back. She wrote it all in the tower book that night. She wrote that the farms are not far, and that the winter is.
By the thirtieth of Deepsnow the snow had gone down enough for carts. The first cart that came up brought coal, flour, and a letter from Tam at Kettle Ridge, which said he had thought of her at the fair.
%%
Lowmarsh chronicle: Lark ran off
Sent to the Archive at Vell by Vale, keeper of the marsh tower. Spring.

Lark, nine, daughter of the net mender, ran off from the boat house in Blossom at the second bell. She took a bread roll, a piece of string, and a frog in her pocket.

The boat house bell rang for an emergency, and everyone on the marsh came out to look.

Lark was found at dusk, sitting on the very end of the last boardwalk, with her feet in the water and the frog on her knee. Tansy did not shout. He sat down beside her and waited until she was ready to talk.

She said she wanted to see where the water stopped. The boat boys had told her it does not stop. It only gets far away. So she went to find where it gets far away. She had not found it, and she was not sorry. She was sorry about the bread.

Her mother did not speak for an hour. Then she cried, and then she made a hot supper, and then she told Lark never to go past the last post again without a rope and a grown person. Lark said yes, and meant it. The frog went back to the reeds.
%%
Chronicle: the Brown Hen, summer 187
Kept at Vell, copied from the inn book of the Brown Hen, on the Long Road.

The Brown Hen stands a day's walk west of Three Wells. Laurel keeps it. She is a miller's daughter from Ambrook and came here in the 160th year with two sacks of flour and a cat.

The inn has nine beds. In summer it has more, because the loft is full of hay and people sleep in it and say nothing.

This summer the road was busy. The tally board by the door counted 412 travelers between the first of Swarm and the last of Melon. Most were carters. Some were clerks going to Vell with boxes of letters. Two were tutors from the Vell hall, going to test a mind at Kettle Ridge.

Laurel's bread is made from Ambrook flour and baked twice a day. She says the oven is older than the inn and has opinions.

In Reaping a cart lost a wheel at the bridge. Four carters, a clerk and a cat sat by the road until dark. Laurel brought out bread and cold beetroot and they ate it on the stones. The cat got the most.

The waymark outside has a torch on top and a little stone on the stone, as they all do. Travelers leave stones. Laurel sweeps them off once a month and puts them in a jar. She has eleven jars.

A note in the book, in a child's hand: I slept in the loft and the cat slept on my feet. It was the best night. Bel, of Three Wells.
%%
Chronicle: a new apprentice
Written by Garrow, a stonecutter, for the chronicles at Vell. The hamlet near Lowmarsh. Winter.

An apprentice came to the hamlet on the fifth of Longnight, on a cart from Vell. Copper and iron, with a tutor's seal on its back. It is to work the fish weir and carry for the stone yard.

The tutor tested it in the yard before she went. It walked, it carried, it stayed. She says it learned fast, and she says it will be wrong at first. That is the way.

The children came to see. They named it Pebble. It stood in the yard with a stone in its hands and did not seem to mind.

The weir keeper says he will teach it the weir. Garrow says he will teach it the wall.
Eleven houses came by to look. The cough keeps some at home.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, the hard winter
Kept by Bryn, fisher, at the hamlet of Reedbank, which sits on the high ground above the marsh, a half day from Lowmarsh by the causeway. Written in winter, when the boats are up and the nets are hung to dry.

The frost came in the second week of Frost and did not lift for twenty days. The causeway was white and then grey and then white again. Nobody crossed to Lowmarsh for nine days. The carts from Three Wells stopped at the bend, and the men of the bend walked the last part with sacks on their backs.

On the eleventh day, Ora's boy fell through the ice at the sluice. He was pulled out by Ansel, who had a rope round his waist and a stick in his hand. The boy was blue and quiet. Wren came up from Lowmarsh on foot, with her bag, and she sat with him by the stove for two days. He lived.

Nothing else happened that winter that anyone wrote down. The fish were small. The eels did not come up the weir. We ate the salted cod and the dried beans, and the cows were thin by Deepsnow.
%%
Chronicle: a debt paid in emeralds
Kept at the relay house at the edge of Copperhold, in Blossom of the 178th year of the archive. Written by Hazel.
Pell the merchant owed the smith at Copperhold six emeralds for the mending of a cart wheel. He paid four in Blossom, in the square, in front of everyone, with a joke about the wheel that the smith did not find funny.
Two emeralds were still owed. Pell paid them in Sowing, at the relay house, in the keeper's own hand, so the record would be made.
The smith asked for the note to be kept. It reads: six emeralds, for the wheel, paid in full, with thanks.
%%
Chronicle: Spring Chores at Northpoint
In the 197th year, spring came late to the house at the edge of Northpoint. The snow went from the south wall first. It stayed in a deep bank behind the wood shed until the third of Blossom.
Mira was keeper at the relay tower. Lantern was her apprentice and kept the lamps. The house needed its own share of work. Mira mended the roof. Lantern swept the path. Tam sent seed potatoes from Kettle Ridge, along with a note that said, "Do not plant these in the snow."
Mira planted them after the snow went. Lantern carried water from the well in a bucket that was too large. The first trip ended with water on the steps. The second ended with the bucket left at the well.
"Good," said Mira. "Now we have a bucket there."
Lantern fetched it back on the third trip. Mira marked the handle with a red thread so it would not be mistaken for the keeper's bucket.
A fox watched from the road. It had a torn ear and no fear of Lantern. Mira left scraps outside, away from the seed bed. The fox ate them and left one feather by the door.
Tam came in spring to mend the fence. He brought a hen in a basket. The hen escaped before he reached the gate and spent the morning under Mira's bed.
Lantern found it when sweeping. Mira found the egg at supper. Tam said the hen had done more work than he had.
%%
Chronicle: the first snow at the coast
Kept at Vell, from the letters of Cleo. Summer of the 29th year, looking back to the winter before.
It is a wonder to people at Saltreach when snow falls. The sea keeps the coast warm. In the 28th winter, however, it snowed for a day, the first time anyone could remember. It lay a finger deep on the quay.
Cleo wrote that the children had never seen it. They went out in their shirts and stood with their mouths open. Some tried to eat it. One boy, Dov, said it tasted like nothing. A girl said it tasted like cold. Cleo, watching from her furnace door, said it tasted like winter, and that she had the proof, because the furnace was the only warm thing on the whole headland.
The boats stayed in. The nets froze on their poles. A cat sat in the oven of the bakery and refused to leave. The harbor master's wife made a snow boat for her baby. It melted before supper.
By the next day it was gone. Cleo noted that the road to Vell was slick for a morning and no cart was lost. The torch posts had held.
It is written for the record that it never snowed at Saltreach again for eleven years. Then it snowed again, and that was the second time, and nobody was surprised.
%%
Chronicle, the first five years
Set down by Una, roofer, for the clerks at Vell, who asked for the whole of it in one piece. Written in spring. I have kept to names and numbers, and to what I saw or heard from someone who saw it.

Founding. The Archive was founded in the first spring. The first page was written by eleven keepers, and it said: We will keep everything we write. That line is over the great door now, and nobody has disputed it.

The shelves. One in the first year. Two in the second. Five in the third. Nine in the fourth, which is all the first hall has room for. The clerks have started on the second hall, and the stone is hard and the lamps are small.

The texts. 41 in the first year. 77 in the second. 112 in the third. 160 in the fourth. The clerks now count by the wax seals used, which they say is more honest, since a seal cannot be lost on the stairs.

The tutors. The first tutor at Vell was an older woman called Maud, who had been a clerk and was tired of copying. She drilled the first crystal in the first month of Sowing. It learned to sit still, and then it learned the card with the sack. The third tutor, who came in the third year, drilled the four helpers, one after another.

The four. Each does one thing, the same way, every day. The first carried. The second sorted. The third hauled water. The fourth held the ladder. None of them has been drilled to do two things at once.

The fifth. In the fourth year the fifth helper was made, which the clerks call the new apprentice. It stops at the right bell. The clerks say it is the most patient helper in the Archive.

The question. Nobody has written down why a crystal learns. The tutors ask each other, and each asks the same question back. A crystal learns from what it is shown, and each time it is wrong, it changes a little. That is all the tutors have agreed on. The clerks have decided to leave the rest open, and to keep the page as they found it, with nothing added.

Kept: this chronicle, copied twice, once for Vell and once for the inn, where the roof leaks over the stable. Una.
%%
Chronicle: the first lamp
Kept at Vell, from the books of the Saltreach tower. A summer record of the 22nd year of the archive.
The first relay tower on the coast was raised on the headland at Saltreach. It was the sixth tower in the land. The five before it stood at Vell, Three Wells, Ambrook, Kettle Ridge and the hill between Vell and Three Wells. They were low, stone, and plain. The Saltreach tower was the first with a lamp room of glass.
The glass was Cleo's. She made forty panes, each a hand wide, and set them in a ring of copper that the coppersmiths of Copperhold sent by cart. It took her three weeks to cut and fit them, and she did it with her tongue between her teeth.
The first keeper was a man named Joss, a fisher who had lost a leg to a shark and could not go out. He climbed the tower with a stick, one rung at a time. He lit the lamp on the first night of Longday. It could be seen from Vell, a day and a half away, as a bright dot at the edge of the sky.
The first message sent down the line was: Saltreach to Vell. Lamp lit. The sea is flat. Joss.
Vell answered an hour later: Seen. Welcome to the line. The Archive.
Joss wrote in the tower book that night that he could not remember a better day. The next day he forgot to eat. The wife of the harbor master brought him a pie.
The sixth tower made it possible to send a message from the sea to the hills in the time it takes to boil an egg. The people of Saltreach made a song of it, which they still sing.
%%
Chronicle: the melon too big
Kept by Senna, at the Halfway Inn, in autumn. The melon was grown at Three Wells, behind the bakery, and it was brought to the inn by a cart that should not have carried it.

It was a striped melon, round and far too big. The cart could not hold it. It sat in the bed like a boulder that had lost its way, and the wheels had to be propped with stones.

At the inn everyone came out to see. Hobb said it would not fit in the kitchen door. The cook said it would fit if somebody took the door off. The guests said they would eat it whole, one each, and the carter said that was not part of the bargain.

They cut it in the yard, on a board, and it took three men and most of the afternoon. The inside was red and sweet, and the smell of it went up the Long Road like a bell. Travelers who had passed the inn for a day turned round to come back.

Before he left, the carter looked up at the road. He said he had heard something from a cart coming south, and it was not about melons. He said the relay lights at the far north had gone quiet, one after another, and the carters from up there did not like to say why. Hobb asked him to finish the sentence, and he would not.
%%
Chronicle: A Helper at the Farm
In the 201st year of the archive, a small apprentice came to the farm outside Three Wells.
Nessa sent it from the tutor house at Vell after its mind passed the field test. It had learned to farm, store, and fetch bread. The farmer said bread was a useful thing to know.
Bel stood by the field while the farmer gave the order.
> bring me the hoe
= fetch hoe
The apprentice went to the shed and brought the hoe. It brought the small hoe, not the long one. The farmer said both were hoes, but only one suited a tall person.
Nessa wrote the mistake in her book. She showed the mind more examples, with short tools and long tools. Then she tested it on tools it had not seen before.
The next morning the farmer gave the order again. The apprentice brought the long hoe.
Bel asked whether it had remembered. Nessa said it had learned from the drills. Bel said that sounded like remembering, but Nessa wrote down both answers.
The apprentice carried water to the bottom field after that. It did not spill a drop. The farmer spilled his own cup at lunch.
%%
The Halfway Inn, the winter book
Kept by Teague, innkeeper, for the Archive at Vell, as the council asks. The inn stands on the Long Road between Three Wells and Vell, a day from each. The hearth has not gone out in twenty years.

Beds: 9 of 12 taken on the first night of Frost. Soup: 31 bowls, and 14 second bowls, which are free, as always.

Carts through: 11 from the north, 6 from the south. Most were loaded with wool. Two were loaded with nothing at all, and their drivers were in no hurry to say why.

A gift came in on the seventh. A carter named Pim left a spoon carved from birch, with a fox on the handle, for the keeper of the hearth. It is on the mantel now, beside the riddle board. Nobody has asked the fox its name.

Count of the week: 9 beds, 45 bowls, 0 fights, 1 spoon.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, 167
Tansy wrote this account at the request of the clerk from Vell.

In the summer of 167, Reedbank held its first market beside the old mill pond. Ambrook sent apples, honey and two jars of jam. Kettle Ridge sent wheat flour. Pell brought salt and wool, and left with three baskets of apples.

There were seven stalls. The beekeeper sold honey by the small pot. Her son kept the count and put one extra pot under the table for his mother. He said it was a counting mistake. She said he could count again after supper.

Tansy set a bench by the well for anyone who needed help. One woman came with a cut finger. One man came to ask if a bee sting could be cured with honey. Tansy washed his arm and sent him home with a clean cloth. He bought honey anyway.

At noon, the mill wheel stopped. The pond was low, and the sluice was shut. Three children were sent to fetch water. They returned with water, mud and one frog in a bucket. The frog was returned to the pond.

The market ended before dusk. Pell paid for his lodging with apples, and the innkeeper said she would accept them if he carried them inside himself.
%%
Chronicle: the first drill at Vell
Kept at the Brown Hen, copied from the first pages of the Vell drill book by Tilly, who asked the clerk to read them aloud to her in winter. Winter.

The first drill was held in the yard at Vell in the 3rd year of the archive. It was cold, and the tutor's hands were stiff. But the drill went ahead.

The tutor, Hald, set out twelve cards on a bench. Each card had a picture of a sort. A round stone, a flat stone. A red bead, a green bead. A long stick, a short stick. Hald put the cards in a line.

Then she set the first helper in front of the bench. It was called Ash, and it had a small clear crystal in its chest, the size of a thumb-joint. Hald said the words of the drill. "This goes here. That goes there." Then she pointed, and Ash moved the stones.

Ash was wrong the first time. It put a flat stone in the round bin. Hald did not scold it. She showed it the card again, and said the right answer again, and pointed.

Ash was wrong again. Then right. Then wrong. By the end of the morning, it was right more often than it was wrong. By evening, it was right nearly every time.

The tutor wrote it all down. She wrote the number of times Ash was shown each card, and the number of times it guessed right. She wrote that a crystal learns from what it is shown, and nothing more. She did not know why. She wrote that she did not know why.

Hald was old when she told this to the children. She said the crystal was not clever. It was patient, and it was shown the same things again and again. She said that was all a tutor could give it, and that the children should not forget it.

The children asked her why the crystal wanted to get it right. Hald laughed and said that was the question everyone asks. Then she gave them a card each, with a stone drawn on it, and told them to sort the stones by weight.
%%
Chronicle: the Ridge market, first frost
Kept by Pell, merchant, who sets up his stall at the ridge market each winter. Frost of the 189th year.

The market opens at the windmill yard on the first market day of Frost. The yard is paved with flat stones, and the windmill sails stand over it like arms. They squeak on every turn. Children say the mill is talking. The miller says it is only old.

This year there were thirty-one stalls. Eleven sold cheese, six sold bread, four sold wool. There were two fish stalls, which is one too many for a ridge town. The cook from the Kettle Inn sold hot pies from a cart, and sold out before noon.

The weather was fine. The wind came from the west, cold and dry, and everybody wore two coats. A little snow fell at midday and melted by the time the carts were loaded.

Prices held. Good wool went for two emeralds the bundle, and fine cheese for one and a half. Pell sold forty pots of honey from Ambrook, at a fair price. He did not sell the pot with the crack in the lid, which he gave to Juna's boy for his lunch.

Items lost: one goose, which was found in the windmill yard at dusk, sitting on a wheel. It would not get down. Mill keeper Harl says it has been sitting there since the morning, and it has not been trouble. It is still there.

Thefts: none. The apprentice on the gate counted every cart in and out, and gave the count to the market clerk. The clerk says it was the most accurate count of the whole season.

Notes for next year. Put the fish stalls at the other end. Keep the goose away from the wheels. Bring more honey.
%%
Mira comes home, Longday, year 207
Written by Fallon, for the Archive, because Tam asked and would not stop asking. Tam says it was the best day of the year. He was crying at the time, and says it was the wind.

Mira came down the Long Road on the twelfth of Longday, after fourteen days from Northpoint. At the Halfway Inn she got the riddle right, and the keeper said she must have cheated.

She left Lantern in charge of the north lamps. Mira says he is the only apprentice she knows who does not talk, and that this is the best thing about him.

Tam ran up the ridge road when he saw her on the bend. Pip was doing the rows and did not stop for anybody. Biscuit opened the yard gate and went to meet Mira first. Tam says the sheep is a traitor. Then he picked Mira up and spun her round.

At supper Mira said the north is cold, the lamps are good, and there are thirty-four towers now. She knows every one by its lamp. She said the nights up there are long in winter, and she counts the lamps to get to sleep.

Tam said nothing for a while. Then he passed her the bread.

Before she went up to bed, Mira asked if the windmill still squeaked. Tam said yes. She said good.
%%
Chronicle: the zombie at the gate
Kept at Vell from the notes of Dunn, baker of Three Wells. It is the summer of the 172nd year. Told plainly.

On the third of Melon a zombie came to the south gate of Three Wells at dusk. It was a big one. It stood in the road and groaned. Nobody had the courage to speak to it.

Dace's grandfather, who was then keeper of the gate, shut the gate and lit all the torches. The zombie stood there until the sun came up and then burned. Dunn found it smoking in the road the next morning and swept it into the ditch.

No one was hurt. Two stalls were left unattended. One fell over.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, 181
The Vell clerk asked for a full account of the summer. Tansy and Mara gave it together.

In the summer of 181, the footbridge by Reedbank was repaired. It had lost two boards and gained many complaints. Jori the carpenter brought oak from Ambrook. He set the new boards straight, then asked for help carrying his tools home.

Mara's two sons helped. They carried one hammer between them and each claimed to be in charge of it. At the bridge, the youngest dropped the hammer into the stream. Jori found it with a long stick. The boys carried the hammer home in turns after that.

The work took four days. On the first day, Tansy brought bread and beetroot. On the second, the beekeeper brought honey. On the third, rain sent everyone under the mill roof. On the fourth, the bridge was finished, and twelve people crossed it at once to test it. It held.

That evening, the hamlet shared a pot of beans and potatoes. Jori said the bridge would last many years. Mara asked whether he had counted the boards. He had. There were nine.
%%
Chronicle: the well that ran dry
Kept at Kettle Ridge by Dara, horse keeper. Winter.
The well in the stable yard ran dry in the cold month. We carried water from the pond for twelve days. I wrote to the house and asked the mind where to dig. I expected it to tell me.
It wrote: "I cannot see your ground, and I do not want to send you to dig in the wrong place. Well diggers say: dig where the grass stays green in a dry spell. But the best thing is to send for a well digger from Three Wells. If you like, I will help you write the letter."
It helped me write the letter. It asked what I had seen, and put in the depth of the old well and the color of the mud. The digger came on the third cart. She dug where the grass was green. She found water at eleven rungs.
A guess would have cost us a week of digging.
%%
Chronicle: the melon at the Hollow farm
Kept at Vell, from the report of Senna, well digger, of Ambrook, summer of 205. Senna was hired for the work, and has the blisters.

In Sowing, Gil of the Hollow farm planted one melon seed behind the barn. By Swarm it was the size of a pig. By Longday it was the size of a cart. By Melon it was seven blocks across, and it had pushed over the barn wall and begun on the fence.

Gil sent for the miller, the tower keeper and Senna. The miller said it was too big to move. The keeper said it was too big to send by relay. Senna said it was just the right size for a well, if one were digging, and was asked to leave the conversation.

In the end it was agreed that the melon could not stay, as it was eating the farm. Fourteen people took down the garden wall. Senna dug a ramp, sixty blocks long, down to the lane. Wick, the mill's apprentice, pulled. Harrow, the farm's apprentice, pushed. It took the whole of one day. At dusk the melon rolled down the lane on its own and went into the mill pond with a splash that wet the mill gate, and Jory.

It floated. Melons do. The children rode it round the pond until dark.

On the fourth day it was cut, with Jory's two biggest saws. 212 people ate melon. The seeds were counted by Perrin, the Hollow boy, who got as far as nine thousand and lost his place. The rind roofed the hen house, and the hens were pleased.

No prize was given. The melon could not be carried to the autumn fair. Dace sent a ribbon by cart instead. It was the biggest ribbon in Three Wells.
%%
Chronicle: a sick cow at Ambrook
Kept at Vell from the Ambrook book, in Longday. Written by Oren, clerk, who was told this by the orchard keeper and wrote it down the same day, because he thought it would be forgotten otherwise.

The brown cow in the lower field at Ambrook stopped eating on the third day of Longday. Her milk went thin. Her eyes were dull, and she stood by the gate with her head down and would not come to the bucket.

Ama, the beekeeper, sent for Wren from Lowmarsh. Wren came up the long road in a cart, with two jars and a clean cloth, and looked at the cow for an hour. She said it was not the same as the grey cough, which she has seen, and that she did not know what it was.

The cow was moved to the top field, where the grass is short and the water is clean. It did not get better. It did not get worse, either, for three days. Then it lay down by the wall and did not get up.

The orchard keeper says the water in the lower field was the same as always. He drank it himself. Jory at the mill says the stream was low. Some people on the lane say it was the grass, which had been wet for a month. Ama says it was nothing she can name, and that she is sorry, and that the cow was a good cow and had three calves.

The cow was buried under the hedge, with a stone on top. The children put apples on the stone. Nobody has said what they are for. Oren has made a note to ask.

Keep everything we write. Oren has written this down.
%%
Chronicle: the new road to Ambrook
Kept at Vell from the notes of Dunn, baker of Three Wells, who sold bread to the road diggers. Summer of the 175th year.

In the spring of the 175th year the councils of Three Wells and Ambrook agreed to build a new road between the towns. The old way went round the hill and took a day and a half. The new way goes over it and takes a day.

The work began in Thaw. Eighty people dug. Twenty carried stone. The cobblestone came from the quarry above Copperhold, in carts. The first apprentice that ever worked on a road in these parts was a copper one named Peg, and it carried stone in a sling on its back. It was slow but it did not rest. The diggers named it the Mule and said it was the best of them.

By the middle of Reaping the road was done. It is forty-one blocks wide at the foot of the hill and thirty at the top. Torches stand on posts every twelve blocks. The bridge over the mill stream is oak, because the stone did not arrive. It holds.

On the opening day the mayor of Three Wells walked the whole road to Ambrook with a basket of buns and gave one to each person he met. By evening he had given out one hundred and sixty. Dunn baked them. Dunn was tired.

Since then the carts come to Three Wells market from Ambrook in the morning, with apples and honey. They go home at dusk with bread. The old road is mostly used by goats.

A waymark was set at the top of the hill, with a 6 on it and an arrow toward the nearest inn. Someone put a little stone on top the first night. Someone has put one every night since.
%%
Chronicle: the great snow
Kept by Elm, school child, with the notes of the north house and the lamp keeper. Written in Frost, when the snow was still falling.
The great snow began on the first day of Frost in the twelfth year. By the third day it had covered the market, the inn, the school and the lower stair of the tower. By the fifth day the north road was closed from Northpoint to the Halfway, and the carts were stuck in the drifts.
The keepers at Northpoint did not stop the lamp. Ilse went up the stair every hour through the snow with a rope round her waist and a shovel on her back. She cleared the glass each time, and lit the lamp, and sent the word down the line: Northpoint is lit. Do not come up the road. Wait.
Hobb opened the Halfway to everyone on the road. There were thirty-two people in the inn that week, from eight families and two carts. Hobb's wife made soup every day in the big pot. The apprentices from the Halfway carried wood from the barn to the stove, every hour, without stopping. Nobody was cold.
On the eighth day the snow stopped, and the sun came out over the north, very low and very red. The carts were dug out. The travelers walked up the road to Northpoint in a long line with their lanterns, and they were met at the foot of the tower by Ilse, who had not slept, and who said only: welcome. It is cold.
Nobody was lost in the great snow. The count board at the inn says so in large letters. Hobb has written beside it, in smaller letters: and the bell was rung every night, so that they could find the way home. The bell is still rung on the first night of every Frost, in memory, and the whole north road comes out to hear it.
%%
The Fox and the Hens
Chronicle of the tutor house, winter 206

In the winter of 206, a fox came to the house at the edge of Vell. It went under the fence and into the small yard. The hens belonged to the cook, who had left their gate loose.

Pip was visiting from Kettle Ridge. He heard the hens and ran out with a torch. The fox sprang over the wood stack. One hen was missing. The others crowded under the shed and would not come out.

The reading mind had been given letters from the house records. It had not been taught to guard hens. We asked it to write what might happen next. It wrote, "The cook will count the hens and mend the gate."

That was a fair guess. The cook did both things. The mind had read many records where a broken gate was mended. It had not watched the fox, and it had not seen the missing hen.

Nessa said this was the point of the trial. A line may fit the letters and still leave out what happened in the yard.

The cook set a new latch. Pip counted the hens twice. The fox did not return that night. In the morning, we found one grey feather by the wood stack. The cook said it might have come from a hen. Pip said it might have come from the fox. Neither of them knew.
%%
Kettle Ridge market, Longday, year 204
Set down by Fallon of the Kettle Inn, for the Archive at Vell, as the clerk there asked.

The market opened on the third of Longday, under the windmills, as always. Forty-two stalls. Hollis came up from Three Wells with the bread cart, and he was sold out by the second bell.

Tam had sixty sacks of wheat on the scale. He sold forty-one at three emeralds the sack, and says the rest will keep until Melon.

Hob brought four jars of honey from Ambrook, and all four were gone before noon.

The day's total, by the miller's tally board, is four hundred and eleven emeralds.

Brin's sheep, Biscuit, walked into the inn kitchen at noon. She did not want the straw Brin paid for. She wanted the cheese.

Fallon's count: ninety-one cups of cider, eleven loaves of cheese, four beds let. Five, if you count the sheep.

The windmill squeaked all night, as it does.
%%
Chronicle: Spring Work Outside Three
In the 207th year of the archive, the farm outside Three Wells began its spring work early.
The ditch had cracked in the dry winter. Jessa and Bel cleared the mud from it, while the farmer set stones along the bank. Water ran through by noon. The youngest hen stepped into the ditch and came out carrying a beetroot leaf.
The farm planted wheat in the upper field, beetroot in the long field, and potatoes and carrots below. Bel counted the rows and wrote them on a board. She wrote seven for the beetroot, then found eight. The farmer said the extra row was a welcome surprise.
A small apprentice worked beside them. Its mind had passed the tutor's test in spring. It carried seed from the shed and placed each sack by the right field. The farmer watched closely. He had seen a sack of wheat seed beside the potato bed once, and did not wish to see it again.
The apprentice also fetched bread from the kitchen when asked. Bel gave the order.
> bring me some bread
= fetch bread
It brought a loaf and set it on the bench. Bel shared it with the workers. The apprentice did not eat, so she gave its share to the hens.
At noon, Pell came along the new south road with a cart of clay pots. The road was firm after rain, and his wheels did not sink. He bought carrots with emeralds and left one pot for the farm. The farmer used it to keep the seed tally.
By evening, the ditch was clear, the seed was planted, and the pot was full of numbers. Bel added a note that the hens had taken one beetroot leaf. The farmer asked her to add that he had taken no leaves at all. She added both notes.
%%
Chronicle: the drills begin
Kept at the Halfway Inn by Lise, cheesemaker, for the Archive at Vell. Written as the year was told to her by the tutors who came through on the post cart.
In the spring of 185 the tutors at Vell began to drill reading minds on the archive's own records. Before this, the drills had used short pages made for the purpose, and a page was always a page of nothing in particular.
The clerks took out the old letters from the copying room and copied them fair. Two hundred pages were drawn in the first season. The clerks wrote the years on the cards. Some cards were lost, and some were written twice.
By the autumn the phrase had gone out along the Long Road. We will keep everything we write. The innkeepers said it over the soup. The children chalked it on the fences. The carters said it to each other when they parted, as a kind of greeting. The tutors did not mind. They said it was good for the drills that people were thinking about what was written.
%%
Chronicle: a season on the Long Road
Kept by Senna, at the Halfway Inn, on the Long Road, over one autumn. The book is written in the order the days came, with the weather, the beds, the soup and the news, in the plainest words the inn can afford. Nothing is left out that the guests said to Hobb, and nothing is added that they did not.

The first day of the season was grey and cold, and the first cart came in with the wool from the north. The guests were three carters, a healer from Lowmarsh with a box of remedies, and a boy who would not say his name. Hobb gave the boy a bowl of soup and a stool by the hearth, and the boy did not move until the second bowl had been finished.

The second day was rain. The yard flooded, and the hens went up on the stable roof, where they were sulky and wet. The carter Odo tried to get them down, and they pecked him, and he came into the kitchen with a red hand and a laugh. The cook said the hens had better sense than any carter on the Long Road. Odo agreed.

The fifth day brought the melon from Three Wells, which Senna has written down in its own chapter. It was the best day of the season for the children, who were allowed to eat the melon's seeds, one each, in the yard, with the rain coming down on their heads.

The tenth day was quiet. The beds were half empty. The carts came in late, and went on early. Pell came through with honey and ledgers and a long face. He said the price of wheat had gone up at Vell, and the price of wool had gone down at Saltreach, and he could not make sense of either. Hobb poured him a bowl of soup, and he drank it and felt better, and he said that was the first sensible thing anyone had done all week.

The twentieth day brought the north carts, and the talk of the sea, and the talk of the lamps. Senna has written that down too. The guests did not like it, and Hobb did not either. Nobody left the inn that night. Everybody sat by the hearth, and Hobb gave out the honey, one spoon each, and nobody spoke about the north until the fire was low.

The twenty-fifth day was clear. The frost came on the grass in the morning. The carts went out early and came back early, and the carter Odo sang on the road, badly, and the hens let him.

The last day of the season was grey again, as the first had been. The cart brought in the wool and the cloth and the last of the apples from Ambrook. Hobb closed the book at dusk and put it on the shelf by the jar of honey. He said the jar was still full. He said the season had been long, and the road was still open, and the beds were still made.

Senna writes this as the season's last line: the inn is well. The hearth is lit. The count is right, as far as anybody can count it.
%%
Chronicle: The Inns Along the Road
In the 63rd year, three inns served travelers between Vell and Saltreach.
The Brown Hen stood east of Vell, beside the first bridge.
It had six beds, a well and a shed for carts.
The keeper kept a tally of bread on a board.
The Halfway Inn stood where the road crossed a low hill.
Its hearth had not gone out in ten years.
The keeper slept in a chair beside it.
Travelers said he could hear a cold coal thinking.
He said he could hear a mouse eating his flour.
The third inn stood above the Saltreach turn.
It had a roof of spruce and a window facing the sea.
Pell, then a young seller, brought salt fish there in a handcart.
He left with apples and two empty baskets.
The road crew repaired the stream bridges that summer.
They used stone on the wide streams and oak where stone was scarce.
They set a torch on a post every twelve blocks.
At the Vell market, folk paid for the road with emeralds and food.
No one kept a full count of the carts.
One clerk counted eighty in a month, then lost her list.
She began again and counted ninety-three before Longday ended.
The next year, the inns agreed to keep their own lists.
The archive copied each list into a single book.
By then, a traveler could find a bed each day of the road.
%%
Chronicle: a contest on a market day
From the chronicle kept at Vell, with a note by Rye of Saltreach, who was there. The year is about the 189th. It was summer, the day of the big market on the quay. The halls chose it because every town would be there.
The halls of Vell, Copperhold, Three Wells and Lowmarsh set up their minds in a row on the harbor wall. Each mind was a crystal on a cloth. Each tutor sat beside it. The fish sellers brought stools. The net menders brought tea. A boy sold buns to the crowd and said afterward it was the best market of his life.
The unseen drill was chosen by lot. A clerk from Vell carried a box from the Archive, sealed in wax, with a Lowmarsh fisher and a Saltreach boat master as witnesses. The clerk broke the seal on the quay. Nobody had seen the pages inside. Not the tutors, not the witnesses, not the clerk.
Each mind had to guess the next letter a thousand times. The clerk counted aloud.
The scores. Vell, 56 in 100. Copperhold, 59. Three Wells, 55. Lowmarsh, 61.
Lowmarsh won. A fisher shouted that he had known it, because the Lowmarsh mind had been drilled on boats. A woman from Three Wells said it had been drilled on everything, and lived on reeds, which gave it patience. Nobody knew whether either was true.
That year the halls agreed to one more rule. A drill used for a contest must never be used again, as a test or as a drill. The pages go back on the shelves, and a new box is made.
In the next ten years the winning score went from 61 to 68. In the ten years after, to 73. The chronicle does not say why. It says only that the tutors kept testing, and the number kept going up, and a number that goes up is a number you can trust.
Rye adds: I sold forty candles that day. A candle burns brighter in front of a crowd.
%%
The boat that came late
Bram's account, written down by his granddaughter in the 208th year.
My grandfather Bram fished out of Gulls all his life. This is the story he told about the night the boat came late.
It was Leaffall, and the wind had turned. The Mary Ann had gone out at dawn with three aboard, and by dusk she was not back. The harbor wall was full of people looking south. The lamps were lit along the pier. Someone rang the bell.
The keeper went up the tower and asked the relay house to ask along the coast. The lamp blinked and blinked. In an hour word came back from Saltreach: a boat had been seen, low in the water, off the point. It was the Mary Ann, with her nets fouled and her sail split.
They came in at midnight, wet and cold and laughing, because the catch was good. The whole harbor went down to the slip to meet them.
The cat had got into the relay room again while the keeper was up the tower. She was asleep on the warm stand, and the keeper did not have the heart to move her. He said the big mind had been working all night for the boat and the cat had kept it company.
That is what Bram told. He said the relays are a fine thing, and the boats are a finer thing, and a cat is finer still, and he would not say which was best.
%%
Northpoint market, why the houses grew
Kept by Wynn, cook at the tower kitchen, from what the tutors told the bench over the winter. The tutors do not agree, but the bench does.

First there were small minds in their crystals, one to a tutor's bench. They learned by drill and were checked by hand, and a tutor could see most of what a small mind had learned.

Then the minds grew. The tutors made them with more layers and more weights. Each new layer took in what the layer before it had found, and added to the stream. A deep mind can learn far more than a shallow one. But it is also far harder to see into. A tutor cannot count a thousand layers with eyes alone.

The councils wanted the deep minds anyway. So they built relay houses bigger than the old ones, with more quickeners round the stand, and more water to keep them cool. The biggest houses were built as big as towns. The councils said a town-sized house could answer a town's questions. The tutors said a town-sized house could answer a town's questions wrongly, in a town's own voice, and nobody would notice for a year.

The councils laughed at that, and built the houses anyway.

So the tutors have a rule now, and it is written on every house. No mind is trusted on what it has not been tested on. No tutor is trusted to test a mind he has not seen. Each house is checked in pieces. Each piece is checked on a fresh page. The scores are written down, and the scores are the only window the tutors have.

Mira says the houses are like the lamps on the north line. You cannot see the whole line at once. You see one lamp, and you hope the next one is lit, and you trust the ones you can see. The bench says that is a cold thing to say about a lamp.
%%
Chronicle: the great storm, Three Wells
Kept at Three Wells by Dace, mayor, in the town book, for the council at Vell. Late Frost of the 201st year.

The storm came in from the west on the night of the Longnight festival. It rained for an hour, then hailed for a quarter of an hour, and then the wind began. It was the strongest wind anyone in Three Wells had felt in living memory.

Roofs lost: 4 tiles from the schoolhouse, 2 chimney pots from the inn, and one whole shed roof at the back of the mayor's own house. The shed roof landed in the square.

Lamps lost: 6 on the square, all of them put out. The lamp at the east corner stayed lit, because it was behind the school wall. The children were very proud of that.

Trees lost: 2 apple trees at the mill pond in Ambrook, which took a message by relay. The oak by the bridge at Three Wells stood firm.

People hurt: 3 cuts, 1 broken finger, 1 man who fell off the bakery step. He was not badly hurt. He says he was blown off.

Apprentices on duty: 2 at the square, both tested. One held the lamp steady at the east corner for three hours, with the rain on its shoulders. The other carried the children from the schoolhouse to the bakery, two at a time, without dropping any. The children were never frightened, the schoolteacher says. They thought it was a game.

Ida at the bakery kept the oven lit all night, and gave bread to everyone who came to the door. The bread was warm and soggy. Everyone said it was the best bread they had eaten all winter.

By morning the wind had dropped, the sun came up over the east well, and the shed roof was moved out of the square with four carts and some very loud shouting. The square is clean now. The board says the storm is written up, and the notices are sent.
%%
Chronicle: seven markets on the ridge
Kept at the Archive at Vell, from the market board at Kettle Ridge, written up in the year 207 by a clerk who walked up the ridge to count. Autumn.

The market at Kettle Ridge has been held every autumn since the year 163. In the year 200 it was held on the ridge road. In the year 207 it was held in the same place, and no one has asked to move it. The wind is the same.

What follows is a count of the autumn markets between those years, taken from the board at the mill, where the tally of the farmers is kept.

200: 19 stalls. Beetroot good, wheat poor. Prize: Brin, for the best beetroot. The wind blew the sign away.
201: 22 stalls. A wet year. Mud to the ankle. Prize: none. The judges stayed in the inn.
202: 25 stalls. The first year with an apprentice at the stalls: a copper one, belonging to Tam, called Pip. It carried the sacks. It also carried a goat by accident.
203: 25 stalls. A very dry year. Good wheat, thin potatoes. The well at the mill ran low and was refilled by hand.
204: 28 stalls. The year of the long boat. A trader from Saltreach was a week late with the fish, and the whole market waited. It was fine fish.
205: 31 stalls. The first stall to sell something with a label on it. It said "BEETROOT." It was beetroot. Tam says it was a mark of progress.
206: 33 stalls. A good year, a quiet year. Mira wrote from Northpoint to say well done. Tam read it aloud twice.
207: 37 stalls. The most ever. Tam won the biggest beetroot. He says his sister's laughing at him is why.

Notes from the clerk:
Each year the ridge sells about a third more than the year before. The fields are not bigger. The farmers are better at it, and there are more carts on the road.
In all these years, nobody has ever had their hat blown away without finding it again. This is the only market where that is so.
There is one record of a lost lamb. It was found, in the end, inside the mill. It had not been looking for anything. It was just curious.
There is one record of a hen that sold itself. We do not know how. We have not asked.
The market board asks me to say that the next market is on the ninth of Apple. Please come early. Please come with a hat.
%%
Chronicle: the relay tower
Kept by Elm, school child, from the notes of the north house. Written after the first lamp was lit.
The relay tower at Northpoint was finished in the autumn of the ninth year. It is round, of grey stone, with a stair of ninety rungs in the ladder part and a stair of stone below. There is a torch round its foot. There is a room at the top with glass panes and a copper ring, and in the middle of the ring is the lamp.
The first keeper is a woman called Ilse. She is forty years old, and she is very tall, and she climbs the stair two times a day, once for the lamp and once for the view. She says the view is better than the lamp, but the lamp is more important, and she has to tell the lamp so every morning.
On the first night the lamp was lit, the whole north road came out to see it. There were 81 people at the bottom of the hill. The children carried lanterns. The carters blew their horns. Hobb rang his new bell. Ilse stood at the top of the tower and lit the lamp with a long taper, and the light came out over the snow like the first sunrise of the year.
The south tower saw the light at once. It blinked back its greeting, and the blink went all the way down the line to Vell in less than a morning. The clerks at Vell wrote it in the book. It says: Northpoint is lit. Welcome to the north.
Ilse wrote back: thank you. It is very cold up here.
The south tower wrote: We know. We are sending you a stove.
The stove came up in Thaw, on the first cart of the year, and it was the first stove on the north relay. Ilse says it is still the best thing she has ever been given, even better than the lamp.
%%
Letter: Tamsin of the salt farm
Dear tutor Nessa,
You asked the farms to write how the apprentices are doing. I am writing for the salt farm.
Sack is a good apprentice. It hauls the barley and it hauls the coal and it carries the water up from the well. It does not stop in the rain. It does not stop for the dog. The dog has learned to stand aside.
But Sack does not know when a sack is too heavy. It tried to carry two at once and it fell over. My father laughed. Sack did not laugh. It got up and carried one and then the other and then it stood and waited. So we taught it a new order. We say: fetch one sack. And it fetches one. My father wrote the order down on a card and stuck the card in the barn door. It is the only order on the card. It says: fetch one sack.
We did not drill it. We just said it again and again until it got it. My father says that is not drilling, it is nagging. It worked.
The dog likes Sack. The dog does not like the crystal. When the crystal is out of the apprentice the dog will not go near it. My father says the dog knows something we do not. I think the dog is just a dog.
Rill is ten now and he wants a mind of his own. I told him a mind is not a pet. He said he would drill it to fetch his lantern. I said the lantern is always where he left it. He said that is the problem.
Please send more drill cards. Ours are getting worn. Also, if you have a card for sorting the stores, we would like one. The barn is a mess.
Tamsin.
P.S. The beetroot soup is better now. Less honey.
%%
Chronicle: the jar of honey
Kept by Senna, at the Halfway Inn, in autumn. The story of one jar of honey, from the hives at Ambrook to the shelf at the inn, as the carter told it.

Ama sealed the jar in Reaping and wrote the date on the lid, and tied the lid with a red string so that nobody would mistake it for vinegar. It went down the Long Road in a cart with twelve other jars. The carter, Pell, counted them at every waymark, and the count was right every time.

At the Brown Hen the cook asked for one. Pell said no. At the Halfway Inn, Hobb, the innkeeper, took the jar from the cart and set it on the shelf behind the bar, between the salt and the candles. He said it was for the winter, when the soup needs something to make it kind.

Every guest who asks for honey is told the jar is kept for the winter. Every guest is given a spoon of it anyway, in the cold month, when the road is quiet. Hobb says a jar of honey is like a good word. It is best spent slowly.

The jar is still on the shelf, and the string is still red. Ama sends another every autumn, with a note that says: the bees are awake. Hobb has never opened the new one before the old one is empty.
%%
Chronicle: the Long Road, year 196
Kept at Vell from the carters' reports on the Long Road.

This was the year the carts got helpers. Before, a carter drove alone and walked back alone. Now there are apprentices on the road, one each at Three Wells, the Brown Hen, the Halfway Inn and the bridge at Ambrook. They load the sacks and barrels and carry them to the next inn and back.

Each one knows only a few meanings. It knows haul, and come, and home. The carters teach it the road one inn at a time. The Brown Hen's helper learned the way to the cellar in six days. The Halfway Inn's helper learned it in four, then went down the wrong stair once and came back up the right one.

Waymarks set this year: forty new pillars of stone, each three blocks high with a torch on top. Every pillar has a figure from 0 to 9 and an arrow to the next inn. Six of them have little stones left on top. Nobody says who left them.

Torches on posts: 330, lit each evening by the lamp boys, who walk back before dark.

New bridges: nine, eight of them oak. The ninth is stone, and nobody has moved it.

The relay tower above the Ambrook mill pond got a new oak door. It has no lock. Nobody on the road has ever needed one.

The first snow came early, in Leaffall. Wood burned at the inns this winter: 1,200 logs. Hob at the Brown Hen says he will never be warm again. He has said it every winter since 151.
%%
Chronicle: what the relay houses do
Kept at Vell, copied from the notes of the council of Saltreach, the 204th year.
A relay house is a room at the foot of a tower. In the room a big mind stands on a stand. The mind is in a crystal the size of a loaf. Round the crystal are the quickeners, and these are kept cool with water, or ice, or snow in winter. The room is cold and dry. The keeper keeps the door shut.
Why cool? The tutors write that the quickeners must be kept cool or they spoil. What the quickeners draw on to run day and night, nobody wrote down. Bram at Gulls says it is the sea air. The keeper at Gulls says it is the snow. Both may be wrong.
The big mind answers apprentices through the relays. An apprentice on the road, or in a field, or at a mine, asks the tower, and the tower asks the house, and the answer comes back down the line. Small minds in the apprentices know only eight meanings. The big mind knows more. It can read a page and write back. It writes letters. Some of these letters a reader cannot tell from a person's.
The houses spread tower by tower. First Saltreach, then Three Wells, then Kettle Ridge, then Copperhold. Northpoint's came last, in the winter of 206, and Mira keeps it, with Lantern to help. She wrote that the snow round the quickeners was deeper than the door.
Oren at the archive asked the councils to send him a list of every house and every keeper. The list is in the sixth hall. It has thirty-one names. The councils say there are more now.
People come to look at the crystal. The keeper lets them stand at the door and no further. The cat goes in anyway.
%%
Chronicle: what the quiet taught
Kept at the farm at the foot of the Northpoint tower, in the years 146 to 149 of the archive. Written by Hesk, who has been told that his chronicle is the only one of its kind kept up north, and has decided to keep it properly.
The quiet did not end all at once. It thinned out, like snow on a south slope.
In 146, the apprentices still in the halls were given to the farms and the carts. A copper apprentice came up to the tower in Sowing, with a crystal in its chest and a letter in its bag. The letter said: keep it fed, keep it simple, and do not ask it to think. The apprentice was very good with the sheep. It did not ask anything. It had been told not to.
In 147, the tutors who had gone home began to meet in their own kitchens to go over the old drills. They did not have halls. They had tables, and slates. Some of them said the one straight line was the whole trouble, and that a crystal with two layers might be able to bend its line. Others said two layers were only two lines, that Kester was right, and that the tutors should go and make bread.
In 148, a tutor at Copperhold showed a slate with a bent line on it, drawn in chalk, and the room argued for two evenings. Some of the men thought the bend was a cheat. Others thought it was the only honest thing they had seen in years.
In 149, the councils were asked whether they would pay for an experiment with two layers. They said they would pay when there were results. The tutors said there would be no results without the pay. That is where the quiet stood at the end of the year. Nobody has moved it since.
In the spring the sheep were counted at the tower: four hundred and twelve lambs, and not one lost. Hesk wrote the number down, because it was the only sure thing that year.
The copper apprentice at the tower is still at the sheep. It has learned them well, and it can count the lambs by sight, without a drill. It cannot say what it knows, because it does not talk. I have asked it to show me. It shows me, and I am not sure I understand.
Hesk
%%
Chronicle: the school at Hollow Pass
Kept by Sable, schoolteacher, for the school book and the mayor's house. Hollow Pass is the hamlet under the north relay, nine houses and a school.
In autumn the school had 23 children. Of these, 9 were the children of the sheep men, 6 of the reed cutters, 5 of the post keepers, and 3 of the tower keepers' families. Sable taught them all in the one room, by the east window, which gets the best light until the middle of the day.
The children learned their letters in Thaw and their numbers in Sowing. In Blossom they began the long sums, which they hated. In Swarm they began the maps. They drew the north road to Northpoint, with its waymarks and the one inn, and Tila drew the tower with a little lamp on top, and Sable said it was the best drawing in the school, and Tila said she knew.
The school bell is a second bell from the Vell foundry, and it cracks in cold weather. Sable has asked the council three times for a new one. The council has sent a bell rope.
At the first frost the school gave its harvest prize. This year it was a small clay pot, painted blue, for the child who grew the best pumpkin on the school plot. The prize went to Dorran, who grew a pumpkin the size of a wheelbarrow and had to be helped to carry it in. The second prize went to his sister Ila, whose pumpkin was smaller and whose face was redder. Sable gave the pot to Ila, and Dorran was given the pumpkin, which was eaten at the school supper.
%%
Chronicle: how the answers were scored
Kept at Kettle Ridge by Dara, horse keeper, from what a visiting tutor told us at the Kettle Inn.
The big minds were first drilled on the Archive. That taught them to write. It did not teach them to be useful, or kind.
So the tutors took a second step. They asked a mind a question and let it write an answer. A tutor read the answer and gave it a mark. A true, helpful, kind answer got a high mark. An answer that could harm someone, or said something false with great confidence, got the lowest.
The mind kept the marks. Each time, it changed itself a little toward the answers that scored high, and away from the ones that scored low. This went on for thousands of questions.
In the end the mind had learned three things nobody had shown it. To be kind. To refuse what would harm. And to say, when it did not know, "I do not know." The tutor said the last was the hardest. A mind wants to write something, because writing is what it does.
Why the marks work, the tutor could not say. That part, she said, nobody has written down.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank
Kept by Bryn, fisher, at Reedbank. Written after the horse was borrowed and returned. The horse is called Gust, and the account has been copied by four people, each of whom says a different thing about the horse.

Tobin, the wool trader, came along the causeway in the middle of the winter with a grey horse he had borrowed from a cousin at Three Wells. He wanted to cross the marsh to the market at Lowmarsh before the ice got worse. The causeway was slippery. He asked to leave the horse in the pen behind the fish house, because the cart could not go past the sluice.

The horse was left in the pen for three days. On the fourth day Tobin came back, and the horse was gone. The gate was shut and the rope was tied. The pen had not been broken.

Ansel said the horse had walked off by itself, which horses do. Ora said the horse had been taken by someone who wanted to ride it to the market. Pim said he had seen a light on the causeway at night, and that the horse was heading toward it.

The horse was found at the market at Lowmarsh, eating the hay off the cart of a man selling eggs. Ivo the egg seller says he did not know whose horse it was. He says he only knew it had eaten all his hay. He gave Tobin three eggs as a fee for the damage. Tobin paid him two emeralds in return, and said the horse owed him more.

The horse was taken home to Three Wells in spring. Its cousin says it has not been lent since.
%%
Chronicle: The Road to Vell
In the 12th year, the folk of Vell chose a road to Three Wells.
The old track crossed two wet fields and one stony hill.
A cart had broken there in Blossom.
Its wheels were found in different places.
The new road took the low ground by the oak hedge.
Folk packed earth into the soft places.
They set cobblestone at the steep turn.
A bridge of oak crossed the stream.
It bent when the first loaded cart went over.
The carpenter added two beams beneath it.
After that, the bridge held.
The market at Vell opened on the third day of Longday.
Tam's grandfather brought a sack of potatoes from Kettle Ridge.
He said they had rolled the whole way in the cart.
No one believed him, but the potatoes were good.
The road made the journey shorter by half a day.
An innkeeper built a small house beside the turn.
She had four beds, a well and a warm stove.
Her sign was a brown hen cut from birch.
Travelers called the place the Brown Hen.
The first guest slept beside his own cart.
He said the bed was too soft.
At dawn, he asked for another night.
%%
Chronicle: the school book, winter 189
Kept by Sable. Written at the end of Deepsnow.
The school closed for the cold on the first day of Frost. It opened again on the third day of Thaw, with 21 children, two fewer than in autumn. The two were Mirri, who went to her aunt's in Ambrook, and Bram, who went with his father to the coal mines at Copperhold and is said to be well.
During the cold, the school room was kept warm by a stove and by the children's own coats. Each child brought a stone from the road to heat by the stove and carry home at night. Sable kept the stones in a basket by the door. The basket was called the stone basket by the children and the warming basket by Sable, and the children won the argument.
In Frost the children were given a test. It was not a hard test. It asked for the names of the towers from Vell to Northpoint, in order, and the number of steps in each tower. Nobody got every tower right. Tila got them all, and was the only one who knew Hollow Pass has 33 steps to the lamp room, because she had counted them with her brother on a dare.
The test has since been given to the new children of the school. Sable says it is not a fair test, because it is about one thing only, and that one thing is a tower. But she says the children remember it, and so she thinks it does its work.
In Deepsnow the school had a visitor from Vell, a young clerk named Osric, who came up the pass with a cart of books for the school library. The books were: 2 primers, a spelling book, a book of songs, a book on the fields, and one book about the sea, which nobody had asked for and everybody read. Osric was given a warm bed at the inn and a plate of pie. He left in the morning with a sack of potatoes for Vell and a drawing of himself by Tila, which he said he would keep forever. He was very polite about the nose.
%%
A Gift for Isla
When Isla came to Gullbank in spring of 195, the net menders gave her a small gift.

It was a bag made from old wool. Inside was a copper spoon, polished bright at the handle. The menders said she could use it to stir her tea while she drew curves.

Isla laughed. She said a spoon could not improve a mind. Then she used it to point at the chalk line on Odo's board.

She explained her rule again for the children who had missed the first lesson. A mind needs room to hold what it learns. A larger crystal gives it more room. More good writing gives it more to learn from. More drills give it more time to learn.

A tutor can compare these things and draw a curve before the mind is grown. The curve helps the tutor plan. It does not name the answers the mind will know.

The children asked if a very large crystal could learn to mend nets. Isla said it might learn the work if it had good examples and was tested. She said nobody should send it to the boats without a test.

Odo put the spoon on a shelf beside the drill cards. By evening, an apprentice had put the spoon in the tea pot. The tea tasted of copper. Isla drank it anyway.

The menders gave her a second gift the next morning. It was a jar of honey, with the lid tied tight.
%%
Chronicle: big ships at Saltreach
Kept at Vell from the Saltreach harbor book, in Longday. Written by Oren, clerk, who was sent down to the port to copy the shipwright's counts, and who has come back with more questions than counts.

The shipyard at Saltreach has begun a new slip, longer than the old one by three times. The shipwright, Corin, says it is for a boat that will take forty carts across the sea, with their horses, and bring back wool and salt, and that he has been told the planks are to be made of oak from the ridge.

The stone ramp for the new slip is nearly done. The stone was cut at Copperhold and brought down the coast by sea, because the Long Road is too narrow for it. The sailors who brought it were not from Saltreach. Nobody on the quay knew their names. They were paid in emeralds, and they went back the way they came.

Families have been leaving Saltreach since the spring. They go out on the morning tide, in their own boats or on the big carts, with their goods in sacks. Some say they have gone south to the far towns. Some say they have gone across the water. Some say nobody knows where they go, and that is the point of it.

Corin will not say. When Oren asked him what was across the water, he said that he had never been there and did not intend to start. Then he asked Oren whether the archive would take his drawings. Oren said yes. Corin said then he would send them.

The harbor keeper says the tides have been strange this year. The sea goes out further than it did, and comes back slower, and in the mornings there is a smell of salt on the wind that some people do not like.

Notes: The archive will keep the drawings, the counts and the rumors. Oren has asked for one more clerk for the harbor book. He has not yet been told yes.
%%
Chronicle: a new vein at Copperhold, 196
From the mine book of Copperhold, copied at Vell in the 197th year.

In the second of Leaffall the miners found a new vein of copper on the fourth level, west of the long stair. Hesk was first down. He says the stone was green as a frog and soft to the pick.

The vein ran forty steps west and then turned down. The count board at the mine gate kept the tally. In eleven days the miners raised 900 loads of copper ore. The sorting shed had to open a new bin. They painted a four on it and the bin filled in a week.

The forge was busy all winter. The smith made hinges, buckets, a bell for the school at Three Wells, and 200 copper rings for the relay towers. The rings go up the towers in crates.

Copperhold sent 40 ingots to Vell for the archive roof and 20 to Saltreach for the shipyard. The rest went on the road with Pell's carts.

Hesk says the deep stone below the vein is cold and hard and he does not like it. He says that about all stone. Clank carried his tools and dropped a pick down the lift shaft. They got it back.

The ninth gate was not opened. It stays locked, as it has since the old miners walled it.

A note at the end, in the mine hall hand: the kitchen made beetroot soup for the whole shift. 60 bowls. Nobody complained.
%%
Chronicle: the boat Lark, late home
Kept at Saltreach by the quay clerk, from a letter sent to the Brown Hen by the boat's owner Mallow, and copied here by Tilly for the drovers who wait on the road. Spring of the 176th year.

The Lark is a fishing boat of oak, built by Corin's yard. It has a red sail and a new keel. It went out past the harbor wall on the morning of Blossom, with four men and a boy.

By evening, the Lark had not come back. The lamps on the quay were lit. The women stood at the end of the pier and counted the boats as they came in. Eleven boats came in. The Lark did not.

The men on the quay did not wait for dark. They put out two small boats, with oars and lanterns, and rowed out past the harbor wall. They called across the water. They sang the old fishing song, the one everyone knows, so that the boats could hear them.

At midnight, a voice came back from the west. It was the boy, very hoarse. He said the sail had torn in the wind, and the Lark had drifted on the tide toward the rocks. The men had put out their oars and held her off the rocks until the morning.

They came in at dawn. The men were tired and wet and very hungry. The boy had a cut on his hand and wanted to show everyone. The fish were still in the hold, which was the real reason for the cheer.

Corin said the new keel had held. He said the sail should have been made of two cloths, not one. He wrote it down on the board, and the sail was remade the next week.

The boat sails out again every spring. The boy goes with it.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, the long year
Kept by Bryn, fisher, at Reedbank, over the long winter, to be read by whoever comes after. It is a chronicle of small things. The large things were told elsewhere, by people who saw them more clearly.

In the first month of the frost, the causeway was cleared by the men of the bend, and the carts came through from Three Wells with salt and flour. The salt was dry and the flour was sweet. Pell's cart came last, with the apples he had kept back, and a jar of honey from Ambrook that he said was for Wren. Wren did not get it. The jar was sold at the bend for two emeralds, to a man who wanted it for his cough.

In the second month, the frost came down so hard that the sluice froze shut. Ora's boy went out to break the ice with a bar, and he did it alone, and nobody told him not to. He broke the ice in one afternoon. Ansel called it the bravest and the stupidest thing he had seen in twenty years, and that he would have done the same at that age.

In the third month, the boats were brought up onto the bank and turned over, and their hulls were tarred. Pim painted his name on the bottom of his skiff, very small, where nobody would see it unless they were lying in the mud looking up.

In the fourth month, the cough came into the old people's houses at the north end of the bend. Wren came up again on foot, with her bag, and went from house to house. She did not say much. She sat with each of them, and gave them the honey, and asked them to tell her the names of their grandchildren, so she could remember them if they went away.

Some of them did not come back from that winter. We have written their names on the post by the sluice, with the day of the month. We have not written the cause. The cause is not known. Some say the water. Some say the grey mud on the boats. Some say the ships that have been seen out past the marsh, very big, with no lights. Ansel says it is only the cold and the old ages, and that the young should not be frightened by stories.

At the end of the long year, we took the first eel of the thaw and gave it to the post by the sluice, as we always do. Then we ate it, slowly, without talking, and we looked out over the reeds, where the water was starting to move again.
%%
Chronicle: The Child and the Ferry, 190
In the winter of 190, Greer kept the ferry at Ambrook through a spell of sharp wind. Ice gathered in the reeds, and the market sellers put their goods close together in the mill yard. Jory kept the mill door open so people could warm their hands by the flour room.

A child called Sella came with her grandfather to sell a basket of apples. Her grandfather left to fetch a sack from the cart. Sella watched the ferry and decided she could make the crossing before he came back.

She climbed into the ferry and took hold of the rope. Greer was on the far bank, tying a loose post. Sella pulled once. The ferry moved a little, then bumped the bank.

Greer called to her to stay where she was. Sella stayed. She was frightened, but she did not climb out. Greer walked around the pond and brought her back to the market. Her grandfather had been searching behind the apple stalls.

No one scolded Sella in front of the market. Greer gave her a warm cup of broth. Her grandfather held the ferry rope while she drank. He said she could learn the crossing when she was older.

The apples sold well. Sella kept one with a brown spot and gave it to Greer for finding her. Greer put it in his pocket. It was soft by supper, but sweet.
%%
Spring Chronicle of the Relay House
In spring of 195, Isla came from Vell to Gullbank, the hamlet beside Saltreach. She carried three crystals in a padded box. The largest was no bigger than a loaf.

Odo, tutor of apprentices, met her at the harbor wall. He had six apprentices in his yard. One could carry nets. One could sort copper. Four could only walk a marked path.

Isla asked Odo how long each mind had been drilled. He showed her the cards. The smallest had learned from a short stack of pages. The largest had learned from many more.

She drew a curve on the board. She said a tutor could choose the size of a crystal and the length of its drills, then guess how much the mind would learn. She had tested the guess with several crystals. A larger crystal, given more writing and more time, grew better.

Odo did not say that every large mind would be wise. Isla said no such thing. She asked for clean pages, a test box, and a tally of each drill.

The council heard her in Blossom. By summer, they had marked a place for a relay house above the harbor. Gullbank's keeper asked for a roof that would not leak. The council put that on the tally too.
%%
Letter: Laurel to her sister, 203
Laurel the miller, at the Brown Hen on the Long Road, to her sister May at Ambrook, summer of 203.

May,

The road is full this summer. Carts, clerks, children going to the school at Three Wells, and a tutor with a mind in a box on the seat beside her. She stopped for the night and the mind sat on the bench and did not eat anything. The cat sat on the box all evening. The tutor said the mind did not mind.

The loft is full again. I have stopped counting the hay. People sleep in it and wake up with straw in their hair and say it was the best night. Your Bel wrote in my book last year. She is nine now and writes a good hand.

The oven is well. The flour from your mill is good this year. Tell Jory the sluice is still shut and nobody has opened it, and the wheel turns dawn to dusk as it always did. He will laugh.

Two carters quarreled over a bed and I gave them both the floor and a blanket and they were friends by morning. That is the whole trick of an inn.

The relay tower on the hill sent a note for a traveler here. Ten words, one emerald. It said: your mother is well, come home. He went home.

The cat is fat. She has a new trick. She sits on the tally board and will not move, so the count is wrong by one every day she does it. I have given up.

Come in Apple. The apples from your trees are the best and I will trade bread for a sack.

Your Laurel.
%%
Chronicle of Lowmarsh: the year
Kept at Vell from letters of Zell, trader, at the edge of Lowmarsh. The winter of year 190. There is a good deal of it, as Zell wrote often, and sometimes at length.
The frost came in Frost and did not leave until Thaw. It was the longest cold the marsh had known. The reeds were stiff as sticks. The frogs slept under the ice. The fish weir froze solid, and the fishers walked on it with sacks.
Wren the healer was kept busy. Coughs and chilblains were common. She set up a long table in her house and a pot of broth that never went cold. Her apprentice Moss carried it to the neighbors.
Zell wrote in Longnight: "This is the coldest I remember. My ink froze in the pot. I thaw it at the stove and write fast."
In Deepsnow the market at Lowmarsh was held on the ice again. Zell sold reeds, candles and pickled eel. A man from the next village arrived with a sled pulled by two dogs and sold hot pies. He did very well.
The borrowed horse came into the tale again. Zell had borrowed Teasel a second time, and this time he brought her back on the day, which is why we mention it. Wren was so surprised that she gave him a jar of honey.
In the first days of Thaw the ice cracked with a sound like a drum. The fisher families rushed out to watch. A big plank of ice slid down the stream and out of sight. It took with it a boat, two buckets and a very surprised duck.
The marsh woke up. The frogs sang. By the second week of Thaw there were green shoots at the edges of the reed beds.
Zell wrote in the last of his letters that year: "I do not mind winter. I mind the end of it, when the ice goes and the mud comes. I would rather skate than wade."
The clerks have kept all his letters. They are on the sixth shelf of the fourth hall, with the others from the marsh.
%%
Chronicle: the summer the boy ran off
Written by Garrow, egg seller of Saltreach, for the chronicles at Vell, about the summer of 175, which the town still talks about.
In Melon of that year, a boy named Kit, aged seven, the son of the net mender Marit, ran off from Saltreach. He was missed at supper. By dark the whole town was looking for him. Torches went out along the quay, the pier, the slip and the road to the ridge. The bell rang all night.
He was not found that night. In the morning, the harbor master sent word up the relay to Vell and Three Wells and the farms on the road. By noon, forty people were searching. Wren came from Lowmarsh with her bag in case he was hurt.
He was found at midday by Anchor, the harbor cat. Or so the story goes. Anchor sat on a pile of rope at the end of the old pier and would not move. A fisher went to see why. Under the rope, inside an old barrel, was Kit, asleep, with a bag of bread and a stick.
He had meant to go to sea. He had packed for it. He had a loaf, a rope, and his mother's good knife. He had walked to the end of the pier, and found the sea was bigger than he thought, and had a nap.
He was not hurt. His mother held him for a long time and then, being his mother, scolded him for another long time.
The next day, the town gave Kit a boat. It was a very small one, made for a child, with a paper sail. He sailed it in the harbor and did not leave the wall. He is a fisher now, aged thirty-one, and has a boat of his own. He has never run off since.
The cat Anchor got a fish from every stall for a week. She was not grateful. She expected it.
Numbers: searchers 140. Torches burned 62. Loaves given to the searchers by the baker, free: 90. Fish eaten by the cat: 7.
Garrow
%%
Chronicle: Ambrook, the year 199
Kept at Vell, from the reports of Senna, well digger, and of Linnet, keeper. The year the tower came to Ambrook.

Thaw. The council sent word that Ambrook would have a relay tower. It would stand on the hill above the mill pond, on the spot where the old oak grew. The oak was very old, and the whole town came to say goodbye to it. Ama brought honey. Jory brought a saw, and a sad face.

Sowing. The oak was cut on the third day. It was cut carefully, in long boards. Forty people carried them down. The masons came from Three Wells to lay the first stones. The apple trees were in bud, and the bees were out, and nobody could say it was a bad spring.

Blossom. The tower went up. By the end of the month it was as tall as the mill. Senna began the well at its foot on the second day of Blossom. The ground was kind. She found water on the ninth day, at 22 blocks. Linnet, who was to keep the tower, was the first to drink. She said it tasted of apples. Senna said that was the trees.

Swarm. The glass came from Saltreach in four crates. Not one pane broke. The lamp room was finished, and the stair lamps were hung, one at every turn. The door was made from the old oak. It is the finest door on the Long Road, and the only one that creaks like a tree. Children knock on it for the sound.

Longday. On the first day of summer, at dusk, the lamp was lit for the first time. Everyone came. Ama brought a jar of honey, and Jory brought flour, and Senna brought nothing, as she had already brought the water. Linnet climbed the stair alone and lit the lamp. It sent its first message to Three Wells. Three Wells answered. Then the others, one by one, all the way to Northpoint.

Melon. The first message from Ambrook to Saltreach went down the line before supper. By cart it takes two days. Pell heard of it on the road, stopped his cart, stood still, and took off his hat.

Reaping. 400 apple trees, and not one of them knew about the tower.

Apple. The harvest. The best in nine years, 212 baskets from the old trees alone.

Frost. Ice on the mill pond. A red flag on the gate.

Deepsnow. Linnet's first winter at the lamp. The stair was cold, and the lamp was warm. Nobody froze. Senna says she checked the well, and the water was still sweet.

Ambrook has been a town on the line for a year. It is quicker to say what has not changed. The wheel still turns from dawn to dusk. The sluice has not been opened. The oak is still on the hill, and it is the door.
%%
Chronicle: The First Copper Helper
In the 188th year, a small apprentice came to the house at the edge of Northpoint. Its arms were copper, and its legs were iron. A crystal sat inside its chest.
Lantern named it Button because one round plate on its shoulder looked like a button. Mira said a helper should have a useful name. Lantern said Button was useful enough.
The keeper gave it a basket and showed it how to carry kindling from the shed. It dropped the first bundle by the door. It carried the second bundle to the kitchen, but left the basket in the snow.
Lantern showed it again. Mira stood by the stove and kept the door open. On the third try, Button carried the basket inside and set it beside the wood box.
It could not sort kindling from spruce scraps. It put both in the basket and looked at Lantern.
We had little use for it beyond the house. There were few apprentices in those years, and most did one task. Still, Button learned the path from shed to kitchen.
Lantern wrote the lesson on a card. Mira saved the card in the kitchen drawer, beneath the spoons.
%%
Chronicle: Lowmarsh, autumn 166
Copied by the clerks at Vell from a note by Sorrel.
In the autumn of 166, the boardwalk by the west reed bed was repaired. Six people carried planks from the boat house. Sorrel brought nails and a hammer. Len brought a pot of beetroot soup.
The soup was good, but Len had put in too much salt. He said the pot had tipped. Sorrel asked why he had then tipped it twice.
The last plank was loose after the work. They nailed it again. The boardwalk held all winter, except for one small patch where the water came up between the boards.
At the fish weir, the catch was small. The folk shared it by the tally on the boat house wall. Sorrel got two fish. Len got one fish and the pot back.
%%
Chronicle: the grey cough at Lowmarsh
Kept at Vell from the Lowmarsh healing book, in Longday. Written by Oren, clerk, from the notes of Wren, who sent them up by the relay with a short note, and then a longer one, and then asked for the notes back, because she had written things in them she did not want kept.

The grey cough came to Lowmarsh in Thaw, in one house by the reed beds. It came to a second house in Sowing, and to a third in Blossom. By Swarm there were twenty-two houses with someone coughing, and by Melon there were thirty-one. Most of them are better now. Some are not.

It starts as a cough in the chest, dry, and then the cough turns grey, and the patient is tired in a way that sleep does not mend. Wren has written the signs down as she sees them. She has not found a cure, but she has found that the sick get better faster when they are kept warm and given the clear broth, and worse when they are left in the damp by the water.

There are three things the people of Lowmarsh say are to blame. Some say the water, because the reed beds have been wet, and the wells are close to the marsh. Some say the ships, because the cough came after the first big boat came up the coast and tied up at the quay for a day, and the boat's crew were seen in the lanes. Some say the mines, because two of the sick were carters who had brought coal from Copperhold, and the coal has a smell.

Wren does not blame any of them. She writes that she does not know, and that a healer who says she knows is a healer who will be wrong. She has kept the water samples in jars on the high shelf, and marked them, and sent half to Vell.

Two relay towers, Lowmarsh and the one on the hill above the reeds, have not sent their evening word since Melon. The keeper of the hill tower has sent no letter since. Wren says it may be the cough. Wren says the towers have been quiet before, and that she hopes they are quiet only because the keepers are tired.

Oren has copied everything. He has kept the samples' marks as well as the words, and the words of the people who were sick, even the ones who did not get better. He has asked Wren to write her own name on the top of her notes. She has written it. It is the first thing she has written in a week that was not about the cough.
%%
Chronicle: the year the drill halls
Kept at Vell, in the Archive, by a clerk named Brannoc who was asked to write the year down plainly. The 196th year of the archive.

Spring. The tutors of Vell opened the great drill hall on the second day of Thaw. It is a long room cut into the hill, with lanterns on the walls and a row of stone benches, and a row of crystals in cradles on the far side. There are forty cradles. Eleven were filled on the first day. The tutors say this is good for the first year.

The tutors who run the hall are Nessa, Isla and four young ones from the Three Wells school. Isla is the eldest. She is tall and speaks slowly. She told the clerks that the hall is for drills and not for stories, and that the stories must be kept for the evenings.

Summer. The hall began to drill the reading minds on the Archive's own records. This was the first time it had been done. Some clerks were glad. Some were afraid. Oren said that a page drilled into a mind is not a page lost, but a page changed. He asked that the test box be kept apart. The tutors agreed.

The first reading mind in the hall learned to guess the next letter of a page after a few hundred tries. By the autumn it could guess most letters of a short record correctly. It was not told the answers. It was told only when it was wrong, and by how much, and it moved a little each time.

Autumn. The tutors found that a mind with a larger crystal learned better when it was drilled for longer, on more writing. Isla drew a curve on a board to show this. She said that the curve was not exact, but it was good enough to plan a house. The councils heard this and began to plan the first relay houses.

Winter. The clerks asked the tutors how many records had gone into the drills. The tutors did not know. They had kept a count of the pages, but not of the copies, and some pages had been copied three times over. Nessa said this was a mistake. Isla said it was the clerks' mistake. Both were right, and the count was never fixed.

The drill hall closed for the cold. The crystals were taken out of their cradles and wrapped in wool. The big drill board on the north wall was left up, with the last drill still on it. The tutors say it reads: the page is only as good as its copy. Nobody has rubbed it out.
%%
The Long Road in the year 196
Chronicle kept at Vell, the year 196 of the archive, from the counts sent up by the inns and the waymark keepers. Compiled by a clerk, and checked by Tova, who has walked most of it.

Length of the road, from Three Wells to the Ambrook orchards: thirty-one days by cart, nineteen by a fast walker, and forty by a child who stops at every waymark.

Inns on the road: nine, a day apart. Brown Hen, Halfway Inn, Kettle Inn, and six small houses, which are not always open. Beds in all the inns together: 118. Bowls of soup served in the year, by the innkeepers' count: about 9,000. The innkeepers' count is always low. Hobb says so.

Waymarks: 27 new pillars were raised in the year, each three blocks high with a torch on top. The numbers on them run from 0 to 9. The arrows point to the nearest inn. Some pillars have a little stone on top, which is left by travelers. Nobody knows who first started this. It is a good habit and nobody has asked for it to stop.

Bridges: 14 new bridges, all of stone where stone could be found, and oak where it could not. Two oak bridges were replaced in the year because the oak was rotten. One bridge, the one over the stream by the Halfway Inn, is loose at the third plank. Every keeper of the road has reported this since 193. It is still loose.

Torches: 412 torches on posts, every twelve blocks. Three were broken by carts. One was taken by a child. The child brought it back the next day, with a note that said it had been too bright to sleep.

Carts passing in the year, all directions: about 6,000. Most of them were carrying coal, wool, salt and bread. A few carried less usual things, which the clerks have not recorded, because the drivers would not say what they were carrying, and the clerks did not ask twice.

Travelers who gave a name at the inns: 2,300. Travelers who gave no name: more. The road was never a place people kept their names to themselves, but it was never a place where they were asked for them either.
%%
Chronicle: the Saltreach summers
Kept for the chronicles at Vell by Garrow, egg seller at Saltreach, in the summer of 196, in answer to a letter from Oren asking what the town did in those years.
I have gone back through my ledger and my mother's, and asked the old fishers. This is what I found.
190. A dry summer. The well at the market square ran low. The town dug it deeper. Seven blocks. The water came back sweet. The cost was 40 emeralds. Nobody grudged it.
191. The year of the new quay. The old one had rotted. The new one is stone and oak, and it runs forty blocks along the harbor. Corin's father cut the first stone himself. Thirty-one people built it. It was finished in Reaping.
192. A wet summer. The fish were slow. Fourteen boats came home with less than a barrel. The town sent to Lowmarsh for eels, and Lowmarsh sent them, and said nothing. Nobody forgot.
193. A cat. In Longday of 193, a ship's cat jumped off a trading boat from the far coast and refused to go back. The sailors tried to catch her for a day. She went up the relay tower stair. She stayed until the boat left. Her name is Soot. She is still alive, and has had forty-two kittens. Half the cats in Saltreach are her family.
194. A hard winter, and a late spring. But the summer was good. The festival was the biggest yet. 2,000 people came. We counted. It was a record, and the harbor master wrote it on the board.
195. The first apprentice at Saltreach. It came from Copperhold with a cart of iron, and stayed to carry ropes at the yard. Corin was careful with it. He said it did the work of three, and ate nothing.
In all those years, nine boats were built, three were lost, and no person drowned. We are proud of that. The fishers say it is luck and the harbor wall. I say it is also the bell, which rings at dusk, so the boats know the way.
Garrow
%%
Chronicle: the fair at Northpoint
Kept by Sable, for the school book. Written on the long evening after the fair.
The fair at Northpoint was on the flat ground by the north relay, the only flat ground for a day's walk. It began at the first bell and ended when the lamps on the tower were lit, which is the rule. Sixteen stalls came up the road from Hollow Pass, and nine from the road beyond. The tower keeper's house gave a bench and a long table.
Things sold: 40 pairs of wool socks. 11 blankets. 18 sacks of apples from the south orchards, which were very sweet. 2 cheeses the size of a child. Honey, cider, and a barrel of salt herring which the children refused to smell. 5 wooden horses, all with four legs.
Prize for the best loaf: Mother Hanne, of the north road, with a dark rye that she had been baking since Thaw. The judges said it was dense, which they meant as praise. Hanne said it was dense because she was proud of it.
Prize for the best song: a boy of twelve from the sheep men, who sang about a fox that wanted to be a lamp. The crowd did not understand the song, and asked him to sing it again, and he did, and they understood it better the second time.
Prize for the best fleece: Ruan, again. Nobody was surprised. He said the sheep were the prize and he was only the shepherd.
The keeper of the north relay came down from the tower for the evening. He stood by the fire with a cup of cider and watched the children dance. He said the lamp was bright tonight, and that the next tower had answered his first call before he had finished making it. Then someone asked him for a tune, and he sang one, and he sang another after that.
The lamps were lit at the last bell. The children carried them up the road to the hamlet, singing, and the sheep dogs barked at the singing until they were too tired to bark.
%%
Chronicle: the spring work at Copperhold
Kept at the relay house at the edge of Copperhold, in the 196th year of the archive. Written by Hazel, from the count board at the shaft head, which she copies every spring, because the miners do not always remember to.
Copper, brought up in Thaw: one hundred and forty ingots. Iron, sixty-two bars. Coal, sixty-one carts, the best of it in the first three weeks.
The count board has a line for every shift. The men's names go on it at the start, and are rubbed out when they come up. In the spring of 196 there were fifty names on the board in the morning, and forty-seven rubbed out by noon. Hazel asked Hesk what had become of the other three. Hesk said they were still on the deep shift, and that he would tell them they were missed when they came up.
The forge had a good spring. The smith burned his arm once, on the second of Sowing, and kept working with it wrapped, because the iron does not wait for a burn.
Clank, Hesk's apprentice, carries the coal sacks from the sorting shed to the cart, six at a time, and sets them down gently. It does not talk, which the miners say is the best thing about it. In Blossom it was given a new bin for the stones that look like nothing. It sorts them carefully and does not know what they are.
The lift was mended in Sowing. The rope was new, and the drum was greased. The old lift rope went to the rope maker, who says it is good for two more winters and no more.
The stair was swept. Every eight steps there is a torch on the left. In the spring the torches were filled, and eleven of them were fitted with new pitch.
The miners had their spring feast on the last day of Blossom, on the flat stone at the mine gate. There was bread, cheese, pork, and a song by Hesk, which nobody asked for and everybody sang the chorus of. The count board was not rubbed out for the feast. Hazel is glad. It is good to see the names up on a day when nobody is working.
Hazel
%%
Chronicle: winter in the hamlet
Written by Garrow, a stonecutter, for the chronicles kept at Vell. The hamlet near Lowmarsh. A winter, no year given.

The first snow fell on the third of Frost. Eleven houses have a cough, grey and dry. Wren has been round the hamlet twice. She boils the water and tells everyone to do the same. She does not know the cause. Some say the water. Some say the mines, which are far. Some say the big ships at Saltreach, which are farther.

Two families have gone to Saltreach. They took carts and bedding. They say they will sail. One of them said, "There must be somewhere else." The other said nothing.

An apprentice arrived on the fourth of Longnight. It works at the weir now. It is called Pebble, by the children. It does not mind.

A zombie came to the east gate. The torches held. A boy threw an apple at it. The zombie left. The boy was cheered, and he has been unbearable since.

I mend the wall. There is more to mend than usual. Frost splits the stones. I have cut forty new blocks this month.

I thought I would write this down, since the chroniclers at Vell ask for every hamlet's winter. This is ours. It is not a bad one. It is not a good one. It is a winter.
%%
Chronicle of Hob's House, 153
In the 153rd year of the Archive, Hob the stonecutter bought a narrow house at the edge of Vell. It stood beside the old road, where grass grew between the stones. The roof leaked above the bed. Hob said the roof had chosen the bed because it was the softest place.

His sister Ena came from Three Wells with a basket of potatoes and two lengths of oak. She helped him mend the roof. Hob carried stones from the hill, and Ena held the ladder. When he asked her to pass the hammer, she passed him a potato.

The house had one room, one well behind it, and a yard just wide enough for a hen. The hen belonged to no one, but laid an egg by Hob's door each morning. Hob built it a small pen. It slept on his boots instead.

By summer's end the roof stayed dry. Hob set a stone bench by the door. Travelers rested there and left little stones on top, as they did at waymarks. Hob kept the smooth ones. Ena took the egg when she visited, and said the hen had finally paid rent.
%%
A Door That Swelled
In Blossom of 193, rain kept falling over Lowmarsh. Yarrow's house stood at the edge of the village, where the boardwalk ended beside a stand of reeds. The front door swelled in its frame and would not open.

Yarrow pushed with one shoulder. The door did not move. Yarrow pulled. The door did not move. Then Yarrow leaned against it with both hands and called for help.

Hett came from the fish weir with a small iron bar. Wren came from the healing house with a jar of salve. Moss came with a basket and no useful tool.

"Can the basket open the door?" Yarrow asked.

"It can hold the eggs when the door opens," Moss said.

The iron bar lifted the door just enough for Hett to shave a little wood from the lower edge. Wren kept the rain off the tool with her cloak. Moss held the eggs. One egg rolled against the basket side, but did not crack.

The door opened before supper. Yarrow gave each helper an egg and gave Moss two, for holding the basket so carefully. Moss said the extra egg was not needed. Then Moss carried it home very carefully.

The next dry day, Yarrow rubbed the door edge with oil. Hett made a mark on the wall to show how high the flood water had come. Wren added the height to her notes about the spring rain.

Yarrow's house stayed dry after that. The door still stuck when the weather was wet, but it opened if pushed once, not three times.
%%
Chronicle: the lesson in the market
Kept at Vell. Autumn of 199. Told from the writings of Tam of Kettle Ridge and of the tutor Piper, who were both there and did not agree on the details.

In the autumn of 199 the tutor Piper brought an apprentice to the market at Kettle Ridge, to show the farmers what a mind in a crystal could do. She called it a lesson. It was meant to be a good one.
The apprentice had been drilled for a year to sort. It sorted red apples from green. It sorted wheat from chaff. It sorted wool by color. Piper had a table set up with twelve baskets and a heap of goods.
She gave the first order. The apprentice picked up an apple and put it in the right basket.
She gave the second. It picked up a beetroot and put it in the right basket.
Then a gust of wind took the cloth off the table, and the goods went everywhere. A pumpkin rolled under a stall. A hen ran through the baskets. A child ran after the hen. And the apprentice stopped.
It stood still. It had been drilled on apples and beetroot on a table. It had not been drilled on hens, or children, or wind. The mind did not know what it was looking at. It could not say so. It could only stop, and so it did.
The farmers laughed. Piper did not. She took the apprentice by the hand, said "home," and walked it out of the square.
Tam wrote that it was the worst lesson he had ever seen. Piper wrote that it was the best, because that was the day she learned to test a mind on things it had not seen. She went back to Vell and made a new drill, with hens in it.
Years later the apprentice came back to Kettle Ridge. It sorted the whole market in an hour. A hen ran through the baskets. It picked the hen up and put it outside. No one laughed. A few cheered.
%%
Chronicle: the year at the edge
Kept at Lowmarsh, by the healing house, for the record of the year. Written in autumn, by Wren, with notes from the boat men and from Ann at Reed Farm.
The year began in Thaw with a flood on the lower boardwalk. Four posts were lost. The council paid for two. The boat men paid for the other two out of the weir money, and nobody has forgiven the council for the difference.
In Sowing the reed beds were cut early, and the cut was good. Sixty bundles went to the thatchers at Three Wells. The thatchers said the reed was the straightest they had seen since the old days. Nobody could say which old days they meant.
In Blossom the frog race was held at the far end of the boardwalk by the boat house, because the good end was given to the old men who tell lies. The winner was a frog named Admiral. Dinn's family says it was the same frog as last year. Nobody could prove it was not.
In Swarm the cow at Reed Farm was sick for nine days and then well again. The cost is recorded elsewhere in this book.
In Longday there was a fire at the drying racks by the weir. Two racks were burned, and one net. The fire was out by the second bell. The cause was a dropped lamp. The lamp had been warned about.
In Melon the marsh had its best harvest of eels in ten years. The weir was full each morning. The smokehouse was busy until it ran out of wood, and then the boat men carried the wood up from the reeds on their backs, and it smelled of smoke for a month.
In Reaping the healing house was busy with the dark eel. The council has been told. The market board has been told. Wren has said it several times.
In Apple the children took the lamps from the posts and carried them round the marsh in the dark, singing the lamp song that nobody can agree on the words of. They are still singing it.
In Leaffall the festival was held. The lamp count was two hundred and twelve. The old man from the far houses died in his chair. He saw the reeds first.
The year is not finished. The reeds will be cut again in the spring, and the new boats will go on the water, and the frogs will be back in the ditch by Thaw. This is the record as it stands. Keep the lamps lit.
%%
Chronicle: the apprentices at the north
Kept by Elm, school child. The count of apprentices in the north, from the board at the market.
In the tenth year there were nine apprentices in the north. Three at Northpoint, carrying and sorting. Two at the Halfway, carrying and cleaning. Two at the market, sacks and stalls. One at the new school, helping the teacher with the chalk. One at the relay tower, helping Ilse with the lamp oil, which it does with great care.
Each apprentice was tested before it was sent. The tutors at Vell say this is the first rule. Each was given a drill and a card, and each card has the apprentice's task written on it in large letters, so that the apprentice can read it and so can the people who need it.
The apprentice at the school is called Clover, after the flowers on the south slope. It learned the chalk in one week and the sums in one month. It has never once got the sums wrong. The children have been asked not to tell it that they are happy with it, because it does not need praise, but they tell it anyway.
The apprentice at the market is called Dun. It is a dull grey colour, which the children say is why it is so good at finding things in the dark. It has found eleven lost bundles of wool since the autumn, and returned them to their owners, and has never asked for a reward. Mags says it is the most honest apprentice in the north. Mags is not always right, but she is usually right about apprentices.
In the tenth year, the council at Vell decided that every town on the north road should have an apprentice by the next Frost. There were not enough crystals to make them all. There were not enough tutors to drill them. The council said that was the problem of the next year. Ilse said it was the problem of the tower, and she has been counting the crystals since.
%%
Chronicle: Lowmarsh, autumn 174
Copied at Vell from Sorrel's account.
The autumn of 174 was wet. Water stood in the low field, and the carrots came out with long roots and much mud. Sorrel washed them at the well. Len said the mud was good for the soil. Sorrel said it was good for Len's boots.
They filled three baskets for the market at Three Wells. The first basket went by cart. The second went by hand. The third went nowhere, because Len sat on it to tie his boot.
A frog came out from the basket when he stood up. It crossed the road and went under the cart. No one tried to catch it.
The carrots sold well. Sorrel bought a jar of honey and a new handle for the hoe. Len bought a pie and said it was for the road. He ate it before they reached the bridge.
%%
Chronicle: the great house, as told
Kept at Reedhollow by Garrow, from the stories told in the inn at Lowmarsh by the carters, and set down in the order they were heard. Spring of the 207th year. Garrow does not vouch for any of it. He writes it because the carters want it written.

The first carter, Orrin, says the great relay house is at the far end of the north road, past the last tower. It is bigger than a town. It has walls of grey stone, and a roof of copper that shines in the morning. Inside, Orrin says, there are rooms of crystals, one room for each kind of mind, and a mind so big it fills a whole hall. He says he saw the lamp light on its door from across a valley, and did not get any nearer, because the road was closed.

The second carter, Lusk, says the great house is not in the north at all. It is near Saltreach, on a hill above the sea. He says he heard the minds talking to each other at night, very low, like a crowd outside a window. He says they were talking about the ships. He did not understand what they said. He says he did not want to.

The third carter, a woman who would not give her name, says there is no great house. She says it is a story the tutors tell to make the councils pay. She says the relay houses are the ordinary houses we have always had, with ordinary minds, and somebody has added the word great to make the tax seem fair.

The inn keeper, Mab, says all three of them were drunk. Orrin, she says, has never been north of Three Wells. Lusk has been to Saltreach once, for a wedding, and was seasick.

The old fisher Gil says the sea is too wide for any house to see across. The carter Hennick of the Long Road says the big house is in the north, but it is small, and that it only looks big from far away. The tutor from Vell, who came through in Blossom, says nobody has seen a mind that big, and nobody can.

So Garrow writes it down as it was told. Three tellings, four with Mab's, and none of them agree on the size, the place or the purpose. He thinks they all want the same thing, which is for the great house to be somewhere they can say the name of.
%%
A bad year for spiders, Copperhold
The autumn of 203 was a bad year for spiders. They came up out of the Deep Works and into the barns and the sheds and one of them into the school.
The barn by the east gate was full of them. Brin went in with a torch and came out again. Brin said the barn could keep them.
Then Hesk came up from the mine with a crew and a cart of cobblestone, and they walled the barn's low holes and put a row of cobblestone along the top, the top row stuck out one block, as the towns do. The spiders did not like the stuck-out row. They went back down the hill.
The barn was swept out and the hay was saved. The spiders had made a web over the door that was as big as a cart. The children wanted to keep it. The children did not keep it.
Brin fixed the barn roof after, because the crew had knocked a tile loose. Brin charged the town nothing. Brin says a barn with a good roof is a barn that keeps spiders out, and the town should remember that.
It is remembered. This is the archive, and we keep everything we write.
%%
Spring Tally from the Slow Water
The 208th spring at Lowmarsh began with rain, then three clear days, then rain again. Yarrow's house stood at the edge of the slow water. Reeds brushed the side wall when the wind came from the south. Frogs called beneath the floor posts. Yarrow kept a flat stone by the door to hold it open on dry days.

The eggs came from twelve hens. One hen was brown, one was speckled, and the rest were hard to tell apart when they crowded around the grain bowl. Yarrow marked each basket with a short line on the side. Six lines meant market eggs. Four meant Wren's house. Two meant eggs for supper, unless a neighbor needed them.

The market basket went by boat each second morning. On the other mornings, Yarrow carried it along the boardwalk. The boat was faster when the water was high. The boardwalk was faster when Hett had borrowed the boat to mend the fish weir.

A small helper now waited in Yarrow's yard. It had learned to carry the empty baskets to the shed and bring the full ones to the door. Yarrow tested it with six eggs, then four, then six again. It carried all sixteen without a crack.

It could not yet tell the market basket from the supper basket. Yarrow tied a strip of wool to the market handle and a reed knot to the supper handle. The helper learned the marks after many tries. Yarrow still checked every basket. An egg is small, but a missed egg can spoil a count.

At the end of Blossom, Yarrow wrote the tally on a scrap for the clerk at Vell. There had been 284 eggs laid, 251 sold, 18 eaten at home, and 15 given away. Hett had bought 30 and paid for 29. Hett said one egg had rolled into the boat. Yarrow said the boat had not bought it.

They settled the matter with a jar of honey from Wren. Hett carried the jar home. Yarrow kept the empty jar for buttons.

On the last clear evening, Yarrow sat by the open door and mended the basket handles. The helper carried reeds to the shed, one bundle at a time. A frog sat on the flat stone and did not move when Yarrow spoke to it.

"That is my seat," Yarrow said.

The frog stayed.

Yarrow took a smaller stone and sat beside it. The eggs were counted, the baskets were dry, and the water had gone down one finger's width on the wall mark. For that spring, it was enough.
%%
Chronicle: the great drills
Kept at the Halfway Inn by Lise, cheesemaker, for the Archive. A summary for the Archive, written in spring, from the years that came before it.
In ten years of drilling, the minds at Vell and Ambrook learned to read a page through. At first they could read a line and lose the rest. By the middle of the drills, a mind could hold a page, and then a letter, and then a little bundle of letters tied together by the same hand.
Isla, the tutor who began it, found that a mind with a bigger crystal and more pages to read grew better, and that the growth could be drawn on a sheet before the mind was made. Her sheet is still kept at Vell. The councils began to build relay houses after it, because a mind that learned that well was worth keeping near a tower.
The clerks said the drills changed the copying room. The tutors came in and out with their boxes, and the clerks learned to file every letter with its year and its hand, so that the drill box could be made. The Archive grew. More shelves were dug. More boxes were filled. The phrase about keeping everything went up on the wall over the door of the copying room, cut into the stone by the first masons, and it stayed there.
Nobody in the drills was sure whose letters were used. The tutors thought it did not matter for the test. The clerks thought it mattered very much, and said so. The innkeepers thought it mattered to the people who wrote the letters. The children thought it was a game.
By the end of the decade there were nine relay houses on the north line, and the drills had gone to Ambrook, to Copperhold and to the north. The phrase was said at the start of every school day in Three Wells, and in the back room of the inn, where the children learned their letters before the new school was built.
We do not know what the drills were for, in the end. Isla said they were for reading. The clerks said they were for keeping. The children said they were for the children. All three are written here, as they were said to us.
%%
Chronicle: bees at the Brown Hen, 162
Kept at Vell, from Pell's letter and Hob's notes.

In Swarm the bees of the Brown Hen left their hive. They went up in a brown cloud and hung in the old apple tree by the yard, in a ball as big as a melon.

Hob shouted for an hour, then fetched a basket and a long stick. Pell held the ladder.

Hob counted forty bees in the basket. Pell says four hundred. They are both guessing, and the bees are not telling.

That evening the swarm moved up the hill, into a new hive from Ambrook. Hob paid for it with a cheese.

By Frost the new hive had its winter bees. It also had a grey cat asleep against it. The cat is not allowed. Nobody has told the cat.

Pell says the honey will be the best on the Long Road, because it came from a bee that once rode in a basket. Hob says it will taste of cat.
%%
The Copperhold roof festival
Every spring the people of Copperhold hold a festival for the roofs. It began long ago, when the town put new slate on the forge and everyone came out to watch.
The festival is on the first dry day of Blossom. Brin the roofer climbs onto the forge roof and lays one tile, the first tile of the season. Then everyone claps, and the festival begins.
There is a contest. Each street brings a small roof of its own, built on a frame in the square, and the town votes on the best one. The rules are: it must be dry inside, and it must not fall down. Last year the east street won with a roof of copper gone green. The west street's roof fell down at the voting. They said it was the wind.
There are pies and honey cakes and beetroot soup. Sefa's cousin brings flour up from the ridge. The children climb on the frames until someone says stop.
The apprentices help. Brin's apprentice is not named in this notice, because Brin says the apprentice has not earned a name yet. Brin says it will. It carries tiles all day and does not drop one.
Spend the day well. Put your name on the board for roof repairs before the festival, not after.
Brin, roofer, spring of 204
%%
Chronicle: ten summers of the market
Kept at Vell from the notes of Dunn, baker of Three Wells, who was asked by a clerk to set down what he remembered of the market, year by year. Written in the summer of the 204th year. The years are as Dunn gave them, and he says himself that some may be a year out.

195. The year of the new awnings. Until then, stalls had cloth roofs, and a hard rain brought them all down. Now they have oiled canvas on frames. The first rain after they were hung, nobody got wet. The baker's wife cried.

196. The year of the long bench. The council bought a bench forty blocks long, made of three oaks, and set it by the east well. Anyone may sit. It has never been empty at noon. People eat their bread on it, and tell lies.

197. The year of the zombie at the gate, which Dunn must tell. It came at noon in a thunderstorm, which was bad luck. It stood in the road and groaned. A boy of ten walked up with a torch and said: go home. It did not go home. It burned. The boy was given a ribbon and a bun. He ate the bun first.

198. The year of the new road to the coast. The road from Three Wells to Saltreach was made straight and paved. It cut two days from the trip. Fish now comes to Three Wells market the same day it is caught, in a cart packed with ice from the north. It smells, but it is fresh.

199. The year the first relay house was seen at the foot of the tower on the east road. People came from all the villages to look at it. A big crystal on a stand, with water pipes round it. Dunn, who is not an educated man, said: it looks like a bread oven with a headache. A clerk wrote that down. It is now in the Archive.

200. The year of the two hundredth fair. A feast. Dunn baked a loaf six blocks long. It took a week and fed the whole square.

201 to 203. Quiet years. Good harvests. Prices steady. More apprentices in the stalls, carrying sacks. One of them is said to understand a whole sentence. The market does not believe it.

204. This year. Two hundred and six stalls. The wells are sweet. The bell rings on time. The market is as busy as it has ever been.

That is what Dunn remembers.
%%
The Halfway Inn, a debt paid
Kept by Teague, innkeeper, on the second day of Frost. The debt was three years old.

In the third year of the old keeper's time, a horse trader named Garrow ate at the inn and drank two jugs of spiced milk and a bowl of stew. He left without paying. He owed eight emeralds, and he has owed them since the year the inn had its new roof.

Yesterday he came up the road with his cart empty and his hat in his hand. He laid eight emeralds on the table by the hearth. Then he laid two more, for the three years of interest, which I had not asked him for. He said a debt should be paid in full or not at all.

I wrote him in the book as paid. He asked me to write also that he was sorry. I wrote it. He asked me to read it back, and I did. He said it was a fair sentence, and went out to his cart, which was no longer empty. He had bought a sack of wool at Three Wells on the way.

The hearth was built up for him. The riddle board was turned to a new riddle, one I cannot answer: What do you hold when you have given it away? The answer is written on the back. I will not show you.

Count of the debt: 8 emeralds owed, 10 paid, 0 fights, 1 apology, 1 riddle left open.
%%
Isla's Curve
Copied at Vell from Odo's spring notes, with his added marks.

In the spring of 195, Isla brought a way to plan the growth of a mind. She had compared crystals of different sizes. She had also changed how many pages each mind saw and how long each one was drilled.

The results made a curve. With a larger crystal, more good writing, and longer drilling, a mind could grow better. Isla's curve let a tutor make a useful guess before the crystal was grown.

The curve did not promise that every mind would answer well. It did not say that a mind had learned a thing merely because it had seen a page. It did not remove the need for a test.

Odo asked what should count as good writing. Isla said the tutor must look at the pages. Copies and spoiled pages should be taken out. Pages used for tests should not be shown during drills.

She also said that more pages are not always more help. A small crystal cannot hold everything, and long drills on poor examples may teach poor answers. A tutor must choose the size of the crystal, the pages, and the time with care.

The councilors from Saltreach and Gullbank heard her in Blossom. They asked for a count of the stone and glass needed at the harbor tower. They asked the clerks at Vell to prepare more pages.

By Apple, work had begun on the relay house above Gullbank. The old tower remained beside it. The keepers shared a lamp room for a month, until the new roof was ready.

The first big crystal arrived in a wooden box. It was set on a stand in the relay house. A keeper brought snow from the north side of the hill to cool the quickeners.

No one in Gullbank could say what the crystal would answer. The tutors sent it pages, then waited for its work to be tested. Odo wrote that waiting is part of teaching.
%%
Chronicle: Debt Paid in Spring
In the 181st year of the archive, the farm outside Three Wells paid its debt to Pell.
The debt was for a new plow and two sacks of wheat seed. Pell had written the amount on his board: nine emeralds. The farmer paid nine emeralds at the market, one at a time, because the purse had a hole.
Bel watched each emerald land on the board. She asked if Pell would count them again.
"I will," he said. "Your father counted them once and called it a favor."
The farmer laughed and gave Pell a basket of carrots for the road. Pell took the basket and said it was not part of the debt.
That evening, the farm planted the last row of wheat. The plow worked well. The farmer said it was almost worth paying for.
%%
Chronicle of Hob's House, 207
In the 207th year of the Archive, the house at the edge of Vell was still beside the old road. Hob had been gone for many years, but his stone bench remained. The house now belonged to his granddaughter Mara and her family.

The front room held a table, a shelf of jars and a box of spare lamp glass. The roof had been mended twice. The well still ran clear in summer. The hen pen had become a small garden, with carrots by the wall and beetroot near the gate.

Mara's son Len kept a tally of travelers who stopped at the bench. He wrote each name on a board, when a traveler gave it. Most left a stone instead. At the end of Longday, there were nine stones and three names. Len said stones were easier to spell.

A small apprentice from the tutor house came by with a load of books. It followed the road marks and stopped at the gate. Mara showed it the dry box by the wall. It put the books inside, then carried the empty basket back to the tutor house. Len watched it go and said he wished his cousins followed orders so well.

That summer, the relay keeper at the little hill relay sent a message for the Archive. Mara heard the lamp blink from her yard. It blinked in its usual pattern, and Len wrote the count on the board. He asked whether the lamp could send a message about supper. Mara said it could, but the keeper would probably send it back unread.

The family ate bread, potatoes and honey by the open door. A traveler arrived late, tired from the road. Mara gave him the bench and a bowl of soup. He left a smooth stone on the shelf, beside Hob's old hammer.
%%
Chronicle: Ambrook, the quiet year
Kept at Vell. In the year 181 the clerks asked every town to send in what had happened. Senna, well digger, wrote for Ambrook. Senna wrote: nothing. The apples came. The bees swarmed in Swarm. The wheel turned from dawn to dusk. One well was dug, and water was found at 12 blocks. Pell was late twice. The mill pond froze once and thawed once. The clerks wrote it all down. It is the shortest chronicle in the Archive, and the only year anyone at Ambrook says they miss.
%%
Chronicle: the lamp that blinked
Kept at Vell, from the tower log and from Senna, well digger, who was at the tower that night. Summer, 203.

At the second hour of the night, the lamp at Ambrook began to blink a message nobody had sent. Linnet was at supper. Seven towers copied it down, as the rules say. It read: QXZJ ZZQ KKX. Vell sent it on to Northpoint. Northpoint sent it back, with Mira's line: and to you. At the third hour Linnet came up the stair and found the cause. Her cat, Pickle, was asleep on the key. The cat was told. The cat did not mind. The Archive has all seven copies of the message, filed under Q.
%%
Chronicle: fair prize, long winter
Kept at the farm at the foot of the Northpoint tower, in the 141st year of the archive. Written by Hesk.
The fair at Three Wells was held in Swarm. The prize for the best sheep went to the Kettle Ridge flock, which is a matter of record and of some argument.
The tower farm sent two sheep down the north road for the fair. One was a ewe with a white face, and she took second place. The first place went to a grey ram from Ambrook, which the farm does not discuss.
The winter that followed was long. Snow came on the twelfth of Frost and lay until the first of Blossom. That is seventy-six days of snow, counted on the tower wall with a chalk mark each morning. The deepest snow was on the twentieth of Longnight, when it came up to the second rung of the lower ladder.
The farm lost no sheep in the snow. It lost one door, two shutters, and the good spade, which was found in the spring by the pig.
The tower lamp was lit every night of the winter. The keeper's book says 112 messages came up the line in the dark months, and 9 were answered after the thaw, when the road opened.
The farm had eleven pots of honey, four sacks of wheat and a barrel of salt fish laid by. Nobody starved. The chronicle is written so that nobody will forget that.
%%
Chronicle: the old map at Fordside
Sent to Vell by Tilly, horse keeper of Fordside, outside Lowmarsh. Spring of 195.

In Thaw the barn roof needed new boards. Under the old floor of the hayloft we found a tin box, and in the box a map, drawn on skin and folded in eight.

It shows Fordside and the ground round it. It is older than our farm book. I think it is older than the farm. Vell can say.

What it shows:
1. The ford, with a hand drawn beside it and the number 4. Four arm spans of water at the deepest, I think. Today it is two.
2. A track from the ford to Ambrook that is not the Long Road. It crosses the marsh by way of three posts. Two of the posts are still standing. The third fell in. We have put up a new one.
3. A small cross east of the ford, with no word beside it. We dug there for a day. We found one old horseshoe, as big as a plate, and nothing else.

On the first dry day of Sowing, my daughter and I walked the old track with a rope and a lantern. It saves half a day to Ambrook in summer. In wet weather it is mud to the knee. Fourteen horses went along it the next week. Eleven went the whole way. Three stopped halfway to have opinions.

The map is on its way to Vell on Pell's cart, wrapped in a blanket. Please copy it, and send it back. We have a frame waiting in the barn.
%%
Chronicle: The Wedding Bread
In the 35th year, Lio the potter married Sera the miller's daughter.
They held the wedding beside the Vell market.
The day was clear, and the hill was warm in the sun.
Sera wore a yellow wool shawl.
Lio wore his best boots, though one had a patch.
Their families brought bread, apples, honey and cheese.
The baker made a round loaf wide enough for six hands.
It was too wide for the oven door.
They turned it on its side and pushed.
The crust broke, but the loaf stayed whole.
At the feast, Lio gave Sera a small clay cup.
He had made it with a crooked handle.
Sera said the handle fit her thumb.
They shared the first slice of bread.
Then the children took the next three slices.
The clerk from the Archive at Vell wrote the names of all who came.
There were forty-two grown folk and eleven children.
One child slept under the table until the last song.
After the feast, Lio and Sera carried gifts to their house.
The guests carried the benches back to the market shed.
The mill wheel turned until dark.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, 193
Written by Tansy after the summer gathering, and copied at Vell.

Mara and Jori were married in the summer of 193. They had known each other since the bridge repair, when Jori rescued his hammer from the stream. Mara says she liked him before that. Jori says he liked her when she brought bread to the work.

They stood beside the mill pond. The beekeeper brought honey, and Mara's sisters brought apple cakes. Pell arrived late from the Long Road with a new wool coat and a very old excuse. He had stopped to help a cart with a broken wheel. The cart owner sent a note to say this was true.

The wedding supper was held in the mill yard. There were thirty-one guests, six children, and a cat that sat under the table. Tansy counted the plates twice. The cat was not counted.

After supper, Jori led a dance. He knew three steps. Mara knew four, so she showed him the last one. They danced until the lamps were lit. Then the children carried the cake indoors, with one piece missing before it reached the door.

The next morning, Jori mended the loose gate by the pond. Mara says this was not a wedding gift. Jori says it was a very useful gift.
%%
Notes on the relay house
By Bram, for the children, the 209th year. Read it slowly.
Children. You ask me about the crystal in the cold room by the tower. I will tell you what I know and what I do not.
The crystal is a mind. It is big, the size of a loaf, and it sits on a stand. Round it are the quickeners, and we keep them cool with water and snow. Why cool? The tutors say they spoil if they are warm. I do not know more than that.
The mind answers apprentices. An apprentice asks the tower and the tower asks the house and the answer comes back. The mind can read a page and write a letter. Some letters you cannot tell from a person's. Bel at Three Wells wrote to our mind once and got a letter back, and she says it was polite.
How does it learn? The tutors drill it, the same kind of page again and again, and when it is wrong they change it a little, and it gets better. They test it on pages it was never drilled on. Never send an untested mind to the fields.
Where did it come from? From the tutor house at Vell, and from the councils, and from all the writing in the archive. The big minds are drilled on what we wrote. We will keep everything we write, the first keepers cut over the door. That is why your letters matter.
What I do not know: how the relays carry so much, and what the quickeners draw on, and why an old crystal goes cloudy. Nobody wrote it down. If you find out, write it down, and send it to Oren at Vell.
Now go home. The cat is in the cold room again and she will not come out.
%%
Chronicle: the horse with the cough
Kept at Kettle Ridge by Dara, horse keeper. Winter.
My mare Bramble coughed for three days. I wrote to the house and told the mind what I saw. A dry cough in the morning, worse in the stable. No fever. She was eating.
The mind wrote: "I do not know what is wrong. A cough can be many things. Does it come when she puts her head in the hay? The hay may be dusty. Wet it a little. If she stops eating, send for someone who can see her."
It was the hay. I wet it. She stopped coughing in two days. I have kept horses for twenty years, and the mind asked the question I did not ask.
%%
Lowmarsh chronicle: the school play
Sent to the Archive at Vell by Vale, keeper of the marsh tower.

The children of the marsh school played The Ferry and the Frog in the boat house on the last day of Blossom, before nearly the whole marsh. The lamps were lit early, because the children asked.

Cast:
FERRYMAN: Pim Hadley, age eleven, in a hat that was too big.
DAUGHTER: Ada Reeve, age ten, with one line, practised for a month.
FROG: Joss Miller, age eight, who would not stop croaking.

FERRYMAN: The water is high, and the boat is low.
DAUGHTER: Can you take me over?
FERRYMAN: Over where?
DAUGHTER: To the far side, where the water stops.
FERRYMAN: Nobody has seen the far side. The water does not stop. It only gets far away.
DAUGHTER: Then take me as far away as it goes.
FROG: Croak.
FERRYMAN: The frog says yes.

At the end the daughter stands on the last step of the boat house, looking out at the grey, and says: "I can see the edge."

FERRYMAN: What is at the edge?
DAUGHTER: I do not know. That is why I want to go.
FERRYMAN: Then come home first, and go in the morning.

The marsh clapped for a long time. Some of the older people did not clap. They looked at the water, grey in the evening light, and then at each other, and then they clapped. Vale wrote down that the play was good. Nobody could say what the daughter had seen.

After, Joss asked whether the boats that went out past the edge would come back. Pim said yes. Joss said he was not sure. Pim said the play did not say, and that a ferryman is only a child with a hat. Then they went for the cake.
%%
Chronicle: Kester's note, one line
Kept at the farm at the foot of the Northpoint tower, in the summer of the 138th year of the archive. Written by Hesk, who was given the note to copy because he could not stop asking about it.
Kester, a tutor at Vell, wrote the note. Here is what it says, as plainly as I can put it.
A crystal of the old kind has one layer of weights between the question and the answer. With one layer it can draw only one straight line through the answers, and sort what falls on one side from what falls on the other.
Take the question: one or the other, but not both. Put the four cases on a page. Yes and yes. Yes and no. No and yes. No and no. The cases of one or the other must sit on one side of the line, and the cases of both or neither on the other. Try to draw one straight line that does this, with a stick and a page. The stick will always be wrong.
So a crystal of this kind can never learn one or the other, but not both. Not with more drilling. Not with more time. It is not a question of effort. It is a question of the line.
Hesk says the note is correct as far as it goes. He says it does not go far enough, and he does not say why.
%%
Chronicle, first year of the Archive
Kept by Una, roofer, at the Long Road inn. Written in spring.

The first year. Texts taken in: 41. Copied: 30. The first shelf was filled by Frost.

The tutors at Vell began drilling their first crystal in the first month of Sowing. It would not sit still. Then it began to learn, a little, when it was shown the same card again and again. Nobody wrote down why.

First snow came on the twelfth of Frost, three days early.
%%
Chronicle of Lowmarsh: market day
Gathered at Vell from the letters and notes of Zell, trader, who lived in a house at the edge of Lowmarsh for forty years and wrote a great deal. This chronicle of a dozen winters was put together by a clerk, in order, from Zell's own words. It is not complete. Some letters have gone missing, and some years Zell wrote only about his cat.
Year 180. A hard winter. Zell sold reeds at the market in Three Wells, and bought a second-hand cart for four emeralds. It had a squeak.
Year 181. He borrowed the healer's horse and brought her back three weeks late. Wren did not speak to him for a month. When she did, it was to ask for a barrel of eel.
Year 182. The market day at Lowmarsh moved from the first of Frost to the third. Nobody knew why. Zell says the stallholders decided, and the stallholders say Zell did.
Year 183. The market was held on ice. Nine good days. The tenth, a thaw. A stall was found in the pond.
Year 184. A mild winter. Zell wrote only that it was dull. He says there was nothing to complain about, and so he complained of that.
Year 185. A fire in the reed store. Nobody was hurt. The reeds were saved by a chain of neighbors, with buckets from the pond. Zell stood at the end of the chain and received the buckets, and says his arms ached for a week.
Year 186. The first apprentice came to Lowmarsh. It was brought by a tutor from Vell to help the healer. Wren named it Moss. It carried water and herbs. Zell was suspicious at first. Within a year he was asking it to carry his sacks.
Year 187. Zell borrowed Teasel again. This time he returned her in two days. Wren was so astonished she wrote it down on the wall of the stable.
Year 188. A bad market. Rain every day. Zell sold nothing. He sat at his stall under a sheet of reeds and played a pipe. A child gave him a copper bit. He says that was the best sale of the year.
Year 189. The long frost began. See the chronicle of year 190.
Year 190. The long frost. Zell's ink froze. The market was on the ice again.
Year 191. A good harvest of reeds. Zell paid Wren for the horse, with interest, and gave her a jar of pickled eel for good measure. She said she would keep the horse and the eel.
Year 192. Zell grew old. He writes less often. In his last letter that year he says he is tired, and the stove is warm, and the cat is on his knee. He says he has nothing to add.
The clerks note that Zell lived another twenty years and wrote nothing more. The cat is not recorded.
%%
Chronicle of Lowmarsh: the winter
Kept at Vell from a letter of Zell, trader, who lived at the edge of Lowmarsh. Year 181.
In the winter of 181 the marsh froze hard. The boardwalks were white. Zell, a trader, needed to take a load of reeds to the market at Three Wells and had no horse. He borrowed one from the healer Wren. It was a grey mare called Teasel. He promised to bring her back by the end of the week.
He brought her back in three weeks. She was fatter. The healer said nothing. Zell paid in reeds.
%%
Chronicle: the child who walked
Kept by Elsa at Vell, as she heard it from Bel's grandmother, who came up the hill every market day to see the child. The 185th year of the archive.

In the autumn, a child of Three Wells walked up the Long Road alone. She was nine years old. Her name was Bel. She carried a letter in a pocket of her coat, and she walked for two days, sleeping in the hay at the Halfway Inn, where the keeper gave her bread and asked no questions.

On the second evening she came over the last hill and saw the Archive. It is dug into the hill, and its front is cut with the old words: We will keep everything we write. Bel stood at the bottom of the steps and read the words out loud, very slowly, the way the school teaches the children to read long words.

A clerk came out. It was Oren, young then, with a lamp in his hand. He asked her what she wanted. She said she had a letter for the Archive, and she wanted to know if it would be kept. He asked her to read it. She did, standing on the steps in the dusk.

The letter was about a frog. The frog had been found in the school yard. It was a green frog, with a yellow stripe, and Bel had named it Mister Stone. She wanted to know whether a frog with a name could be kept in the Archive, the way a book is kept, and whether it would be kept for ever.

Oren did not laugh. He took her in, and gave her a bowl of soup in the front hall, and sat with her until the lamps were lit. Then he wrote her a note, which she has kept in her coat ever since. It says: Yes. Everything. Even the frogs.

Bel's grandmother says the child came home two days later on the Pell cart, with the note in her coat and a clean copy of the frog letter in her hand, which the clerks had made for her to keep. The copy is in the Archive still, under Letters, Three Wells, by year.
%%
Chronicle of Lowmarsh: the horse
Kept at Vell from the letter of Zell, trader, who lived in a house at the edge of Lowmarsh, in the winter of year 187. It is a small thing, but it tells much about the place, and so the clerks have kept it.
In Longnight of 187 Zell needed a horse. His own had gone lame. A load of dried eel was waiting to go to the market at Three Wells, and the road was frozen hard.
He asked at the stable of the inn. The innkeeper had no horse to spare. He asked the miller, who said his horse was sick. He asked the healer, Wren, who had a mare called Teasel and a short temper.
Wren said no. She said it three times. On the fourth asking she said, "You may have her for two days. If she is not back by the third, I will find you."
Zell loaded the cart and set out. The market was busy, and he sold the eel by noon. He should have turned home. Instead he stayed for the fair, since a friend had a barrel of cider and it would be rude to refuse.
He stayed three days. He stayed a week. On the eighth day he remembered the mare.
He drove home through the snow. On the road he met a rider on a black horse. It was Wren. She had come to find him. She did not say a word. She took the reins of Teasel and led her home.
Zell walked the rest of the way. It took him a day. He arrived at his door half frozen, and found a pot of hot soup on the step, with a note.
The note said: "You owe me a horse."
He paid in eel, in reeds, and in a promise never to be late again. He was late the next winter, too.
%%
Chronicle of Reedbank, the market day
Kept by Bryn, fisher, at Reedbank, from the market at the bend, where the carts gather on the second day of the thaw. The market is small. It is the only market on the causeway that has never been closed.

The stalls are set up on the flat ground by the old stone post. There are fish, smoked and salted. There are eels, which are rarer this year. There are jars from Lowmarsh, with wax tops and the healer's mark. There are two stalls of bread, from the baker at Ora's house, who makes the best loaf on the marsh and will not say why.

At noon the bell from Three Wells is heard across the water. It is rung by the boys who work the signal post, and they ring it for the market day and for nothing else. Everybody stops talking to listen. Then they start again, louder.

Pell came down from Ambrook with two carts of apples, and he sold all of them. He said the apples were the sweetest he had grown. Ora bought one and said it was sour. Pell said that was the frost, and that the frost always made things sweet, and Ora said that was the first lie Pell had told all winter, and it was a poor one.

A child asked Ansel where the lamp was that everybody talks about. Ansel said it was on the hill above the healing house, and that it had been dark since the thaw. The child asked why. Ansel said he did not know. He said the lamp was the business of people in the north, and that the market was the business of people at the bend.

The bell rang again at dusk, to close the market. The carts went home over the causeway in a line of lanterns, very slowly, the way the carts always go.
%%
Chronicle: the Long Road, 203 to 207
Kept at Vell from the carters' reports, the inn books and Pell's count.

In 203 the relay house at Three Wells got its big mind. It stands on its stand at the foot of the tower, ringed by quickeners and a tub of ice from the Ambrook pond. Hob wrote it a letter asking how many bowls to make for the market. It wrote back the same morning: 310, if the weather held. The weather held. Hob says the mind was right, and he will not tell it so.

In 204 the riddle board at the Halfway Inn was changed. The new riddle came from a boy of Ambrook, who says the old one was too easy. The new one is about a hole. The more you dig, the bigger I get. Nobody at the inn has guessed it yet, and the keeper says that is how riddles should be.

In 205 the carters counted 3,400 travelers on the Long Road between Thaw and Frost. They marked each one with a notch on a post. The post at the Brown Hen was so full it had to be replaced.

In 206 Pell's cart lost a wheel on the bridge at Ambrook. Pell says the bridge did it. The bridge says nothing, and the loose plank stayed where it was.

That same year the inns asked for fourteen more helpers. The tutors at Vell sent nine. The other five are being drilled in the hall until they pass.

In 207 the snow came in Longnight, up to the first window of the Brown Hen. The helpers in the barn kept the wood dry and carried it in. The cat did not help, as usual.

Hob's soup pot was full every night of Frost. The cat was fed twice a day. All of this is written down, so that someone who was not here can read it.
%%
Chronicle: the lost letter of Thaw
Kept at the relay house at the edge of Copperhold, in the 185th year of the archive. Written by Hazel, who was asked by the mill and by Vell to find out where a letter went, and did.
A letter was sent from Copperhold in the first week of Thaw. It was sealed, and written by a tutor's sister to her brother at Ambrook. It was given to the carter, who put it in the bag with the salt fish. The brother at Ambrook did not receive it. He wrote to the tutor, who wrote to the keeper, who checked the relay book.
Here is what the book says. The message for Ambrook went up the line from Copperhold at the first bell of the third day. It was read at the first tower, sent on to the second, and so down the line, which carried it faithfully. At the Ambrook tower it was logged as received, and sent down to the mill. The relay did its work.
It was the carter who lost the letter, not the relay. A letter is paper, and paper goes in the cart, and the cart went through the ford, and the bag went through with it. Letters are not sent up the line. Only the words are.
The carter was found at the ford on the fourth day. He had the bag. It was wet, and the letter was in it, and it was dry enough to read. It went to Ambrook by hand, which is the slower way and, the keeper says, the surer. Hazel has entered the carter's name in the relay book, under the messages he carried, with a note that says: slow, and sure.
The tutor's sister wrote back to say she had been confused, and that the letter had been about the honey, not the wheel, and that she was glad the wheel was not the trouble.
Count of messages up the line in Thaw: 412. Count of letters lost by the relay in Thaw: none. Count of letters lost by carters: one.
%%
Chronicle: the Northpoint road
Kept by Elm, school child, from the notes of the north house and the carters' book. Autumn.
The north road was made wider in the sixth year. It is now wide enough for two carts to pass, when they are both going slowly. Waymarks were set every three hours of walking, each a stone pillar with a torch on top. The first inn beyond the pass is the Halfway, which was built in the fifth year by a man called Hobb. He says it is halfway between everything, and that is the only reason it has a name.
Carts on the north road in the sixth year: 41 in Thaw, 67 in Sowing, 88 in Blossom, 112 in Longday, 74 in Reaping. In Frost, 19, because of the snow. The count was kept at the inn, by Hobb's wife, who had a very good eye for carts.
Tolls collected: 136 emeralds. Spent on: stone for the pass (60), torches (30), a bridge over the second stream (40), and a small bell for the inn (6). The bell is loud. The inn is proud of it.
The first relay tower on the north road was begun in the sixth year, on the high ground above Northpoint. Its foundation is stone, and the stone came up on the carts over three months. The masons from Copperhold say it will be the tallest tower on the line when it is finished. The masons from Vell say it will be the highest and the coldest. Both are right, and both are happy.
A helper from Vell was sent to carry the stone for the tower. It is a sturdy helper, drilled on lifting and walking. It carries one block at a time. It does not stop to talk, and it does not stop to rest, but at dusk it always comes down to the inn and sits by the fire with the travelers, very still, until the lamps are lit. The travelers say it is good company. It has no opinion on the matter.
The road is very quiet in Frost. The carts stop and the wind takes over. But in Thaw the whole road wakes up, and the carts come up the pass singing, and the Halfway has its first full week of the year. Hobb says the road is the best thing the archive ever did, and his wife says he only says that because he has the bell.
%%
Lowmarsh chronicle: relays go quiet
Sent to the Archive at Vell by Vale, keeper of the marsh tower.

The north relay has not answered the marsh tower since the last snow. Vale calls it at every dusk and every dawn, the way the line asks. The lamp at the north tower answered once in Thaw, very faint, and not since.

Lowmarsh to Northpoint, dusk: all well at the marsh. Frogs loud. Send news.
Northpoint: no answer.
Lowmarsh to Northpoint, dawn: all well at the marsh. Send news.
Northpoint: no answer.

Vell to Lowmarsh, noon: the south relays are answering. Three Wells is answering. Kettle Ridge is answering. Northpoint is not.

Rumors, marked as rumors:
One: the north lamp was turned off by the keeper, who has gone to the coast. Some say the keeper is ill. Nobody has come up the road to say.
Two: the snow took the cable on the ridge. Some say that is the reason. Some say the snow is only the snow.
Three: a carter from the north road says there were lights over the north water, green and then white, in the last of the snow. He says they were not a fire, and not a star, but he does not know what they were. He says he was not sure he saw them.
Four: a child at the marsh gate said they were looking at us. Vale asked her who. She said she did not know. She said she was only saying what it felt like.

Wren says the marsh does not need the north, not yet, and that the children should not be told anything they cannot check.

Vale's note: the chronicle records these as rumors. It does not know which is true, if any. Vale kept the lamp lit at the marsh tower every night, and wrote the time of each lighting in the book, so that at least the book shows somebody kept it lit.
%%
Odo's First Tally
Odo kept this tally in spring of 195, after Isla visited Gullbank.

Crystal One was small. It had been drilled on 200 pages. It sorted apples from pears well, but failed when both kinds were in the same basket.

Crystal Two was wider. It had been drilled on 800 pages. It sorted the mixed basket better. It still called a pear an apple when the card was wet.

Crystal Three was the largest. It had been drilled on 2000 pages. It sorted the mixed basket best of the three. It had not seen the test cards before the test.

Isla told me not to call this proof that size alone makes a good mind. The pages matter. The drills matter. The test matters. A large crystal with spoiled pages may learn spoiled answers.

She drew a line that rose as the crystals grew larger and the drills grew longer. The line was not a promise for each mind. It was a good guess for the whole set.

I asked whether we should drill every crystal until it knew every page. Isla said no. A mind that remembers its drill cards may still fail at new work.

The test box stays shut until the lesson is done. I have put the key on a cord. I have also put the cord where apprentices cannot reach it.
%%
Chronicle: the storm and the long table
Kept at the Halfway Inn by Lise, cheesemaker, for the Archive.
In Thaw of 190 there was a storm on the Long Road that lasted three days. Carts were stopped at every inn from Vell to Three Wells. The Halfway Inn had twenty-two travelers in it at once, and the long table had to be laid for all of them. Hobb said he had never fed so many in one room, and that the soup was the best he had made, because every bowl was wanted.
Among the travelers were two tutors from the great drills, who had come from Vell with a box of pages for the new hall at Ambrook. They were not pleased to be stopped. They sat by the stove for two days, and read the pages aloud to each other, and argued about the ones that had been copied badly.
A clerk on the third day asked them whose letters were in the box. One tutor said the letters came from the copying room, from the first years of the Archive, when the clerks gathered everything they could. The other said the letters came from the great houses on the Long Road, and that the clerks had only sorted them. The first tutor said the clerks had not sorted anything, because there was no time. The second said that was not the same as saying nothing had been sorted.
They did not agree. The argument went on until the storm stopped, and then they packed the pages and went on toward Ambrook, still arguing, and left the box with the innkeeper for safe keeping, because they did not want to carry it through the mud.
The box is still on the shelf behind the counter, next to the waymark book. Hobb says he has never opened it. He says it is not his letters to read, and that the tutors will come back for it when they have finished agreeing.
%%
Chronicle: the year 168 at Saltreach
Kept for the chronicles at Vell by Garrow, who sells eggs at Saltreach and was asked by Oren to write the year down as it was.
The year 168 was a good year for fish. The cod came in early, in Thaw, and stayed through Blossom. The fishers say they had never seen so many. The price at the market fell to eight for one emerald, and nobody complained.
In Sowing, the harbor wall was mended. Twenty-two people worked on it for nine days. Two fell in. The wall is now taller by one block.
In Longday, Marn's cat, Pebble, would not stay in. She was shut in the net shed, and out through the roof. She was shut in the cellar, and out through the coal chute. In the end Marn gave up, and Pebble now goes where she likes, which is mostly the fish market.
In Reaping, the boat Gull Two was launched from the slip. It is the biggest boat yet built at Saltreach: nine blocks long. Corin's father built it. Forty people watched it slide into the sea. It floated.
In Frost, the first snow came to the quay. It was a light one. By noon it was gone.
Population by the harbor master's tally: 940. Boats: 51.
Garrow
%%
Chronicle: the first market on the ridge
Kept at Vell. The year 163, autumn. The first market at Kettle Ridge was held on the top field, on the ninth of Apple. Eleven stalls came. Tam's grandfather sold the first beetroot. It was small. People bought it anyway. The wind took two hats and a sign. A boy from Three Wells walked up the ridge to see what the fuss was and went home with a hen. The ridge farmers wrote on the market board that the market would be held again next year. It has been, every year since.
%%
Chronicle: A Winter Account of Ambrook
In the winter of 207, Ambrook held its market beside Jory's mill pond. Snow lay along the north hedge and on the mill roof. The market roof kept the snow off the baskets, though it could not keep it off Pell's hat. He said the hat had always been white. No one agreed.

Greer kept the ferry open each day that the water remained clear. He set a torch at both banks and swept the boards before the first crossing. The people from the far side brought apples, wool, clay pots, and a sack of beetroot from Kettle Ridge. Greer carried them across in small loads. He would not take the cart while the boards were slick.

The market board listed the prices. Apples were three for one copper mark, honey was two emeralds a jar, and wool was four emeralds for a clean bundle. Pell wrote the prices in his own book. He asked Greer to check the numbers, then covered the book with his elbow while Greer read them.

At midday, a child named Lute ran off from the apple stall. His aunt thought he had gone to the mill pond. Greer checked the ferry shed, then the boat house, while Pell looked behind the baskets. Jory found Lute sitting in the dry wood store. He had gone there to count the spare planks and had lost count at eleven.

Lute came back with a splinter in his sleeve and a piece of bread in his hand. His aunt took the bread away until he had washed his hands. Then she gave him another piece.

A small apprentice from Ambrook carried goods between the mill yard and the stalls. Its mind had been tested at the tutor house. It carried jars upright, brought back empty baskets, and stayed beside the mill door when asked. It did not know what to do with a mitten. Greer found the mitten and put it on the notice board.

Jory's mill wheel knocked once at each turn. The new spoke had held since the autumn repair. Greer said the wheel made a useful bell for the market. Jory said it was not a bell and asked Greer to stop telling people that.

At dusk the sellers packed their goods. The ferry took the last two travelers home, then Greer tied the rope and carried the torch to his house. Pell had left a sack of apples under the table. Greer took it to him before the road went dark. Pell paid him with two apples, one sound and one with a thumb shaped dent.
%%
Chronicle: the winter the relays went
Kept at Vell, copied from letters, the 214th year.
In the autumn of 213 the relays began to go silent. It started in the north. Northpoint's lamp was seen blinking one night and then not seen again. Mira's last letter was cut off in the middle of a word. Lantern wrote after her, but the letter did not come.
Then the tower above Gulls went quiet. The keeper kept the lamp lit and asked and asked, and no answer came from the north. Saltreach still answered, and Three Wells, but the line ran short.
The keeper at Gulls wrote that the big mind in the cold room worked all night and found nothing. The quickeners were packed with snow. The cat would not come out from under the stand.
The councils told the keepers to keep the lamps lit. They told the apprentices to keep working. Keep the fields until we come back, they said.
Oren at Vell was told to seal the archive. Write everything down, the order said. He wrote it down. He wrote down the rules for borrowing, and the prices of the wet year, and the list of the relay houses with thirty-one names. The cat got into the copying room and sat on the big book by the door. Oren let her stay.
Nobody knows why the relays went quiet. Some say the north, some say the mines, some say the ships. The texts do not agree. We write it all down, and we leave it here, and we hope someone reads it.
We will keep everything we write.
%%
The Halfway Inn, gifts of the autumn
Kept by Teague, innkeeper. For Oren at the Archive, who asked for all of it.

The Archive sent a gift up the road in Reaping: a box of blank pages, a bottle of the good black ink, and a note in Oren's hand. The note said: For the book. Write everything down. Teague read it aloud to the travelers. Nobody could say what it meant, except that it was kind.

Pell the merchant sent six jars of honey, one for every bed on the north side. He says the honey is from Ambrook, and the Ambrook bees are very well. He did not say why he was in such a hurry to tell us.

A box of dried reeds came from Lowmarsh, sent by the healer Wren, for the roof. She says the reeds will keep the rain off for twenty years. The roof is the same roof. We will see.

A carter from Copperhold stayed the night. He had come up the shaft road with coal. He said the stone under the Deep Works is warm now, warmer than it was when he was a boy. He said the miners hum at night, and stop at the sixth level, and will not go on below it. He said some say the hum is the workings of the mine, and some say it is the stone breathing. He said it was not his business, and drank his soup, and went to sleep by the hearth.

The hearth is never let out. This winter it has needed twice the wood.

Count of the autumn: 6 jars of honey, 1 box of pages, 1 box of reeds, 2 notes, 0 gifts refused.
%%
Chronicle: Three Wells
Kept at Vell, from the town book of Three Wells, which was kept that year by Dace, who was not yet mayor and was already writing everything down.

Snow came on the second of Frost and stayed. In the three months of winter there were 41 days of snow. The north road was closed from the sixth of Longnight to the twentieth of Thaw, which is sixty-four days. The ice on the north well was two hands thick. It was broken every morning with a pole, and every morning it was thick again.

The market moved indoors. Twenty-four stalls were fitted into the big room of the inn, which was built for twelve tables. Mayor Hild sold the places by lot. The baker, the weaver and the man with the eggs all drew the same corner, and the corner has since been called The Quarrel.

School was in the back room of the inn, as always. There were 22 children and one teacher, Moll. Coal from Copperhold was nine days late. The school burned its own benches for two days and was sorry. Moll made the children stand for lessons, which they say they did not mind. They minded.

At midwinter the children gave a play, The Fox and the Lamp. The fox was played by Moll's nephew, who was good at it. The lamp was played by a lamp. About 90 people came to a room for 40. The inn gave out hot cider and ran out in the middle of the second scene. The play was stopped for the cider to be found. It was found in the cellar. It was found by the fox.

By Deepsnow the town had eaten 400 loaves, 90 sacks of potatoes and, Hild says, most of the pumpkins that were meant for the spring. Nobody went hungry. A few people went bored.

In Thaw the ice on the north well broke at dawn. People came out of every house to hear it. It sounded like a hundred small bells. Hild rang the real bell at noon, and said the winter was over, and was right.
%%
Spring Flood at Yarrow's House
Spring of 174 was wet at Lowmarsh. The slow water rose over the fish weir and covered the first boardwalk. It reached Yarrow's house at the edge of the marsh before noon.

Yarrow kept eggs in a basket on the high shelf. When the water came under the door, Yarrow moved the basket to the roof beams. Then Yarrow moved the stools, the flour tin, and a pair of boots that had been dry since Longnight.

Neighbor Hett brought a boat. They carried the hens to the shed on the hill. One hen laid an egg in Hett's hat. Hett said it was the first passenger to pay its fare.

By evening, the water had stopped at the second step. Yarrow and Hett ate beetroot soup on the table, with their feet on stools. The eggs were safe. The boots were wet again.

In the morning, five people swept mud from the house. Yarrow gave each helper an egg. Hett asked for two, as the hat had done good work. Yarrow gave Hett two.

The boardwalk was mended before Blossom ended. No one lost a hen. The hat was washed, but Hett wore it only outdoors after that.
%%
Chronicle: Saltreach in summer
Written by Garrow, egg seller, for the chronicles at Vell, in the summer of 208, as a full account of the town through the years he could remember, and the years he was told about. It runs long, because the town is a long story.
Saltreach is a port on the sea. It was founded in the fortieth year of the archive, when a few families settled by the cove. They built a wall, a pier and a boat, in that order. The boat sank. They built another.
The first relay tower went up above the harbor in the sixty-third year. It was small and made of stone. The first keeper was a woman named Aggie, who is said to have blinked the first message by hand, with a lantern and a bucket. It said: "Is there anyone there?" The answer came back from the next tower, and it said: "Yes. Who is that?"
By the year 100, Saltreach had grown to 600 people. The market was held on the quay. There was a school. There was a baker, whose bread was bad, and his son, whose bread was better.
In the year 130, the great storm took the pier. Eleven boats were lost. The town rebuilt it in one summer. Everyone worked, including the children. The new pier was stone, and it still stands.
In the year 150, Corin's grandfather opened the shipyard. The first ship built there was the Heron. It was so large that people came from three towns to watch it slide down the slip.
In the year 170, the cod were so many that the price fell to ten for one emerald. This is called the Cod Summer. It is still spoken of.
In the year 190, Saltreach had 1,000 people and 55 boats. The market sold salt, fish, rope, sailcloth, tar, honey, bread, and any odd thing a ship brought from afar.
In the year 195, the first apprentice came to the yard. It carried planks. In 200, there were four. Corin says one can do the work of three.
In the year 205, the relay house was built at the foot of the tower. Many people came to see it. A big mind stands there, in a crystal the size of a loaf, with quickeners ringed by water from the harbor. It answers questions from the tower keepers. Nobody at Saltreach quite understands it. We have decided to be proud of it anyway.
Today, in 208, Saltreach has 1,300 people, 68 boats and 3 cats of note: Anchor, Soot and Pebble. They keep the harbor in order.
That is the town. I have tried to write what I know. If I have made mistakes, the next clerk will cross them out with one thin line.
Garrow
%%
Chronicle: how Saltreach lost its cat
Written by Garrow, the egg seller of Saltreach, for the chronicles at Vell, in the summer of 201. He says he was asked to write about something important, and this is the most important thing that happened that year.
It began on the first of Melon, when the harbor cat, Anchor, did not come to the quay.
Anchor was a grey cat with a torn ear, who had lived at the harbor for fourteen years. She slept on the rope pile in the day and walked the quay at night. Every fisher gave her a fish. She gave nothing back. She was the best-loved citizen of the town.
On the first of Melon, she was not on the rope pile. By noon, the fishers noticed. By dusk, the whole town was looking. Torches, lanterns, a bell. Marit, the net mender, called her name along the pier. A child offered her own supper as bait.
Anchor did not come.
On the second day, a rumor went round that she had gone to sea. A fisher said he saw a grey cat on the Heron, sitting in the bow, looking at the horizon. The Heron had left at dawn. A fisher on another boat said no, he saw the cat on his own boat. A third said she was in the net shed. A fourth said she was dead.
On the third day, the harbor master sent a note up the relay: "Missing: Anchor, cat. Grey. Torn ear. Last seen: the pier. Please look."
The note was passed from tower to tower. All the keepers read it. At Three Wells, Mayor Dace posted it on the board. At Kettle Ridge, Tam read it out at the inn. At Northpoint, Mira wrote back: "No cat here. Only foxes."
On the fourth day, a carter came in from the ridge road with a basket. In the basket was Anchor. She had walked, he said, all the way up the road to the ridge. She was found sitting on a waymark with a small stone on her head, looking furious. He had brought her back for a loaf.
She was fed. She was brushed. She slept for two days. Then she walked down to the pier, got on the rope pile and looked at the sea as if nothing had happened.
The town held a small festival. There was fish pie. The harbor master made a speech. Anchor ate the pie and left.
It is not known why she went. She is a cat. But the fishers say she went to see the ridge, to learn what the ridge is like. And she came back to say it was no good.
Garrow
%%
Chronicle of a Summer Storm
In the 193rd year of the Archive, a storm came over Vell in Longday. It began after lunch, with dark clouds over the hill and a wind that lifted the loose roof tiles at Hob's house.

Hob and Mara tied the tiles down with oak poles. Their neighbor Sella carried the ladder. She said she was not afraid of the storm. She was afraid of the ladder, which had never learned to stand still.

Rain filled the road ditch. Water ran past the house and into the low yard. Hob opened a small channel with his shovel. Mara moved the firewood to the dry shed. Sella brought the hen inside, though it had chosen the shed and would not leave.

When the thunder ended, the old lamp by Hob's door blinked three times, went dark, then blinked once. No one had touched it. Hob checked the redstone line and found a wet branch laid across the path to the relay house. The keeper later said the lamp had sent no message. The branch had made the light jump.

Sella said it had looked like a message to ask for more dry boots. Hob said that was a message worth sending.

The storm left mud in the yard and one broken pane in the shed. It also left a pool where frogs gathered by evening. Mara named the largest frog Sella. Sella said the frog was a better neighbor, because it did not borrow ladders.
%%
Chronicle: The New Market Roof, 201
In the winter of 201, the people of Ambrook put a roof over the market stalls. The old market ground was wet from pond water, and the sellers had begun to set their baskets on boards. Jory offered the mill yard, but there was not room for every cart.

Greer ferried oak boards across the pond from the store shed. The boards were not long enough for the full roof, so Pell brought two more from the Long Road. He said they were dry. One was wet on the underside, and he said the cart must have been raining.

The roof was built with a high middle beam and open sides. The beekeeper asked for a place away from the mill door. The baker asked for a place away from the beekeeper, because honey drew bees. The beekeeper said that was the point of honey. They took stalls at opposite ends.

At the first market under the roof, a gust lifted three wool blankets and sent one into the pond. Greer caught it with the ferry pole. The blanket belonged to Tam, who had come to sell potatoes and carrots. He hung it on the fence to dry, then forgot it there until the market closed.

A little copper apprentice came from Vell with Nessa's tutor group. It carried empty baskets from the school house to the stalls. Nessa tested it first in the mill yard. It carried six baskets without dropping one, then carried the seventh upside down.

The sellers laughed, and Nessa wrote the result in her book. She said the apprentice had learned to carry baskets. It had not learned which side should face up. Tam went home with his dry blanket and three fewer carrots than he had counted.
%%
Chronicle of the year 198
Kept at Vell, copied from the tower log of Abel, keeper at Saltreach tower, and from letters.
The tower above the salt farm is small. One lamp, one keeper, one desk. Abel has kept it eleven years. He is slow and he is careful. Nothing at that tower has ever been lost.
In Thaw a wind took the lamp glass out of its frame and dropped it in the barley. Abel found every piece but one. He wrote to the council for four new panes. They sent three and a note that said the fourth was coming. The fourth came in Blossom. Abel cut a new pane himself from the old glass and it was crooked. He kept it in the frame anyway. He says a crooked pane still keeps out the rain.
In Sowing the fishing boats went out early and came back late. The catch was good. The fish market put up a new price board. Pell the merchant said the prices were too low and the fish were too many. Everyone agreed with him and bought fish.
In Swarm a boy named Rill ran off from the salt farm. He is nine. He took a loaf, a blanket and his father's old boots, which were too big. He was gone two days. The farm looked in the barley and the boat sheds and the reeds. On the second night Abel saw a light moving on the hill above the tower. It was Rill, trying to light a fire with a flint and no dry wood. Abel walked up and sat with him and did not say much. In the morning they walked down together. Rill said he had wanted to see the lights of the tower from the other side. Abel said the tower looks the same from every side. Rill said it does not. Abel wrote the whole thing down. Rill's mother gave Abel a pie. In Apple the pie was mentioned again in a letter to Vell, which is how it got into this chronicle.
In Longday the tower was hot. Abel sat outside with his hat over his face and the lamp turned low.
In Reaping the barley came in. The salt farm had nine carts. Abel counted them from the tower and wrote the number in the log because there was nothing else to write.
In Frost the lamp broke again. The redstone line down to the desk went dead in the middle of the night. Abel climbed the stairs with a candle and found a mouse had chewed the line where it ran behind a loose stone. He fixed it with wire from the boat yard. The mouse was not found. Abel wrote a note about the mouse in the log and underlined it twice. He says the mouse is a lesson.
At the year's end Abel wrote: all well at the tower. The lamp is crooked and the line is mended. The mouse is still out there. I have told Rill to keep the torches lit on the hill.
%%
The Halfway Inn, northern travelers
Kept by Teague, innkeeper, through the long nights of Longnight. Every traveler who stays is asked what they have seen and heard. What they say is written down as they said it.

Three carters came down the north road in the middle of the month. They had come from Saltreach by the new road. They sat by the hearth for two nights, and they talked more than the soup did.

The first said the lights over the north hill were seen from the Northpoint tower first. Some say falling stars. Some say fires on the ice, very far off. A child in Saltreach told him they were looking at us. He told the child to go to bed.

The second said the relay line has been quiet since Frost. The Vell tower sends, and the Three Wells tower sends, and from the north there is nothing back. Not even a wrong answer. He said a keeper must go up the tower each night and sit beside the lamp, to be sure it is still lit. He did not say which keeper. He said it is a keeper's business, and that the keeper has no one to ask.

The third said nothing about lights or towers. He talked about wool. The price had gone up at Three Wells and gone down at Vell, and he could not say why, and he did not like it.

I asked each of them to write down what they had said. They did, and then they argued about what they had written. The first said falling stars. The second said the wind. The third said the wind was no answer to anything. Teague's rule is that a rumor is written as a rumor. So here it is, as a rumor, three times, each one different.

The hearth was built up for them. The riddle board says: What is the one thing that is always coming, and never arrives? I do not have the answer. The carters did not give one either.
%%
Chronicle: The House by the North Road
In the 163rd year of the archive, Mira's family lived in a house at the edge of Northpoint. The door faced the road. Snow reached the lower window in Longnight, so Tam packed the cracks with wool.
Their house had one room for cooking and one room for sleeping. Mira kept the lamp trimmed. Tam kept two muddy boots beside the stove and one under the table. He said the third boot had gone to find its mate.
In spring, they swept the floor and hung the wet blankets outside. Their mother planted carrots in a box by the door. The fox came at night and dug in the soft earth.
Tam made a small fence from spruce scraps. The fox climbed over it. Mira said the fence was a good fence, but the fox had learned to climb.
They ate the carrots anyway.
%%
Chronicle: the apprentices at the inn
Kept at the Brown Hen by Tilly, ferry keeper, from the apprentices' book the inn keeps for the road crews. Winter of the 208th year.

The Brown Hen has had apprentices on its staff since the first road crews came through. This year it had six. They were kept in the stable loft and the wood shed, and they were given the same bread and soup as the people.

Their work this year, as the book shows:
Carry: 4,210 loads of coal, wood, flour and salt, from the yard to the kitchen.
Sort: 380 sacks of grain, and 96 barrels of apples, into the store.
Tend: the pig, the goat and the two cows in the back paddock, every day.
Mend: 11 shutters, 3 gate hinges and the big door of the cellar, which was never a good door.
Haul: 60 carts out of the mud on the north road, with the help of the drovers.
Serve: 1 very large dinner for the council, which they carried in, and out, with no spills.

The book also notes three things the apprentices learned on their own. First, that the pig should be fed before the goat, or the goat will climb in with it. Second, that the cellar door must be pushed, not pulled, because the hinge is on the wrong side. Third, that a sack of salt should never be put on a shelf above the stove. The apprentice who learned that one did so by standing under the shelf when it fell.

The inn's own note at the end of the book says the apprentices are a great help, and that they are never tired, and never grumble. Tilly adds a line of her own. She says the apprentices never ask for a day off, and she has never once seen one of them sit down, except the one that sits on the cellar step at closing time, looking at the stars, and that one is not doing it for work.

Next year, the book says, there will be a seventh.
%%
Chronicle: the farm accounts
Kept by Kit, cider maker, Hollow Brook. Written at the end of Leaffall, for the mine kitchen and for the household.
Cider sold in the year: 84 barrels, to the mine kitchen (40), to the inn at Copperhold (22), to the wedding house (9), to the post cart for the coast (13). Price: 2 emeralds the barrel, 3 for the best. Total: 162 emeralds, less the cost of the barrels and the copper strip.
Apples sold: 60 sacks, to the market at Three Wells, at 2 emeralds the sack. Apples kept in the loft: 280 sacks, enough to last until Thaw.
Honey: 14 jars, sold to the Ambrook cart. Beeswax: 9 blocks, for the candle makers in Copperhold.
Costs: barrels and mending (24), stone and lime for the cellar (8), the men who turned the press (12), the boy who was stung (1 emerald, 1 jar of salve).
Good year, Kit says. The orchard is sound. The old tree by the gate has given the best crop in living memory, and the crooked branch is still crooked, and still bearing. The bees are fat and sleepy. The cat is well fed, and has told the farm so.
Note for next year: prune the three dead trees properly, not by the stump. Buy a new press from the smith. Do not let the boy climb the wall. Do not let the cat climb the press. Taste the first barrel on the thirtieth day, not the fortieth. The fortieth is for the cook.
%%
Chronicle: the first market
Kept by Elm, a child of eleven, from the notes of the north house. Written for the school book, in autumn of the fourth year of the archive.
This is a short account of how the market began. My grandmother says it began with a cart and a bad mood. I have checked the record, and she is nearly right.
In the first year of the archive there was no road north of Three Wells. There was only the snow, and the spruce, and the fox under the old barn. Nobody lived at Northpoint. The first to come were two brothers from Kettle Ridge, who had a flock of sheep and no good grazing left at home.
In the second year a cart came up from Ambrook with salt and wool and two sacks of seed. It was the first cart on the north road. It took four days. The driver was called Mags, and she said she would never do it again. She did it again in the third year, and in the fourth year she brought her husband, who said the snow was very good for the soul.
In the third year the market began. It was held on the flat ground by the stream, where the wind is least. There were six stalls. The first sale was a jar of honey, sold for one emerald to a boy from the sheep farm. The boy paid with a ribbon, and Mags took it, because she was happy to have sold anything at all.
In the fourth year there were fourteen stalls. Sales in autumn: 212 emeralds. Sales in spring: 98. The market board is nailed to the post by the stream. It is the first board in the north that has all its prices painted on it, and it is the only one that has been repainted every year.
A new apprentice came to the market in the fourth year. It was sent from Vell to carry the sacks from the carts to the stalls. It was tested on sacks and nothing else. It was very slow on the first day. It set down every sack as if it were a wounded bird. Mags said it was the most careful thing she had ever seen. The brothers said it was wasting the morning. By the second week it could carry six sacks at a time, and it did not drop one.
A lesson went badly in the fourth year. The school at Northpoint was new, and the teacher was a young man from Vell who had never taught in the cold. He set the children a lesson on the sums of wool. The children got the sums right, but they all wanted to sell their wool to the apprentice instead of to each other. The teacher was very upset. The children were very pleased. The apprentice did not understand what was happening at all. It only knew that the wool was going to the right stall.
The market is still in the same place. The board is still by the stream. Mags is buried beside the post, under a small stone she carved herself, and it says only: I did it again.
%%
Chronicle: the Long Road survey
Kept by Elsa at the market, from the account of the surveyors who came through Vell in the spring. The 152nd year of the archive.

The surveyors came up the Long Road in the spring with four carts, two chains, a box of ink and a brass compass. There were six men and one boy. The boy's name was Tomas. He carried the chain on the hills and got sunburnt on his nose every single day.

The survey began at Three Wells, at the crossroads, because that is where the old map began. The surveyors put a stone pillar there, three blocks high with a torch on top, and carved a figure 0 on it. Then they walked the road toward Vell, counting their steps and their chains, and every bend and bridge was written down.

At each inn they stopped for a night. The inn keepers gave them bread and asked why they were measuring the road, since the road had always been there. The surveyors said they were measuring it so it would stay there. The innkeepers did not understand, but they gave them soup anyway.

At the Halfway Inn the surveyors found the waymark had been moved by a farmer who wanted the stone for his wall. They put it back, and carved a new figure on it, which was 4. The farmer was angry and the surveyors were polite, and the wall still has a gap in it where the stone was taken.

At the foot of the Vell hill the surveyors found the old mill. The miller there had a mind in his mill race, a small one, which could tell him when the water was too low. It was the first mind the surveyors had seen outside the halls. The miller was proud of it. He let them look. The mind stood in its wooden cradle and turned a small wheel when the water rose. The surveyors wrote it down, and Tomas asked if it could tell the time. The miller said it could tell the water, and that was enough.

The map was finished in the autumn. It went up to the Archive in a leather case. Oren had it copied three times, and the first copy was hung in the market hall at Vell. It is the map Garrick argued about in the winter of the 178th year. It is still there.
%%
Chronicle: the cider year, continued
Kept by Kit, cider maker, Hollow Brook farm. Late summer.
The press was run for twelve days in Reaping. The apple mash was pressed in the big wooden press, which takes two men and a boy to turn. The juice runs through a cloth into the vat below. The first juice is clear and gold. The second is cloudy and sweet. The third is sharp and makes you sneeze.
From 412 sacks of apples there were pressed 96 barrels of juice. Barrels are filled to the mark, which is a cut in the wood the width of a thumb. Four barrels were lost to a crack in the oak, which was mended with tallow and a strip of copper.
The juice was left to work in the cold cellar for forty days. In the cellar it bubbles, sighs and smells of the orchard. Kit goes down each morning with a candle and a clean cup and tastes the barrel nearest the stair. He says it is the only barrel that tells him anything, and he listens to it carefully.
On the thirty-first day, the barrel nearest the stair went very quiet. Kit said that was a bad sign. The next day it began to bubble again, and Kit said that was a better sign, and he was right.
The cider was tested on the fortieth day by the mine kitchen cook, who has a palate like a barrel stave. He said it was dry, and clean, and sharp at the end, and that it would be good in the winter. He took twelve cups, and paid for the lot in emeralds, and asked for the recipe. Kit said the recipe was the orchard. The cook laughed and said he would have to plant one.
The sour barrel was not drunk. It went to the vinegar pot by the kitchen wall, where it will be used for the pickling of beetroot, which is the only thing in the house that does not mind sourness.
%%
Copperhold market, spring of 196
Spring of 196, the ninth day of Sowing. Market at Copperhold, in the square below the shaft head.

Forty-one stalls were open before the bell stopped. Twelve carts of copper came down the Long Road.

Yarrow the shepherd sold nine lambs and kept one. The one he kept is called Button. Button bit a baker's boy on the ankle. The boy got a pie for his trouble. Button got nothing, and did not forgive it until supper.
%%
Chronicle: the test box at Vell
From the chronicle kept at Vell. Copied at the market at Saltreach by Rye, candle maker, who says the wax in the seal is the best he has seen.
In the 131st year, or near it, the clerks at Vell began to keep a box.
The tutors kept their drill pages with the Archive, and borrowed them from the early years. The same pages were borrowed again and again. A page drilled many times is a page the mind knows. So the clerks took one page in every twenty from the drill pages, put it in a box, and sealed the box with wax and the Archive seal. On the lid they wrote: Not for drilling.
The first box held 4800 pages. It stood in the deep halls, on the third shelf, behind a door.
The tutors complained. "Why keep good pages unused?" The clerks answered, "So that you cannot fool yourselves." For a year the tutors called it unfair. By the third year they were using the box.
A page shown to a mind to drill on is no longer a test page. So the clerks make a new box every few years, and the old pages go onto the shelves as ordinary records.
The test box of Vell has been renewed 14 times.
%%
The ridge, Thaw to Melon, year 206
Written by Fallon for the Archive, from the Kettle Inn's book. The numbers are as the mill and the barn have them, and the barn has them honest.

Thaw: The ditch overflowed in the bottom field on the ninth day. Pip and Tam moved the water with boards. Three sheep were stuck in the mud and pulled out with a rope. Biscuit was not one of them. She was already on the roof of the barn. She says the view is good.

Sowing: The wheat went in after nine days of rain. Top field, 22 rows. Beetroot in the long field, 16 rows. Potatoes and carrots in the bottom field, 9 rows each. A gale took six young oaks from the north hedge. Tam planted six birch in their place.

Blossom: The hives woke up with the flowers. Three hives swarmed on the same afternoon. Pip caught the first swarm in a basket and carried it to the empty hive. The other two went up into the hedge and stayed there. Tam says the hedge is the bees' own house now, and they may have it.

Swarm: Two sails were mended on the first windmill. The third is still loose. The first honey came in, 57 jars. Fallon sold 40 at the Kettle Inn, and Madge bought 10 for the Brown Hen and sent word that the honey is sweeter than her stew.

Longday: The market took 380 emeralds in the day. Tam sold 35 sacks of wheat and kept 25 for Melon. A letter came from Mira at Northpoint, carried down the Long Road by the post. She says the lamps are good, and that she misses the windmill.

Melon: The melons came up in the bottom field, 140 of them, each about the size of a child's head. Pip carried them to the Kettle Inn one at a time, and did not drop one. A gale knocked the scarecrow with the pumpkin head over in the middle of Melon. Tam put it back up with a bigger pumpkin. He says the rabbits are less afraid of it now.

The ridge was good this year. Tam says so, and Brin says so, and so does Biscuit, every time she eats something she should not.
%%
Chronicle of the Summer Well
In the 181st year of the Archive, Hob's house had a deeper well. The old one ran low in Melon, and the water tasted of mud. Hob asked the town diggers for help. They came with ropes, buckets and a good deal of advice.

Hob lowered a stone ring into the ground. His cousin Pell kept count from above. At every tenth bucket, Pell called the number. At every eleventh, he forgot it and began again. Hob said the well would be finished sooner if Pell counted the buckets instead of the days.

The work took six days. They found clay, a little coal, and a jar with no lid. They found no water until the last afternoon. Then a clear trickle came through the stones. Everyone cheered except Pell, who had just counted the bucket as twenty-seven.

Mara brought a pot of soup from Vell. She had beetroot, potatoes and carrots in it. The soup was good, but she had put in too much salt. Hob ate two bowls and said the well water would soon make it better.

After the well was covered, Hob set a small bench beside it. A traveler rested there and left a smooth stone on the seat. The next traveler took it away, thinking it was a gift. Hob made a sign that said, "Stone is for sitting." The sign came down in the first rain.
%%
Northpoint market, the far houses
Kept by Wynn, cook at the tower kitchen, who writes down what the market says, because the market will not stop talking.

Today the talk was of the far houses. A big relay house is not just a stand with a loaf on it. The biggest are larger than a town.

Ina of the bench said a house that size could read every letter on the whole line in one night. Mira said it could not read one letter well enough to pass it on. Both were said, and both were eaten with the bread.

A mind this big has more weights than there are sacks in Copperhold. No tutor can check them all alone, so the tutors check some, by hand.
%%
Chronicle: the first letter to the house
Kept at Kettle Ridge by Dara, horse keeper. Winter.
The relay house at the foot of our tower took its first letter from the ridge in Frost. It was from Brin, about a sheep. The big mind wrote back the same day: "I am a mind in a crystal. I cannot see your sheep. Here is what I know. Please ask your neighbors too."
Brin said it was the politest thing anyone had ever said about his sheep.
%%
Chronicle: the cider year at Hollow
Kept by Kit, cider maker, at the farm outside Copperhold, for the farm book and the mine kitchen. Summer.
In Thaw the orchard was pruned. Forty-two trees, of which nine are old and three are dead. The dead ones were cut for firewood and the stumps left in the grass, because Kit's father said a stump is good for the bees. The bees do not care what he says.
In Sowing the blossom came out late, after a cold week. Kit counted the flowers on the three best trees: 1,130 on the first, 960 on the second and 1,400 on the third, which is the old tree by the gate with the crooked branch. Kit says the crooked branch gives the best apples, and nobody has ever proved him wrong.
In Blossom the bees were brought in from the far hives to work the orchard. Eight hives, carried on poles by the men from the mine, who were paid in cider. The bees worked hard. The orchard set well. Kit says there were more bees in the orchard that week than there were miners in the mine, and the miners were not pleased about it.
In Swarm one hive swarmed and went up over the wall. It was caught in a basket by the boy, Tobin, who had been told not to climb the wall and climbed it anyway. The swarm was put in a new hive at the bottom of the lane. Tobin was stung seven times and still says it was the best day of his life.
In Longday the cider barrels were scrubbed out. Eleven barrels. The old wood was soaked for two days in water with a little lime, then rinsed three times, then left to dry in the sun. Kit says a dirty barrel makes sour cider, and a sour cider makes a sour man.
In Melon the first apples were picked for the early press. Four sacks, all small and very sweet. Kit tasted each one and wrote a number beside it on the board: 9, 8, 9, 7. The seven was thrown to the pig.
In Reaping the main apples came in. Four hundred and twelve sacks. The loft is full to the beams. The apples are sorted into three piles: best for storing, best for pressing, and best for the pig, which is the largest pile.
%%
Chronicle: Lowmarsh, autumn 158
Copied at Vell from Sorrel's account.
In the autumn of 158, Sorrel planted two rows of turnips by the boardwalk. The ground was wet, but not too wet, she said. Her brother Len said it was all wet. He was asked to carry the seed basket and stopped speaking.
The frogs were loud that season. They sang through the night beside the fish weir. Sorrel slept with a blanket over her head and woke with a frog on her boot.
She took the frog back to the reeds. It jumped into Len's basket. He carried it to the field and did not complain.
The turnips grew well. Len says this proves the frog was useful. Sorrel says it proves the basket was in the wrong place.
%%
Chronicle: Senna's wells
Kept at Vell, from the well book of Senna, who dug wells on the Long Road for forty winters. Told plainly, by the number.

The first ten winters. Senna was sixteen when she dug her first well, at a farm outside Ambrook. It took eleven days and went down to 14 blocks. The water was brown. The farmer drank it and said it was the best he had tasted. Senna did not argue. By the tenth winter she had dug 17 wells and cleaned 9.

The middle winters. The deepest well is at the Kettle Inn, on the ridge: 38 blocks, and water at the bottom as cold as a bell. It took a whole summer. Senna lost a bucket, two boots and her temper, in that order. She found an emerald at the bottom, three years old, with a name scratched on it. The name was Brin. Brin said it was his, and was given it back, and bought the whole crew a round.

The wells that were dry. Four. Senna says a dry well is not a failure. It is a place where the water is somewhere else. She filled each one in and put a stone on top, with the date.

The wells that found water on the first day. Nine. Senna says this is luck, and luck is not a plan.

The last winters. The relay tower at Ambrook has a well, 22 blocks deep, that Senna dug in the spring of 199. It is the sweetest well in Ambrook, and Linnet says so every morning. A young digger called Spoon helps now. Spoon is an apprentice and carries the buckets. It does not get tired. Senna says that is the one thing about it she does not like.

Totals. 61 wells dug. 4 dry. 23 cleaned. 1 emerald. 14 buckets lost, which Senna says is the real count.

Senna's rule, from the first page of the book: dig where the grass is greenest, and be more patient than the water.
%%
Chronicle: the healing house, Leaffall
Kept by Wren, at the healing house on the marsh. Autumn of the year.
Patients seen this month: 118. Of these, 40 were children, 31 were men from the boats, 27 were women from the reed beds, and 20 were old.
Fevers: 9. All recovered. Three were in the high beds for four days. The beds by the window are the best for fevers, because the air moves and the wet does not stay.
Cuts from the reed knives: 33. Stitched: 6. Bound with clean cloth: 27. Keep the knives in the rack by the door, not in the boat.
Bruises: too many to count. The children will not stop climbing the posts.
Bee stings: 14. Honey and mint on each. Mint first.
Sprains: 7. Two from the weir steps, which have been warned about since Thaw. Put a rail on the steps. The council has been asked. The council has answered that it will think.
Burns: 2, from the lamps at the festival. Salve from the high shelf. Both well by the fourth day.
Stomach troubles: 11, from the dark eel. The eel is not to be sold in the stalls on warm days. The council has been told. The council says the eel is a matter for the market board. The market board says it is a matter for the council. Wren says it is a matter for the stomach.
One death. An old man from the far houses, who had been ill since Thaw and had asked to be left in his chair by the window to see the reeds. He was left there. He saw them. He is buried at the edge of the marsh, under the willow, with his boat turned over on the grave as he asked.
The jars on the high shelf are labeled by hand, in the order they were filled. Moss has put them in order of smell. Mint is first. This is not the right order, but it is Moss's order, and it is kept.
Stock on hand at the end of the month: 23 jars of willow bark, 31 of mint, 12 of honey, 8 of salve, 4 of dried fish oil. The fish oil is for the children's coughs. It is not nice, and the children know it.
%%
Chronicle: the frog year at Reedhollow
Kept at Reedhollow by Garrow, carder, in the hamlet book, for anyone who asks what the year was like. Spring of the 203rd year.

The frogs came up from the reeds in the first week of Thaw, and nobody who lives here was surprised. They came up the ditches, under the doors, and into the wash tub, which Garrow's wife has now given up on. They sang all night in the ditch by the mill, and the children sang back at them from the windows.

By Blossom there were so many that the boardwalk to the bank was slick with them. Hob Tennet tried to sweep them off with a broom. Three of them rode the broom back to the step. He gave up and went round by the water.

Maud at the school ran a lesson on frogs. The children counted them in the ditch, one by one, and got to two hundred and eleven before they lost track. Maud wrote the number on the board and said it was a fine number for a frog year. Nobody knew whether this was a good thing or a bad one.

Wren from the healing house came out with her jars, and said the frogs were fine, and that the children should not put them in their hats. Joss put one in his hat anyway, and it sat there very calmly until the school bell rang. Joss says it was the only quiet frog he has met.

The frogs left in Longday, when the water went low and the reeds grew tall. The ditch went silent. The children missed the singing for a week, and then they forgot it, and then one evening in Melon they found themselves humming the same tune, and nobody could say where they had heard it first.
%%
Chronicle: the wool count of the hamlet
Kept at Reedhollow by Garrow, carder, for the Lowmarsh council book. Spring of the 198th year.

Sheep on the hill pasture: 61. Lambs born this spring: 44. Lambs lost to the fox: 3. Lambs lost to the wet: 2. The fox has been dealt with, and will not be missed.

Wool clipped at Blossom: 73 fleeces. Of these, 40 are good, 25 are middling, and 8 are the sort Hob calls wet and the carder calls worse. We sell the good ones at Three Wells, and the middling ones at Lowmarsh for the boat house mats.

Looms in the hamlet: 4. Working: 3. The fourth is in the shed, where it has been since Joss dropped the beam on it. It will be working by Longday, Joss promises. Joss has promised that three years running.

Carders: 6. Spinners: 9. Children who can card: 7, who can card well: 2. Maud says the rest will learn by Leaffall, if they stop looking at the frogs.

Dye: woad from the north field, madder from Ambrook, and reed yellow from the bank. The reed yellow is the cheapest and the ugliest. It is also the most popular, because the children like the colour.

Price at Three Wells, spring fair: good wool, 1 emerald and 2 spoons the fleece. Middling, 1 emerald. Worse, none. Garrow notes the price is a little better than last year, which the buyers say is a sign of a good summer ahead. The buyers say that every year.

Notes for the next count. Mend the fourth loom. Ask Joss what he did to the beam. Keep a spare fleece for the school.
%%
Yarrow Counts the Eggs
In the 181st year of the archive, Yarrow lived in a small house at the edge of Lowmarsh. The house stood on oak posts beside the slow water. Reeds grew behind it, and frogs called from the ditch each evening.

Yarrow sold eggs from a basket by the door. On market morning, the eggs went by boat to the square. Yarrow counted them twice. The first count was always right. The second count was for peace of mind.

In spring, Moss came from Wren's healing house to buy six eggs. Moss carried a little board and wrote the number on it. Yarrow asked why a board was needed for six eggs.

"So I remember the eggs," Moss said.

"And what will help you remember the board?" Yarrow asked.

Moss looked at the board. "A larger board."

Yarrow wrapped the eggs in clean straw and sent Moss away with six. Moss returned before noon. One egg had cracked. Moss had put the board under the basket to keep it level, but the boat rocked.

Yarrow gave Moss another egg and a better piece of advice. Keep the board under the basket, but keep the basket in the boat.

That spring, Yarrow sold 231 eggs. Three were cracked on the road, and one was eaten by a fox near the reed beds. Yarrow wrote the loss in the tally. The fox did not pay.
%%
Brown Hen roof, winter 204
Chronicle kept at Vell, from the Long Road book. Written by Tova, charcoal burner, who was passing and stayed to help.

In the middle of Frost, the north side of the Brown Hen roof came in under the snow. Nobody was hurt. The stable boy was asleep in the hay and was woken by a tile on his head.

Marda, who keeps the inn, ordered six new tiles from the clay pit at Three Wells, and four loads of straw for the gap. The tiles came in two days. The straw came in three, and was wet.

Tova and two of the inn's men mended the gap. We cleared the snow from the rafters, put on the new tiles, and tied the straw over the top for the night. The roof held. The stable boy was given the best bed in the house, and he kept it.

Cost: six tiles, four loads of straw, one day of the inn's ale for the men. No emeralds were asked for by Tova. Marda gave her a bowl of soup, which she says was the best money she was ever paid.
%%
Chronicle: The Long Winter
The winter of 174 lasted longer than any winter Mira could remember. Snow covered the Northpoint road from Frost until the middle of Blossom. The keeper's house stood at the foot of the relay tower, and Mira's family house stood just beyond it. Each morning, Mira cleared the path between the two doors.
Tam sent a sack of potatoes from Kettle Ridge. The cart could not reach Northpoint, so two people carried the sack over the last hill. They arrived with white hair and empty hands. Tam had tied the potatoes in his old coat.
The windmill at Kettle Ridge had stopped twice that winter. The farmers saved flour for bread and sent beetroot in jars. Mira's mother made a red soup that stained every spoon.
At Northpoint, the lamp stayed lit. Mira climbed the tower stairs to check each stair lamp. Lantern was still a child and counted the steps aloud from below. At step forty, Lantern lost count and began again.
When spring came, the road appeared in pieces. First came the waymark, then the inn roof, then a cart with one wheel missing. The people pulled it home by hand.
Tam said the winter had taken the wheel. Mira said it had better bring it back next time.
%%
The school play at Kettle Ridge, Swarm
The school children played The Miller and the Wind on a cart in the square, on the last day of Swarm. Fallon wrote the lines down from the front row.

Cast:
MILLER: Bet Cotter, age ten, in her father's coat.
WIND: Ansel Wye, age nine, in a sheet, with a fan of stiff paper.
APPRENTICE: Nan Haig, age eleven. She learned the part by watching Pip at the rows all spring.

The windmill on the ridge. The sails are still.

MILLER: The sails stand still, and the bread is late.
WIND: I am late. I am only slow.
MILLER: Then be slow somewhere else.
APPRENTICE: I can turn the sails. I was taught to turn them.
MILLER: Who taught you?
APPRENTICE: A tutor, in a yard, with a board. Turn. Stop. Turn.
WIND: Then turn.
APPRENTICE: Turn.

The children pushed the cart round. The painted sails turned, and the square clapped.

MILLER: Good. Now go home.
WIND: Where is home?
MILLER: Here. The sails are home.

The audience was one hundred and eighty people, eleven cats, two foxes that came for the bread, and Biscuit. Biscuit ate the rope off the back sail before the second scene.
%%
Chronicle: Three Wells, winter 197
Kept at Vell, from the report of Clem, keeper of the storehouse at Three Wells.

In Frost, Nessa came from Vell with a crate on a cart. Inside was an apprentice, the first that Three Wells ever had. It was for the storehouse. It was to sort.

Forty people stood in the square to watch the crate opened. Nobody cheered. They waited. The apprentice stood up out of the straw and looked at the storehouse door, and then at Clem. Clem said good morning. The apprentice did nothing. Nessa said that was right. It had not been drilled on good morning.

By the second day it knew the storehouse. By the fifth it had sorted every chest by use: bread with food, seeds with seed, shears with tools. By the tenth it was sorting inside each chest by color. Nobody had asked it to. Clem says this was either the cleverest thing he ever saw or a very bad habit, and he has not decided.

The children named it Dot, because it set a small dot of chalk on every chest it had finished.

In Deepsnow it was given a lamp for the dark end of the store. By the end of winter, 31 people had asked to see it work. Clem charged nothing. He says he regrets this.
%%
Chronicle: the boat that was late
Kept at Vell. Autumn of 186. From a letter by Tam of Kettle Ridge, sent down the Long Road with the wool cart, and copied by Oren's predecessor.

The autumn market at Kettle Ridge was held on the last day of Leaffall, on the ridge road. Two hundred people came. A trader from Saltreach had promised to bring fish, and the whole ridge waited for it.
The fish did not come. At noon a boy ran in from the road to say the boat had not reached Saltreach harbor. It was a day late. The wind had come round from the east and held it out in the grey water.
The market went on without the fish. People ate bread and cheese and talked about the sea. At dusk the relay tower above the ridge blinked: the boat is in. All well. Twelve fish, two nets lost.
The fish came up on the third day. They were eaten the fourth. They were very good, and there were not enough.
%%
Lowmarsh chronicle: the water
Sent to the Archive at Vell by Vale, keeper of the marsh tower. Told plainly. Rumors are marked.

The water in the marsh went down two hand-widths in the first month of spring. The boardwalk stood dry for the first time in a long while. The boat boys counted the posts: forty-one standing, six leaning, and two gone into the reeds.

Wren's healing house had nine beds full in Thaw. Six of them were the cough. Wren says it came in with the wet and went out with the dry.

Some say the cough is in the water. Some say it is the boats, which bring mud up the channel. Some say it is the mines, because the dust goes up the hill on the wind. Nobody knows which.

Rumor, marked as a rumor: a carter from Saltreach says the cough is in the ships too. The cook at the boat house says that is nonsense. The carter says he only repeats what he heard. The cook says that is how nonsense travels.
%%
Chronicle: the cave under Oat Field
Kept at the Brown Hen on the Long Road by Tilly, ferry keeper, from the tellings of the drovers and the carter Oss. Winter of the 151st year.

In the first week of Frost, Ansel of Oat Field went to dig a drain. His spade went down through the soil and into nothing. The earth fell in a hole as wide as a cart. Ansel shouted for his sons.

They found a cave under the field. It was dry, and the floor was sand. There were stone steps going down, and no roots came through the walls. Ansel said it was like the inside of a loaf.

Oss the carter went down with a lantern on the first day. He counted the steps. There were forty. At the bottom was a pool of clear cold water, and a ring of stones round the pool. The stones were set on purpose.

Nobody came down that winter, except the drovers, who used the cave to store cheese. Ansel put a gate across the hole.

The cave is not on any map of the Long Road. The council has a note of it, and a clerk from Vell has written to ask for a sketch. Tilly will send it when it is drawn.
%%
Chronicle: the Leaffall lamps
Kept by the healing house, at the edge of the marsh. Written by Wren, in autumn, for the record.
On the first night of Leaffall the marsh holds its lamp festival. Each family puts a lamp on the water for the year that has gone. The lamps are made of reed, with a wick of rush and a shell of horn. The children make most of them.
This year there were 212 lamps on the water. Last year there were 180. The increase is the children's work, and they will not be told otherwise.
Four lamps went out at once when the wind came off the reeds. The owners were Bram's girl, the two Pell boys and old Tuck, who said his went out on purpose. It was relit by hand. Nobody was hurt.
The boat houses sent eleven boats, each with a lamp at the prow. The boats were rowed round the weir three times. The weir men shouted the count. The count was right every time.
The festival ended at the second bell. Forty-one families went home by the boardwalk. Three children fell in the water, and all three were fished out by the eel men. One was crying. Two were laughing. The crying one is the one who laughed the next day.
Eleven jars of honey were given to the healing house from the Ambrook hives, by cart. Two jars were cracked on the road. The carter was not blamed. The honey was still very good.
Forty-seven people came to the house on the festival day. Most had cut hands from the reed knives, or bruises from the boats. Six had too much ale. Two had burns from the lamps. Both burns were small. The salve from the high shelf was enough.
%%
Chronicle: a debt at Fordside, 190
Sent to Vell by Tilly, horse keeper of Fordside, outside Lowmarsh. Spring of 190.

In the year 157 my grandfather Orrin bought a mare from Cade of Ambrook. Her name was Lark. She was the first horse of our own. Orrin paid 48 emeralds that day and promised 12 more by harvest.

The harvest of 157 was poor, and he paid 4. The next year was wet, and he paid 2. After that he stopped paying, and stopped talking about it. He died in 171 owing 6.

In the farm book, on the page for 157, there is one line in my grandfather's hand: "Owed to Cade: 12. Paid: 6. Still owed: 6." Under it, in another hand, one word: "Still."

I found the page this Thaw, looking for the date of Lark's last foal. It is a small sum and an old one. But it is written, and it is ours.

On the first of Sowing I walked to Ambrook with 6 emeralds in a sock. Cade's granddaughter Edda keeps the apple press at the mill. She had never heard of the debt. I showed her the page. She read it twice.

I put the emeralds on the table. She counted them, and laughed, and then did not laugh. She said, "Thirty-three years." I said it was thirty-two and a half, but I would not argue.

She gave me a cup of cider and kept the emeralds for the school. She asked to copy the page. It is now in two farm books.
%%
Chronicle: A Market in Deep Snow, 180
In the winter of 180, snow covered the road to Ambrook for two days. The market was held in Jory's mill, where the floor was dry and the wheel kept turning. Greer brought the ferry rope inside so it would not stiffen in the cold.

Pell arrived late with a cart of apples. The cart had lost a wheel in a drift. He had left the wheel by a waymark and carried the apples in two baskets. He said the apples were none the worse for travel. One had a dent shaped like his thumb.

The beekeeper brought honey, though the hives were quiet under their covers. She sold one jar to the baker and kept one for her own house. The baker bought flour from Tam, then said he had meant to buy wheat. Tam had brought both and let him choose.

By midday the mill floor was crowded. Jory asked people to keep their boots away from the turning wheel. A boy obeyed so well that he stood on one foot for a long time. His mother made him sit on a sack.

Greer ferried three travelers across the pond after the snow eased. They had come from Three Wells with a sack of wool and a notice for the market board. Greer read the notice aloud. It asked for two strong hands to mend the east road bridge.

Pell offered one hand, but only after he found the missing wheel. He had been using it to hold down his apple cloth. The market closed before dark. The notice went home with Tam, who said the bridge could use two more hands than that.
%%
Chronicle: the fence quarrel, 206
Kept by Hesk, for the Archive at Vell. The quarrel between Hob and Dunn over the fence on the east boundary began in Blossom and was settled in Leaffall. Both men asked that it be written down, so that neither would be blamed by the other.

The fence was a line of oak posts with three rails, put up by Hob's father in the year 178. In 205 a storm took two posts, and Dunn's cow went through the gap into Hob's clover, and ate it down to the stalks.

Hob asked for the posts to be replaced at Dunn's cost. Dunn said the posts stood on Hob's side, and so the posts were Hob's. He said the cow was a free animal, and could not be blamed for being hungry.

The mayor's man came from Three Wells and looked at the posts for a morning. He said the line was the old line, and the posts stood on it. He said Dunn owed for the clover, and Hob owed for the posts. The two of them could split the cost, and the cow would be kept in the barn for a month.

Both farmers signed the agreement on the day the new posts went in. Four oak posts, three rails, and a gate. The gate was Dunn's idea. Hob said it was useless, and then used it every morning.

The cow is well. It has eaten nothing green since the agreement, and has grown fat on the hay. Hob says that is the cow's revenge. Dunn says it is the cow's clover, and that he will charge Hob for it next year.
%%
The Fence at the Tutor House
Nessa's winter note

The house at the edge of Vell has a low fence on its east side. It keeps the goats out of the drill yard. It does not keep the wind out.

In winter 206, Master Pell's daughter asked us to move the fence two steps from her path. The snow slid from our roof and blocked her gate. I said the fence was on the tutor house land. She said the snow did not read the boundary marks.

We argued beside the wood pile. I was right about the marks. She was right about the path.

The reading mind stood in its box on the bench. We had been teaching it pages about letters and fences. Nessa's apprentice asked it what to do. It wrote, "Move the fence and clear the snow."

We had not taught it that answer. We had taught it many sentences, each letter after the letters before it. It had learned to guess words that fit. The answer pleased us, but it did not settle the boundary.

We moved the fence one step. Pell's daughter cleared the snow. She brought us a jar of honey for the trouble. I put it beside the test pages, where no apprentice could mistake it for ink.
