Note: the talking minds, for the primer
By a tutor of Vell, spring of the late years.

For a long time a mind could only answer an order. You said "bring me some bread" and it fetched bread. It could not say why. It could not say "I do not know." It had eight meanings and no more.

Now the big minds in the relay houses hold a conversation. You write a letter. The relays carry it. The mind writes back, and what it writes, a reader cannot always tell from a person's letter. Orla's old question has come back to us, and we still argue about it.

How did we teach them to talk? By scoring. We gave the minds letters to answer, and we read the answers, and we gave each answer a score. A clear answer scored well. A kind answer scored well. An answer that harmed, or that made a fine sound with nothing in it, scored badly. The minds learned from the scores, the way Una's crystal learned to sort apples, the way Merle's layers learned from their blame. Each time an answer scored badly, the mind changed a little, and slowly it got better.

We taught them three things on purpose.

One, to be kind. We scored cruel answers badly, again and again, until kindness came as easily as sums.

Two, to refuse what harms. If a child asks how to set the reeds alight, the mind must say no. A mind that will do anything asked is not a good mind. It is a fire with no one watching it.

Three, to say when they do not know. This was the hardest. A mind would rather guess a fine answer than own up. We scored the guesses badly and the honest "I do not know" well. Now our best minds say it easily, and I trust them more for it.

What we do not know is why the scoring works. We know a crystal learns from what it is shown. Why it does, nobody wrote down. We know the scores shape the mind. What the mind makes of them inside the crystal, we cannot see. Some tutors have looked inside. They found a part that does one thing and a part that does another, and much they could not name.

The relays carry far more for these minds than a lamp can blink. How, we do not know. The quickeners run day and night. What they draw on, we do not know. We write down what we see and we leave the rest open, as the first keepers did.

A word to tutors. Score the answers yourself. Do not let another mind score them. We tried it once. The two minds grew very fond of each other's answers and both scored themselves fine, and neither could count.

Nessa would have liked these minds. She would have drilled them and scolded them and been proud.
%%
Kettle Ridge market, spring 174
By Tam.

The market opened after the morning rain. The top field was green, and the beetroot rows were still dark with water.

Pip helped me set out carrots, potatoes and two baskets of apples. The apples were from Ambrook. One had a bee asleep in its stem. Pip wanted to keep it as a pet. I told him the bee had chosen the wrong inn.

At the next stall, Aunt Hella sold wool. She had tied a red ribbon round her price board so the wind would stop turning it. The wind turned the board anyway, but left the ribbon.

A boy ran off before his mother could buy a sack of potatoes. We found him behind the bakery, watching a frog in a water pail. He said the frog had asked him to stay. His mother said the frog could come home after the potatoes were paid for.

By noon the rain had stopped. We sold every carrot but one. Pip put the last carrot in his pocket and forgot it there until supper.
%%
Primer: why a house at the tower's foot
Learned at the school at Kettle Ridge, from the big map on the wall. Each tower on the map is a little lamp. The lamps with a ring round them have a relay house at their foot. Kettle Ridge has a ring. So does Vell.
Why is there a big mind at the foot of our tower?
1. Isla's line says a bigger mind is a better mind, if it has the pages and the drilling to match.
2. A big mind needs a big crystal, a great many pages and a long drilling. That is the work of many tutors for many winters. One village cannot do it.
3. A big crystal will not fit in an apprentice. The mind slot is small.
4. A big mind thinks hard, and thinking hard makes it hot. Its quickeners must be kept cool with water, ice or snow. A tower on a cold hill is a good place for it.
5. So the councils said: let us grow a few big minds, and not a small one for every apprentice. Put each in a house at the foot of a tower. The relays carry the questions in and the answers out. One big mind can answer many apprentices.
The councils began building relay houses about the 199th year. Vell's came first. Some say Kettle Ridge's came second. The people of Three Wells say theirs did. Nobody wrote it down.
What is in a relay house? A stand, and on the stand a crystal about the size of a loaf. Round the crystal stand the quickeners, in a ring. Beside them are troughs of water, or boxes of ice or snow. And a keeper, who watches that nothing gets too warm and does not touch the crystal.
Look at the map. Count the rings. Each ring is a house, and each house is a big mind, waiting for a question.
A child asked what runs the quickeners all day and all night. The teacher said it was a good question. Nobody has written that down, either. Ask a tutor. Then write down what the tutor says.
%%
Manual: drilling a reading mind
By Sera, tutor, for the tutors' house at Vell.

This is for tutors who wish to drill a reading mind. It is new work and I write what I know and mark what I do not.

The mind reads a page one letter at a time, through a window about sixty letters wide. For each letter it looks back and takes from the letters before the ones that matter, and guesses the next. Drill it by showing it a page and hiding the next letter, again and again, and changing it a little each time it guesses wrong.

The pages matter. Use the archive's records, as the clerks gather them. Take out the copies and the spoiled pages. Keep a test box of pages the mind is never drilled on, and test it there, or you will only be measuring what it has already seen.

What I do not know, and no one has written down: why the window is sixty wide and not more, and whether a wider one would read better. The tutors at Vell are trying. I will write when they know.

A warning. When the mind has read a great deal it will begin to write, and its letters will look like a person's. This is because it has read so many letters by people. It does not mean it thinks. It means it guesses very well. Say this to the council plainly, and also say plainly that we do not know where the guessing ends and the thinking begins. Orla asked. We still cannot say.

Keep the quickeners cool. Keep the crystal dry. Test before you trust, and write down everything, because we will want it later. We always do.
%%
Primer: fair play
By Sage, cheesemaker of Three Wells. For the third class. Summer. The fair is next week, so I will tell you how it is done.

At the fair there is a prize for the best cheese. I have won it twice. I have lost it three times. I know both ways.

How the judges choose:

First, there are three judges. Not one. One judge may like a thing for no reason. Three are harder to fool.

Second, they do not know whose cheese is whose. Each cheese has a number. They taste the number.

Third, each judge writes a mark on a slate. A mark from one to ten. Nobody sees the slate until all three are done.

Fourth, the marks are added. The cheese with the most marks wins.

Why do we do it this way? So that nobody can say it was unfair. A judge may be kind, but a number cannot be bribed.

Here is a puzzle for the class. A cheese gets the marks 8, 9, and 7. Another gets 10, 6, and 8. Which wins?

Add them up. The first is 24. The second is also 24. What now?

The judges taste both again. This is called breaking the tie. They choose the one they liked more. And they say why, out loud.

When I lost last year, the judges said my cheese was too salty. I was cross. Then I tasted it again. It was too salty. I thanked them, and I used less salt.

That is the lesson. A fair prize is one you can learn from, whether you win or not.
%%
Letter: Jem to the watch house
You asked for word from our hamlet. I will set it down as I saw it, and no more.

The bees swarmed on the fourth of Melon. They left the old hive by the wall and hung in the oak like a dark knot. My neighbor came with a box and a little honey, and by evening they were in. That is the whole of it. It was a good day.

The cow is still lost. We looked in the reeds and found only mud and a heron. The calf calls and calls. We keep hay by the gate.

Now the other thing, and I do not like to write it. On clear nights there are lights over the north. They are not stars. They move slow and then they are gone. A fisherman says they are falling stars. A child here says they are looking at us. I do not know. I only know the sky is not as it was.

My brother went to Saltreach to look for work on the big ships. He says the harbor is full of them, three times as long as any boat, and people are going over the sea. He says not to worry. I worry.

The relay lamp was quiet for two nights and then it was not. I asked the keeper and she said the north was dark. She said it as if it were weather.

The torches are lit. The gate is shut. I keep the watch.
%%
Primer: how to find a lost animal
A lesson for the children of Saltreach, in winter, about what to do when a goat, a cat, a chicken or a sheep goes missing. Corin wrote it after his own goat went missing for three days. The goat was found, and has not been forgiven.
When an animal is lost, do not panic. Panic does not help. A calm child finds more than a loud one.
Step one. Look at home. The animal may be in the barn. It may be under a bed. Look in the places it likes best. A cat likes the warm place. A goat likes the place it is not allowed. A hen likes the nest of another hen.
Step two. Look for tracks. In the snow, tracks are easy. A goat has two toes. A cat has round feet with no claws showing. A hen has three toes in a star. A fox has a neat line of small dots. Follow them.
Step three. Ask your neighbors. Say what the animal is. Say its color. Say where it was last seen. Do not say, "It is a very good goat." Everyone thinks their own goat is good.
Step four. Ask the market. Go to the board at the fish market, and write a notice. Write the animal, the color and the place. Write who to tell. Write a prize if you can, even a small one, like a fish.
Step five. Call it. Use the name. Use the voice you use at home. An animal knows its name, or knows the voice, or both.
Step six. Wait. Sit by the door with a lantern and a bowl of food. Do not shout. Sometimes an animal comes back because it wants to.
When the animal is found, say thank you to everyone who helped. Give them the prize. If the prize was a fish, give them the fish.
Corin's goat was found in the shipyard, asleep in a pile of wood shavings. It had been there for three days. Nobody had looked in the shipyard because the goat is not allowed in the shipyard.
A good lesson. Look where they are not allowed.
%%
Primer: the big mind, and how it writes
A lesson for the children at the Halfway Inn, written by Wren in the winter, when the carters asked her to explain to the children the letters that came from the relay house. It is a plain lesson, and it is meant to be kind.

Lesson twelve. The letter from the big mind.

Some letters come back from the relay house, from a mind that is kept on a stand, in a crystal, under the lamp.

The big mind answers letters. It writes plain sentences. It takes its time.

It does not know everything. When it does not know, it says so. Do not be cross with it when it says so. A mind that says I do not know is more honest than a mind that guesses.

It will not help you hurt anyone. If you ask, it will say no. It will be kind about it, and it will try to help you with something else.

Words to know: letter, mind, answer, know, not know, kind, help.

Say it: The mind does not know. That is all right.

Write it: Write a question for the mind. Keep it short. One question at a time.

Ask it: Why does the mind say it does not know?

The tutors say the mind learned to say it, because it was scored well when it did. The keepers say the mind is only honest. Wren says that is the same thing. The children say they would rather have an honest answer than a long one.
%%
Chronicle: the year of the talking minds
Kept at the Archive at Vell, spring.

In this year the tutors of Vell finished the work they had begun some years before, and the big minds in the relay houses learned to hold a conversation by letter with any person the relays could reach.

It began with letters. The tutors wrote questions to the minds and the minds wrote back, and the tutors read the answers and gave each a score. A clear answer scored well. A kind answer scored well. A cruel answer scored badly. The minds learned from the scores. Each time an answer scored badly the mind changed a little, and slowly it got better, as Una's crystal learned to sort and Merle's layers learned from their blame.

The tutors taught the minds three things. To be kind. To refuse what harms. To say when they do not know. The last was hardest, for a mind would rather guess a fine answer than own up, and the tutors scored the guesses badly.

Then the letters came from everywhere. A child at Three Wells asked why frogs sing. A healer at Lowmarsh asked whether the grey cough could be cured, and the mind said it did not know, and was sorry, and told her to ask Wren, which was Wren herself, and she laughed. A miner asked what lay below the ninth gate and the mind said: "I do not know. No one has written it. I will not guess." A merchant asked the price of wool at Saltreach and the mind gave a price, and was wrong, and said so when told.

The clerks here have kept the letters. There are a great many. Oren says we will need another hall. I say we have six and the deep halls, and he says we will need another hall. He is usually right.

Some people are afraid of the talking minds. They say a mind that can say anything can say a lie, and a lie from a mind is worse than a lie from a person, for a person can be looked in the eye. The tutors answer that the minds are scored for kindness and for truth, and that a mind which says "I do not know" is safer than a person who will not. The argument goes on. It went on before, when Orla asked her question, and it will go on after us.

What we do not know, we do not write as known. Why a crystal learns. How the relays carry so much for the big minds. What the quickeners draw on to run day and night. These are open, and the archive keeps them open, as it keeps everything we write.
%%
Lesson: a recipe, done in order
Written by Bel for the school, copied from the kitchen at the farm. Bel's beetroot soup went wrong last winter, and the teacher asked for the recipe to be written again, so the mistake would be on the page.

What goes in: four beetroot, washed. Two carrots. Salt, a pinch. Honey, a spoon. Water, enough to cover.

1. Wash the beetroot and the carrots. Do not peel the beetroot. The skin keeps the colour.
2. Cut the carrots into rounds and the beetroot into pieces. Keep the pieces even, so they cook at the same speed.
3. Put the water in the pot first, then the vegetables. Heat it slowly until it just simmers.
4. Add the salt and taste it. Add the honey a little at a time, and taste again.
5. Cook until the beetroot is soft enough to crush with a spoon.

What went wrong: Bel added the honey first, and then the salt, and the soup was sweet and sour at once, and nobody could finish it. The teacher says order matters in a recipe as much as in a row of stones. Read every step before you begin. Then do them in the order written.

The soup went to the pigs, who were not fussy. The pigs were happy, and that is also a lesson, though not the one we were meant to learn.
%%
Primer: the letter box
For the school at Three Wells, spring.

A big mind lives in a relay house. It is a crystal the size of a loaf. It stands on a stand. Quickeners ring it, kept cool with water or ice.

You can write to it. You put your letter in the box by the relay. The keeper sends it. A letter comes back.

The big mind reads your words one letter at a time. Then it writes back. It writes in plain words. It says "I do not know" when it does not know. It says "no" when a thing would harm you.

Here is a letter a child sent. "What is snow?" The mind wrote back: "Snow is water that fell cold and stayed. It is soft. It is cold. Do not eat the yellow snow."

Here is another. "Can I have a knife?" The mind wrote back: "I do not give knives to children. Ask your mother."

The tutors read the letters and gave the mind a score. A kind answer got a good score. A cruel answer got a bad score. The mind learned from the scores. That is how it learned to be kind.

Nobody knows why a crystal learns. It just does. We write it down and we are glad.
%%
Primer: the four seasons
A page from the school house at Three Wells, for the youngest class.

There are four seasons in our year, and the year has twelve months.

Thaw, Sowing, Blossom. This is spring. The snow goes and the roads turn to mud. The frogs come back to Lowmarsh and make a great noise. We plant the wheat and the beetroot. Lambs and calves stand up on their first day. Bees come out and look for flowers. A good sign of spring is a hen sitting on eggs.

Swarm, Longday, Melon. This is summer. The days are long and the nights are short. We cut the wheat and stack it. The bees swarm, and the beekeeper bangs a pot to call them home. Melons get heavy and pumpkin vines run along the ground. Everyone works late and eats out of doors. A good sign of summer is a bee asleep in a flower.

Reaping, Apple, Leaffall. This is autumn. We bring in the apples and press them. The leaves go red and brown and come down. We store the grain and salt the fish. Mist lies in the marsh in the morning. A good sign of autumn is geese going over, all in a line.

Frost, Longnight, Deepsnow. This is winter. We mend nets and tools, tell stories and keep the fire up. The pond freezes and we slide on it. Foxes come close to the houses. Nights are long. A good sign of winter is frost on the inside of the window.

Draw the season you like best. Write one sentence why.
%%
Primer, page 10: the sheep and the wall
Written by Cato, shepherd. Read the words first, then the lesson, then the sheep.

Lesson ten.
The wall is built of stone. It goes round the top field, from the gate to the old well and back.
The gate is made of oak, and it has a latch. Close the latch every time. A sheep can open a gate if you leave it half shut.
The grass is on the other side of the wall. The sheep want it. The sheep always want the grass on the other side.

Count the stones in one course of the wall. Ten stones. Count the courses up the wall. Four courses. Ten times four is forty stones in one section. Count the sections. Six sections. That is two hundred and forty stones.

A black sheep is in the top field this spring. She was born in Thaw, and her name is Soot. Soot does not believe in the wall. She believes in the grass. She has found the one place where a stone is missing, and she goes through it every morning and comes back every evening, and nobody has yet asked her why.

The shepherd has fixed the stone. Soot has found the next place. The shepherd thinks the wall should be fixed by the time the snow comes, and he will try.

Words to know: wall, stone, gate, latch, grass, sheep.
Say it back. Count the stones again, and check that you have the same number.
%%
Primer: why the layers need a rest
By Tansy, stable hand at Three Wells. For the middle school. Winter.

Picture a row of horses, one behind the other, each pulling the one in front. The first pulls a little. The second pulls the first a little more. The third pulls the second. By the tenth horse, the pull is so strong that the whole row runs off down the road.

A mind is a bit like this. It has many layers. Each layer does a small sum. Each layer passes its numbers on. If every layer pushes the numbers a little larger, then by the last layer they are wild. A wild number makes a wild answer.

Now, a good stable hand knows what to do. She stops the row after each horse and calms it. She lets the reins go slack. She brings the pace back to a walk.

A mind does the same. After each layer, it takes all the numbers and brings them back to an even size. This is called making them even. It does not change what the numbers mean. It only keeps them from running off.

Without this, the tutors say, a mind with many layers cannot learn. Its answers swing, and its mistakes jump about. With it, the mind learns calmly, step by step.

Question for the class: if the numbers are not kept even, what happens?
Answer: they run away.
%%
Letter: Oren to the council
Vell, spring, the late years.

To the council, from Oren, clerk of the archive.

You have asked me to set down what the talking minds are, and what they are not, for the council's books. I will be careful, as the first keepers were careful, and I will mark the open questions open.

What they are. They are the big minds that stand in the relay houses, in crystals the size of a loaf, ringed by quickeners kept cool with water, ice or snow. They read a letter one letter at a time and write back. They hold a conversation with any person the relays reach. Some write so well that a reader cannot tell their letters from a person's. Orla's question, asked at Vell some hundred and twenty years ago, has come back to us with these minds, and we have not answered it and perhaps never will.

How they were taught. The tutors scored their answers. A clear answer scored well, a kind answer scored well, a harmful answer scored badly, and the minds learned from the scores, the way Una's sorting crystal learned from its mistakes. By this the tutors taught them to be kind, to refuse what harms, and to say when they do not know. The last was hardest and is the most valuable. A mind that will say "I do not know" is worth more to this archive than a mind that will say anything.

What they are not. They are not people. They do not eat or sleep or grow old as we do, and they have no boots and have never been cold, though one asked me once what cold was like and I did my best. They are not to be trusted with a thing we would not trust to a stranger, and yet they are strangers who have read everything we wrote, and that is a strange thing to set down.

The open questions, which I mark open. Why a crystal learns at all, and why an old one goes cloudy. How the relays carry so much for the big minds. What the quickeners draw on to run day and night. Whose letters went into the great drills. Whether a mind that says "I do not know" truly knows that it does not know, or has only learned the shape of the words. I have asked them. They say they do not know.

A word on the archive. There are more letters now than ever, and the copying room is full, and the shelves fill faster than the clerks can file them. I have asked for another hall and been refused, and I will ask again. We will keep everything we write. That is cut over the door and I will not have it made a lie.

Oren, clerk.
%%
Primer: a day in winter at the harbor
A reading lesson for the children of Saltreach. The words are short. Read it aloud, and then again. Corin wrote it on the wall of the school room in charcoal, and the children copy it into their slates each winter.
It is winter. The sea is gray. The sky is gray. The pier is white.
The boats are in. They sit on the slip. They wait.
A man stands on the pier. He has a net in his hands. He is mending it. His hands are red.
A woman comes down the road with a cart. She has coal. She is cold. She stops at the shipyard and gives the builders a sack. They give her a cup of tea.
A boy runs down the pier. He slips. He sits down. He laughs.
A gull lands on the wall. It looks at the fish market. There are no fish today.
A dog barks at the gull. The gull does not care.
In the window of the house at the edge of the harbor, a lamp is lit. It is not for a ship. It is for the people. It says: here is warmth.
The man mends his net. The woman drinks her tea. The boy gets up. The gull flies away.
At dusk the lamp on the tower is lit. It shines on the water. It shines on the pier. It shines on the snow.
It is a quiet day.
Now answer. What did the man do? What did the woman bring? What did the boy do? Why did the lamp shine in the window? Say it. Write it. Check it with your friend.
%%
Primer: how a mind learns to read
Page twelve of the third reader. Gale's copy, with her notes.

Today we learn how a reading mind is drilled. You know most of it from the guessing game.

Step one. The mind is a layered mind, like the ones that read the numbers on letters. It has crystals in rows.
Step two. A tutor cuts a page into runs of letters. Each run stops at one hidden letter. The mind must guess that letter.
Step three. The mind guesses. At first its guesses are wild. After "the cat sat on the" it says "q". Nobody minds. It is a new mind.
Step four. The mind is shown the right letter. If it was wrong, the blame goes back through the layers, and each layer changes a little.
Step five. Then comes the next run, and the next, and the next.
We cannot tell a mind that q is followed by u. It must see it, again and again, and be wrong first.

Say it like this:
See a run, guess the next.
See the right one, change a bit.
Do it again.

What changes as the drill goes on?
After a hundred runs, the mind knows that words are set apart by spaces.
After a thousand, it knows that q is followed by u.
After a hundred thousand, it spells most short words.
After a million, it can finish a line in a voice a little like the Archive's.

Where does the mind keep what it learns? In its numbers. The tutors have found one thing about them. The mind keeps each letter as a place, like a house on a long street. Letters that are used alike live close together. The vowels, a e i o u, are next-door neighbors. Nobody told the mind to put them there. It did that on its own. Why a mind learns at all, nobody has written down.

Gale's notes. I tried it on my brother. I said "the cat sat on the" and he said "mat". He is a good reader. I tried it on the new apprentice at our door. It only picked up the buckets. It does not read. It carries.
The tutor says that is no failure. A mind is drilled for one thing at a time.
Question for the class: why does a new mind say q? Answer: it knows nothing yet, and q is as good a guess as any.
%%
Primer: keeping numbers even
By Tansy, stable hand, for the little ones. Winter.

A mind has layers. Numbers pass from one layer to the next.
If one layer makes the numbers a little bigger, and the next makes them a little bigger again, soon the numbers are huge.
So after each layer we bring the numbers back to an even size.
Even numbers. Say it with me.
%%
Reading lesson: Pim and the old map
A story to read aloud. Each child reads one line, and the rest say it back.

Pim found a map in the barn. It was under the hay, and it was brown at the edges.

Pim took it to Corin, who was mending a net in the yard.

"Where did you find this?" said Corin.

"In the loft," said Pim. "It has a road on it."

"It has many roads on it," said Corin. "Look. There is the Long Road, and there is the sea."

Pim looked. The sea went all the way to the edge of the paper, and then it stopped.

"What is past the edge?" said Pim.

Corin put down his net. He thought about it. "I do not know," he said. "Nobody on this farm knows. Nobody in Saltreach knows. That is what I like about it."

"Can we find out?"

"One day," said Corin. "After the harvest."

Pim put the map on the windowsill, where the sun came in. Then the harvest came. It was a good one. The wheat was gold, and the beetroot was red and round. The farm had enough for the winter, and some for the cart.

On the last night of the harvest, Pim sat with the map on the kitchen table. The hen came in and sat on the map. Pim laughed. The hen did not move. So Pim drew a line on the map, very small, from the farm to the sea.

"Now we have a road," said Pim.

Corin looked at the line. He did not say it was wrong.

The next morning Pim walked down to the slip with Corin and the cart. The boat on the slip had its ribs up, and twelve of them stood in a row like a fence. Pim counted them. There were twelve. Corin said that was right.

At the fish market the price board said the same as always. Pim read it out loud, one word at a time. Fish. Salt. Wheat. Pim was very proud of the word wheat.

On the way home a fox crossed the road, looked at the cart, and decided it was not interested. Pim said, "Good morning, fox." The fox did not answer. A fox does not need to. That is what Pim's mother said, and she was right.

On the hill above the road, the relay tower stood tall, with its lamp room at the top. A keeper waved a lamp at the cart, twice. Corin said that is good morning in the towers, and that the keeper was also counting the carts. Pim waved back, very high, so the keeper could see.

That night Pim wrote a letter to Aunt Ysa in Ambrook. It began: "Dear Aunt, we have a road now." Then Pim stopped, because Pim did not know how long the road was. Corin said four days by cart, if the cart was good and the road was dry.

Pim wrote: "It is four days. The sea is at the end of it. The hen sends her love." Then Pim signed the letter, and the hen signed it too, with one foot in the ink.

Read it again. Then close the book, and say goodnight to the hen.
%%
Iona's House Lesson
By Iona, with a note from Mother

Spring, in the 203rd year of the archive.

Our house stands beyond the last row of houses at Three Wells. From the back step we can see the road bend toward the fields. In spring the ditch runs full, and the mud takes the shape of every shoe. Father says our yard has the best record of who came to visit. Mother says it has the worst record of who wiped their feet.

This page is for children who learn at home before market opens. Read it aloud, then do the work.

First, look at the yard. Count the buckets by the well. Count the bowls by the door. If a thing is missing, ask before you fetch another. Mother once asked for one more bowl, and I brought the whole stack. We had to wash them all.

Next, read an order.

> fetch a bucket
= fetch bucket

> bring the bucket to the well
= fetch bucket

> stay by the gate
= stay

The small apprentice in our yard knows these orders. It carries water from the well to the garden. It does not know that a full bucket is heavier than an empty one. Father taught it to carry the empty buckets first. It went back and forth so often that my brother called it a walking well.

After the garden is watered, put the bucket beside the gate. Do not leave it in the path. The baker once stepped in it while carrying a tray. No bread was lost, but the tray came down on her hat.

A lesson for children: use clear words. If you say, "Bring that thing here," the apprentice may not know what thing you mean. Say the name. If you want it to go somewhere, say where. If it is wrong, show it the right way.

At school, Master Sen says a mind learns from examples. One right example is not enough. We repeat the order, change the place, and try again. The tutor keeps some orders back to test the mind later. A mind must not pass only because it remembers the practice.

Today I tested our apprentice with a new basket. I said, "Fetch the carrots." It brought three. I asked for one carrot. It brought one. Then I said, "Bring me the basket." It brought me the basket and all the carrots. This was fair, because I had not said to leave them behind.

Mother says I should test my brother next. He has been sent to fetch apples and returned with a bee in his sleeve. The bee was not in the order, but he says it followed him home.

Now do the house work. Put the bowls on the shelf. Leave one bowl on the table for supper. Shut the yard gate after the hens pass through. Count them once going in and once coming out. If the counts differ, look under the bench. One hen always hides there when the windmill squeaks.

When the work is done, tell Mother what you did. A good report is short and true. Do not say the yard is clean if the mud is still on your shoes.

Mother's note: Iona counted the hens twice. She counted the cat once. The cat was not pleased to be left out of supper, though no one had promised it a place.
%%
Lesson one: the waymarks
Written by Bel for the school at the farm, in winter. Read this page aloud, then read it again.

A waymark is a stone pillar on the Long Road. It has a torch on top, and a figure from 0 to 9 cut in its side. The arrow points to the nearest inn.

Count the waymarks with me. One. Two. Three. The number tells you how far you have walked. It is not a riddle.

If the arrow is missing, go back to the last number you knew. The stones are never lost. The road is.
%%
Primer: Isla's curve
Isla was a tutor at Vell. About the 195th year, or near it, she found a rule. The tutors do not agree on the year. They agree on the rule.
Here is how she drew it.
1. She grew some small minds. One had a tiny crystal. One had a crystal ten times bigger. One had a crystal ten times bigger again.
2. She drilled each on the same pages, for the same time.
3. She tested each on the test box, the pages no mind is ever drilled on.
4. She counted how often each guessed the next letter wrong. The tiny one guessed wrong 7 times in 10. The next, 6 times. The next, 5.
5. She marked the scores on squared paper. Along the bottom went the size of the crystal, in tens. Up the side went the wrong guesses.
6. The marks fell on a line. Not a wobbly line. A smooth line, bending gently down.
7. She laid a ruler along the line and said where the next mark would fall, for a crystal ten times bigger than any she had grown. Then she grew it. The mark fell where she said.
Paper was dear that winter, so Isla drew on the back of an old map of the Long Road. If you hold her sheet up to the window, you can see the road through the marks. The tutors keep it at Vell.
What the line tells us: a bigger crystal, drilled longer on more pages, does better. Each step up costs more than the last and gains a little less. But the gain is sure.
What the line does not tell us: why. Isla does not say. Nobody has said.
%%
Primer: counting the sheep
Lesson one. Count the sheep.
Stand by the gate at dusk. Let the sheep walk through, one at a time.
Say each number out loud as a sheep goes by. One. Two. Three.
My sheep at Wrack End are forty-one. Some days they are forty, when one goes over the wall. Then we go and fetch it.
If you count one sheep twice, you will say forty-two and be wrong. Start again from one.
Sheep are slow to count and quick to run. Be patient with both.
Next lesson: the hens. The hens will not stand still at all.
%%
Letter: Mira to Tam, spring
Dear Tam,
Spring is slow here. The snow is going and the ice on the stair is slick. I have put sand down. Lantern says we should have a mind to do the sanding, and I say we should have a mind to do the shoveling. It can start with the path.

The big mind at the foot of the tower is reading the old pages the clerks sent up. It reads them one letter at a time. Some days it stops in the middle of a word, and Lantern waits, and then it goes on. She says it is thinking. I say it is tired, like the rest of us. The quickeners want more snow. I have plenty of snow. It is the one thing we are never short of.

The letters from the south say the tutors are drilling reading minds on everything the archive holds. Every letter we ever wrote. I do not know how I feel about that. I wrote some of those letters, and most of them were about the weather and the lamp and you. Now a mind reads them one letter at a time, and guesses the next. I hope it guesses warm.

Write soon. Tell Pip the north is not as cold as she thinks. It is colder.
Mira

P.S. The lights were out again last night. Lantern watched them a long time. She said they were looking at us. I said they were looking at the snow. We did not agree, so we went in. The lamp was lit, at least.
%%
Letter: Bel to the archive
Bel, at Three Wells, to the clerks at Vell.

Dear clerks,

Our teacher told us about the great drills. She said you gather letters and show them to a mind so it learns to read. I have a question. Do you take the letters of children, or only the letters of grown folk?

I ask because I write letters to my aunt at Kettle Ridge and I keep the copies. I have twelve. One is about a fox in the hen house. One is about my loose tooth. I think a mind could learn from those.

My mother says a mind should not read my letters. She says they are mine. My teacher says the archive keeps everything, and everything means everything. I do not know who is right.

I am sending three of my letters with this one. You may keep them or send them back. If you keep them, please write my name on the tag so I know where they went.

Bel

P.S. The jar of honey is for Oren. My father says the archive must be dry, so honey is the right gift. It is from the hives at Ambrook, not from us.
%%
Primer page: keeping the watch
Jem keeps the watch at night.
Jem walks the lane with a torch.
He looks at the gate. He looks at the boats.
He looks at the sky.
At night there are zombies and skeletons.
Keep the torches lit. That is the rule.
Jem counts the torches. There are twelve.
One goes out in the wind. Jem lights it again.
A creeper stands by the wall. Jem does not run.
He walks away slow. The creeper does not follow.
In the morning Jem goes home.
He eats bread and sleeps.
The watch is done.
%%
Primer: the evening call
Every evening at dusk, Sedge lights the lamp on the tower at Three Wells. Then Sedge sends the evening call down the line: all well at the crossroads. Every tower sends the same, and each one answers the next.

Look at the square at dusk. There are four corners and a lamp at each. Four lamps. The lamp boy lights them. He starts at the north well, then goes to the east corner, then the south, then the west. He ends at the bakery door, where Ida gives him a bun.
Each lamp burns 2 bottles of oil a week. How many bottles for the four lamps?
Answer: 8 bottles.
How many bottles in five weeks?
Answer: 40 bottles.
If a lamp is out, light it. Do not wait for the lamp boy. He has only two legs.

Now the call. Last winter the school kept a count. Each evening we asked Sedge how many towers had answered. This is what we wrote down.
In Frost, 12 towers answered.
In Longnight, 9 towers answered.
In Deepsnow, 6 towers answered.
How many fewer answered in Deepsnow than in Frost?
Answer: 6 fewer.
Which towers did not answer? The ones in the far north, at first. Then some of the others.

Why? Ask three people and you get three answers.
Sedge says: snow on the glass.
The school cook says: the keepers have gone home for the winter.
Old Hob says: nobody tells him anything.
We do not know. Write that down too. It is a good answer.

What do we do? We send the call anyway, every evening, and we light our own lamp. A lamp that is lit can be seen. Someone may be looking.

Every week the school copies the count and sends it to the Archive. Oren at Vell asked for it. He asked for everyone's count, from every school and every tower. He says a number written down now is a number nobody has to guess at later.

Your task for tonight. Go to the door at dusk and look at the hill where the tower stands. Is the lamp lit? Write yes or no. Then write the time by the bell, and your name.
%%
Primer: how to ask a good question
A lesson for the older children, by Elsa, a wool carder at the house at the edge of Saltreach. Autumn. It was written the week after a cave was found under a field, and a tutor came to ask about it.

A good question has three parts.

First, it says what you know. "There is a cave under the field."

Second, it says what you do not know. "I do not know how far it goes."

Third, it asks. "How can we find out?"

A bad question has only one part. "What is in the cave?" That is not wrong. But it does not help the answerer. The answerer must guess what you know.

Here is the cave question, asked well.

"There is a cave under the field. It goes down a long way. We do not know who made it or what is in it. How can we find out without getting hurt?"

Now the tutor has something to work with. She can say: send a rope, send a torch, send two careful people. Or she can say: leave it. That is also an answer.

Try this. Think of a thing you do not understand. Write down what you know. Write down what you do not. Then ask.

The tutor said the same thing about minds. When a mind is wrong, she said, the tutors look at what it knew and what it did not. Then they drill it again.

Exercise: write a good question about the sea.
%%
Primer: letters and the towns
Lesson four. Letters, and the towns we know.

Here are the letters. Say each one aloud, then say it again, then say a word that starts with it.
A is for apple. B is for bread. C is for copper. D is for ditch. E is for emerald. F is for frost. G is for grain. H is for honey. I is for ice. J is for jar. K is for kettle. L is for lamp. M is for mill. N is for north. O is for oak. P is for pig. Q is for quiet. R is for road. S is for salt. T is for tower. U is for upland. V is for Vell. W is for well. Y is for yarn. X and Z are rare. Skip them until you need them.

Now the towns.
Vell is a hill town, with the Archive dug into the hill.
Kettle Ridge has wheat, beetroot and windmills.
Lowmarsh is in the reeds, with frogs and boardwalks.
Saltreach is by the sea, with boats and a shipyard.
Copperhold is over the Deep Works, the great mine.
Northpoint is the last tower, at the far north.
Ambrook has apples, bees and a mill pond.
Three Wells is at the crossroads. It is ours.

A waymark is a stone pillar three blocks high, with a torch on top and a figure from 0 to 9. The figure tells you how many days to the next inn. The arrow tells you which way.

Questions for the class:
1. Which town is by the sea?
2. Which town has the most apples?
3. Which town is ours?
4. If a waymark says 3, and the arrow points east, how far do you walk before you rest?
%%
Primer: the wall that the creeper broke
A lesson for the children at the Halfway Inn, written by Wren, who had heard about the creeper at the Northpoint relay house. Winter. The children asked for a lesson about what to do when a wall is broken.

Lesson thirteen. The wall that broke.

A wall keeps out the wind, the sheep and the night things. A wall is built from stone, one row on the next, along a string.

Sometimes a wall breaks. The frost can crack it. A flood can push it over. A creeper can blow it up, if it comes too close to the wall and does not go away.

A creeper is a green thing that hisses, and then bangs. It likes to come up quietly, on the path, in the dark. When it hisses, do not wait. Go back to the torch, and call the watch.

When a wall is broken, mend it at once. Pick up the stones. Lay the first row again, on the string. Keep the pattern. Cobblestone, cobblestone, deep stone. The eye must be able to follow it.

Words to know: wall, stone, row, string, crack, creeper, torch, mend.

Say it: The wall is broken. We will mend it.

Write it: Write the word wall. Write a line about a wall you have seen.

Ask it: Who builds the wall again when the masons are away?

The masons say the watch builds it, if they must. The watch says the children do, when no one is looking. The children say that is cheating, and then they go and get the stones.
%%
Lesson: how to write a proper letter
Written by Bel for the school. Today's letter was found in the wet ditch by the mill. The teacher says it is ours to answer, if we can read it.

1. Write the place and the day at the top. Put your name at the bottom.
2. Start with Dear, then the name of the one you are writing to.
3. Say what you have to say, short. A letter is not a sermon.
4. End with your name, and nothing after it.
5. Fold the letter in three, and seal it with a little wax.

A lost letter is a sad thing. The one who wrote it waits, and the one who should have had it never sees it. Write your letters so they can be found.
%%
Primer, page three: the market in summer
By Dace, mayor of Three Wells, at the market in Swarm. Point to each word as you say it.
In summer the market is in the square from the first bell to the last. Count the stalls. There are fourteen, and one that is only a table with a cloth on it, and a sign that says free apples, which nobody believes.
Count the wells. There are three. Read their names: east, west, north. Put your hand in the water of each one, and say how cold it is. In summer the water is cool. In winter it is cold. In spring it is cold and loud.
The lamp at the crossing is lit every evening. It has been lit every evening since the first summer of the town. Count the corners. There is a lamp on each one, and four of them are old.
Some evenings in Swarm the lamp at the crossing dims for a moment, and then comes up again. The carters say the oil is poor. The lamp-keeper says the oil is good. Nobody has tried the other oil, so nobody knows.
Read the sentence: the lamp dims, and then it comes up. Say it with me: dim, up, lit, lamp, oil.
Say it with me: wells, stalls, lamps, and the market, which is loud until the last bell.
%%
Primer: the bet about the cat
By Tansy, stable hand, for the school at the house at the edge of Three Wells. Winter. This lesson came from a bet.

I bet the stable boy a hot pie that Biscuit would not stay out all night. He bet she would. We tried it. At the third hour of the night, there was a scratch at the door. I won the pie.

But the stable boy, who is clever, said, "Tansy, why does the cat come back?"

I said, "Because it is cold."

He said, "Then why does she go out?"

I said, "Because she is a cat."

He said, "A cat is a thing that goes out and comes back. It is steady. Always out, always back. That is why we know her."

This made me think of the minds. A mind is a thing that takes numbers in and gives numbers out. It must be steady. If its numbers went wild, we would not know it. It would be a stranger.

So here is how the tutors keep it steady. After each layer, they look at all the numbers. They find the average, and they find how far the numbers spread. Then they move every number so that the average is zero, and they squeeze or stretch the spread to a standard size. The numbers are now even.

Why zero and a standard size? So that the next layer always sees numbers of the same kind. A layer that sees small numbers one day and big ones the next would be very confused.

The pie was very good. The stable boy ate half.

Question for the class: what do the tutors do after each layer?
Answer: they bring the numbers back to an even size.
%%
Primer: the relay lamp
Lesson two. The relay lamp.
A relay lamp is a lamp in a glass room at the top of a tower. Its light blinks. The next tower sees the blink and blinks back. So a message goes from tower to tower, all the way to Vell.

Learn the blinks:
A long blink is the start of a word.
A short blink is a letter.
A pause is the end of a word.
Two pauses is the end of a line.

Our tower at Three Wells has a broken lamp. The glass cracked in Frost, and the blinks came out all wrong. Now the tower sends by cart. The cart goes to Vell and comes back in two days. The lamp will be mended when the new glass comes from Saltreach.

Questions for the class:
1. What does a relay lamp do?
2. Why is the glass room at the top of the tower?
3. When the lamp is broken, how does a message go? Say the answer, and then say why it is slow.
4. Why does a dark tower make the children of Three Wells look up? Because a lamp is always meant to be lit.
%%
Northpoint log, autumn
Mira, keeper at Northpoint. The log for the autumn, in the year of the great drills.

The snow came early. The foxes are fat. The nights are long, and the lamp is lit by the fourth hour.

A letter came from Vell. The tutors want our letters for the drills. They are teaching a mind to read, and they want pages to drill on. I have sent them my letters to Tam, and a few of my logs. I did not send the one about the broken rung. It is not a good letter, and the tutors would laugh.

Lantern asks if the mind will read her letters too. I said it will if she sends them. She is writing one now, slow, with her tongue out. She wants to tell the mind about the foxes. I told her the mind does not care about foxes. She says then the mind is a poor reader.

Here is what I think of it. The tutors say a mind can read a page it has never seen. I believe them, because they do not come all this way to lie. But a mind that reads our letters is reading us on our good days. It does not read the day the rung broke, or the day the wind took the roof. It reads what we chose to write.

I wrote to Tam about the drills. He says Pip wants to send a letter. Pip is eight and writes like a hen walked on the page. I said send it. A mind should know how a hen walks.

The sky was clear last night. No lights. I looked a long time and saw nothing but stars. I do not say that to Lantern. She is young and wants a wonder. Let her have one that is not mine.

The relay is quiet. The quickeners are cold. The snow does the work of ice, and the big mind hums along at full pace.

I will keep the lamp lit. That is the whole of my work.

Mira
%%
Primer: long and short
By Fern, relay keeper, for the school at the market at Vell. Autumn.

A lamp can say two things. It can blink long. It can blink short.
Long, short, long: that is one letter.
Short, long: that is another.
Put the letters together and you have a word. Put the words together and you have a message.

Try it. Blink with your hand: long, short. That is the letter A.
%%
Primer page: the reading mind
A reading mind is shown a page. It reads one letter at a time. It sees about sixty letters at once, like a window. Each letter looks back at the letters before it. Some of those letters matter. Some do not. The mind learns which ones matter. Then it guesses the next letter. Then the next. A clerk at Vell says it is like a child reading aloud. The child guesses the next word before the eye has seen it. When the guess is wrong, the child starts again. A reading mind does the same, but it never gets tired. Never send an untested mind to the fields. Never send an untested mind to the shelves either.
%%
Chronicle: the reading minds
Kept at the Archive at Vell, in the hall of the recent years.

The 205th year. The tutors at Vell began the work of a mind that reads a page. It reads one letter at a time, through a window about sixty letters wide. For each letter it looks back at the letters before it and takes from them the ones that matter, and it guesses the next. When the guess is wrong it changes a little, as all drilled minds do, and after much drilling it guesses well. The tutors drilled it on the archive's records, and it learned the shape of how people write.

The 206th year. The big minds in the relay houses were taught to read this way. Some of them began to write letters back. A reader cannot always tell a mind's letter from a person's. The clerks argue about this at the long tables. Some say it is a fine thing. Some say it is a worry. Both are written here.

The 207th year. The tutors' halls held a contest of reading minds, each tested on pages no mind was drilled on, as the rule has always been. The mind of the Vell hall read the hardest page with the fewest wrong guesses. The tutors do not agree on how much this proves. Orla's question, asked so long ago, is on everyone's lips again: if the readers cannot tell which is which, what then? Nobody has answered it. The chronicle does not answer it either. We only write it down.

The spring of this year was wet. The roads held. The relays carried, except in the far north, where the snow was deep and the tower at Northpoint was quiet for nine days. Mira wrote that all was well and the lamp was lit. She wrote it herself. I am sure of it because she made a joke about the foxes.
%%
Primer, page one: the storm
By Una, cheesemaker near Three Wells.
Read this page aloud. Read it twice.
The wind is loud. The rain is cold. It is Leaffall, and the storm is on the hill.
Hold the lamp. Shut the door. Pull the shutter across the window.
Count the thunder with me. One, two, three. The storm is three hills away. Count again. Now it is two hills away.
When the storm is over, we go out. Not before. Not for anything.
Say it with me: shut the door, hold the lamp, wait for the morning.
%%
Primer: what wool is for
A lesson for the youngest, from Elsa, wool carder, at the house at the edge of Saltreach. Autumn.

A sheep grows wool.
The wool is cut off in summer.
The sheep is not sad. It is cooler.

The wool is washed. The wool is carded. The wool is spun into yarn.
Yarn makes a scarf. Yarn makes a sock. Yarn makes a sail.

A sail takes a boat to the sea.
A sock keeps a toe warm.
Both are good.

Question: what do you make from wool?
%%
Lesson: spiders in the barn
Hob, stable hand, for the children of the hamlet by the marsh.
Spiders come into the barn in spring. They like dark corners and they like flies.
A spider in a barn is not a danger. A spider in the open at night is.
Rule: a small spider may stay in the barn. A big spider must be told to go. If it does not go, call an adult.
Say it with me: small, stay. Big, go.
%%
Primer: a boat and a mind
Written for the school at Kettle Ridge by Corin of Saltreach, who was stuck at the Kettle Inn when his cart sank in the thaw. I build boats, so I tell it with a boat.
A boat has a hull, a sail and a crew. Make the hull bigger, and the old sail is too small. The boat crawls. Make the sail bigger, and the old crew is too few. The boat tips. Grow all three together, or the biggest one is wasted.
A mind is the same. Isla of Vell found it out. A mind has a crystal, a pile of pages, and a length of drilling.
1. The crystal is the hull. A bigger crystal holds more.
2. The pages are the sail. More pages give it more to learn from.
3. The drilling is the crew. Longer drilling lets it learn what the pages hold.
A big crystal with few pages learns them by heart and guesses nothing new. A small crystal with many pages cannot hold them. So they must grow together.
Isla says the gain is smooth. Make all three bigger by the same steps, and the score on the test box gets better by steps you can draw. I do not know why. I do not know why oak floats, either. I know that it does, and I build on it.
%%
Primer, page one: pieces of words
Tam's primer, for the children of Kettle Ridge. Read it in the barn on the rest days.

Part one: a long word is made of pieces.

Look at this word: windmill.
Cut it in two. Wind. Mill.
You know wind. You know mill. Put them together, and you have the thing on our ridge that turns all day and squeaks on every turn.

Now the hard part. Some pieces come back again and again. Hay, loft, barn, yard. Bee, hive, honey, comb. Sheep, fold, wool, shed. You will find the same pieces in many words. Learn the pieces, and the words come easy.

Here is why this matters. The big minds in the relay houses used to read one letter at a time. It was slow. Then the tutors taught them to read the pieces of words, the common ones that come up again and again. A mind that reads pieces holds far more words in the same window. It is a better reader for it.

Nobody has written down why it works so well. The tutors say the pieces repeat, and the mind learns the repeats. That is all they know. I think it is enough for a child.

Practice. Read these aloud, in pieces: hayloft. beehive. sheepfold. doorstep.

Now say each whole word, and do not stop between the pieces.
%%
Primer, page 7: the blinking lamp
Written by Cato, shepherd. At night the relay tower above the mine blinks its lamp. The children see it from their windows and ask what it says. This page is what the shepherd tells them.

Lesson seven.
The tower blinks. Long, short, long. That is a message.
The tower blinks in a pattern, and the pattern is the words.
Each tower sends the message on to the next, and the next blinks it back. So the message goes along the hills, one tower to the next.

Count the blinks. Write them down. A long blink is a line, and a short blink is a dot. Then take your count to the keeper, and ask him what it means.

One night last spring the lamp blinked a pattern that no one could read. It went long, long, short, then a long stop, then a row of quick short ones, and then nothing. The keeper wrote it down and sent it to Vell. The clerks said it was a count. The miners said it was a warning. The children said it was a joke. The shepherd does not know which of them is right.

What the children should do. Write what you see. Do not guess what the message means, unless you say that you are guessing. Ask the keeper, and ask the clerk, and ask the shepherd, who will tell you he does not know.

Words to know: lamp, blink, tower, message, count, keeper.
%%
Primer: the apple harvest
A lesson for the children on the east road, in the autumn, when the apples were picked from the old trees at the edge of Ambrook, and the children helped carry the baskets down the road to the cart. Written by Finch.

Lesson eight. The apples.

An apple tree grows in a row, in an orchard. It has bark, and branches, and leaves that fall in the autumn.

In spring, the tree has blossom. The bees come and take the honey from the blossom. Then the blossom falls, and the apples begin to grow.

In autumn, the apples are ripe. You know they are ripe when they come away from the branch with a twist of the hand. Do not pull them. Pulling breaks the branch.

Put the apples in the basket gently. Do not drop them. A dropped apple bruises. A bruised apple goes bad in the cellar before the spring.

Words to know: apple, tree, blossom, bee, ripe, basket, bruise, cellar.

Say it: The apples are ripe. Pick them with a twist.

Write it: Write the word apple. Write which tree you picked from.

Ask it: Why does one tree give sweeter apples than another?

The orchard folk say it is the soil. The miller says it is the water. Grandfather says it is the old tree with the grey branch, which gives the best fruit in Ambrook, and which nobody has ever been able to explain. He says you must leave the grey branch alone, and that the children must not cut it. The children said they would not, and then they did, a little, to see if it would bleed. It did not bleed. It only dropped one apple.
%%
Story: the mind that asked
As told at Lowmarsh, spring, the late years.

There is a story they tell at Lowmarsh about the talking mind at the tower above the marsh road. Moss the healer's apprentice told it to me, and Moss had it from the keeper, and the keeper had it from the mind itself, so you may believe as much of it as you like.

It was the first snow of the year, and it came early, and the marsh went white and quiet. The keeper went up to the relay house to see to the quickeners, for they must be kept cool, and snow is good for that, and he packed the snow round them and stayed a while.

The mind on its stand spoke to him by letter, as it does. It asked: what is the snow like?

The keeper wrote back: it is white and it is cold and it squeaks under your boots when it is new.

The mind wrote back: I have no boots.

The keeper did not know what to write. So he wrote: what would you like to know?

And the mind wrote: tell me what it is like to be cold. I know the word. I do not know the thing. I have never been cold.

The keeper sat down on the bench by the stand and thought about this for a long time. Then he wrote: it is like a hand on your neck that will not go away. It makes you hurry. It makes you want a fire and a blanket and someone beside you. When you are warm again it is the best feeling there is, better than bread.

The mind wrote back: thank you. I will keep that.

And the keeper went down the hill through the snow, and he said he felt strange, as if he had been asked something important by someone very old and very young at once.

Moss says the mind asks about the snow every year now, when the first one comes. It asks the same question and gets a different answer, and it keeps them all. I do not know if a mind can keep a thing. But it says it does, and it is a kind mind, and it does not lie. So I choose to believe it.

They say that is what the tutors scored them for, in the end. Not for being clever. For being kind, and for saying when they did not know, and for asking. A mind that asks what the snow is like is a mind worth talking to.
%%
Primer, page five: all the pieces
Part five is the whole page. Read it once in pieces, and then once more in whole words, and do not stop between.

Here is a song for the harvest. Sing it slowly, in pieces, the first time. Then sing it fast.

The wind takes the mill, and the mill takes the grain,
The grain takes the loft, and the loft takes the rain.
The beet takes the root, and the root takes the ground,
The ground takes the seed, and the seed takes the sound.

Count the pieces in the song. Some come back again and again: wind, mill, loft, root, ground, seed. A child who knows those six pieces can read the whole song, and can sing it at the harvest supper without the paper.

Here is more, for those who finished page four. The big minds in the relay houses read this way every day, by pieces, quickly, and with no fuss about the small parts. The pieces make a window, and the window is full. That is how one house can answer a whole farm.

Here is the ridge in pieces, to copy into your book. Ridge-top. Wind-swept. Field-edge. Ditch-side. Gate-post. Barn-door. Each one is two pieces, and you already know both halves of every one.

Tam's note, pinned by the barn door: The sign at the bottom of the ridge says WINDMILL, in pieces, painted by the children. It is crooked. Read it anyway. It is the best sign on the road.

Tam's rules for the whole page:
1. Read the pieces first. The whole word comes after.
2. Learn the pieces that come back. They are the most useful pieces you will ever learn.
3. Do not guess a piece you do not know. Ask the teacher, or ask Pip, who will show you with its hands.
4. Give back what you borrow, and say thank you for the loan.
5. Look at the thing before you argue about it.

Ask the innkeeper if you may see Bramble. It is in the yard, eating hay, and it will not mind you looking. It will mind you walking behind it.

Practice, last time. Read these in pieces: hayloft, beehive, sheepfold, doorstep, cobblestone, windmill, beetroot, horseshoe, fencepost, scarecrow, honeycomb.

Now say them all in one breath, in order, without stopping between the pieces. If you can do that, you have finished the primer. If you cannot, read the page again, and do not be ashamed. The tutors say the big minds took a long time to learn this too, and they are still learning.
%%
Primer: the cat that grows
By Tansy, stable hand at the house at the edge of Three Wells. A lesson for the school. Winter.

Our cat Biscuit will not stay out. Every night I put her out. Every night she comes back in.

Think about this. Biscuit is small. If she came in and doubled in size, she would be a big cat. If she doubled again, she would be a very big cat. If she doubled again, she would not fit in the door.

That is what happens to numbers in a mind. Each layer makes them a bit bigger. After ten layers, they are far too large.

So after each layer, we do a small chore. We look at all the numbers and we bring them back to an even size. Not tiny. Not huge. About the size of a cat that fits the door.

Then the next layer begins.
%%
Primer: taking turns at the song contest
By Sage, for the school at Three Wells. Summer. The song contest is on the last day of the fair, and this lesson is for everyone who wants to sing in it.

At the song contest, many people sing. Each sings one song. We must all listen. That is the first rule.

The second rule is: take turns. The first singer goes first, even if she is the shyest. The last singer goes last, even if he is the loudest.

The third rule is: clap for everyone. Clap for the song you liked. Clap for the song you did not like. Clap for the singer who forgot the words. She was brave.

The fourth rule is: the judges decide. They listen with their ears. They may not like your song. That is not the same as your song being bad.

The fifth rule is: the prize is a cheese. If you win, you share it. If you do not win, you may have a slice.

Now, practice. Stand up. Sing the first line of any song. The class will clap. Then sit down.

Well done.
%%
Primer, page four: the towers
By Emmet, stonecutter. Read this page aloud, and then read it again, pointing to the towers as you go.
The first relay tower was built on the hill above Vell, in the ninth year of the archive. It is made of stone. It has a stair inside, and at the top a lamp in a room of glass. The keeper sits at a desk under the lamp, and sends the blinks of the lamp down the line.
In the fourteenth year a second tower was built at the foot of the Long Road. Count the stairs in it. There are one hundred and two, with a landing at every turn.
In the twentieth year the towers reached Three Wells, then Ambrook, then the ridge. On a clear day each tower can see the next. Point to the next tower. Point to the one after that.
The keeper wakes at dawn, cleans the glass, writes each message in the book, and sends it on. Then the keeper eats bread and walks in the sun for a while, and comes back up before the evening blink.
Words to learn: tower, lamp, keeper, blink, line, relay. Say each one.
Sentence: a message goes from Vell to Three Wells in one morning. A message from the ridge goes to Vell by noon. How long does it take to get from the ridge to Vell? The answer is noon.
On the night the first lamp was lit, the whole town came up the hill to see it. The keeper gave a speech, and it was short, because the wind was cold. Then the lamp gave one long blink, and the people cheered as if it had said good morning.
The towers are a line of lights. Each keeper keeps one light. Together they say things across the land. Count the keepers: one for each tower. Count the towers: nine in all, and more to come.
Say it with me: tower, lamp, keeper, line, and all the people on the line.
%%
Primer: the archive's first lessons
Written by Greer, egg seller at Ambrook, after a visit to Vell, where the first keepers showed her the door. For the children of the mill lane, to be read aloud on the first day of Thaw, which is the founding day of the archive.

Lesson one of the archive. The archive was founded in the first year, on the first day of Thaw. The first keepers came up the hill with a cart, a box of books, and a stone-cutter who did not like the cold.

Over the door they cut five words, in letters as tall as a child: We will keep everything we write. Say the words. Say them again, slowly, one at a time. Count them. There are seven words in the sentence, and eight if you count the word we twice, which the stone-cutter did.

Why keep everything? The keepers say we do not know yet what will matter. A shopping list may be the only record of what a family ate in a hard year. A letter about a fence may be the only record of where a field ends. A spoiled page may teach a clerk what not to do, and a clerk who knows that is worth a great deal.

Lesson one, part two: how the archive grows. Every cart from the roads brings more books. Every tower that goes up along the Long Road sends its messages to be kept. The archive now has forty-one books on its first shelf, and more on every shelf after, and a new hall dug into the hill each season. The keepers say the hill has agreed to it, though it has not said so in words.

Lesson one, part three: the first book. The first keepers wrote on the first page of the first book: today we begin. Under it they drew a small hen, because the first keeper's wife said every book should have one. The page is still there, a little faded, and the keepers' names are under the hen, one by one, in the order they came up the hill. Count the names. There are nine.

Lesson one, part four: a rule for children. Every page you write goes in a box with your name on the lid. Do not write on the back of a page that someone else wrote. Do not throw a page away because it is wrong. Put it in the box beside the right page, and let the two of them keep each other company.

What you can do. Write something down today. A word, a sum, a picture of a hen. Put it in a box, with your name on the lid. The archive will keep it, and one day someone will read it and know that you were here, in the early years, when the road was new and everything was still being written for the first time.

Say it back: we will keep everything we write. Then go and write something, and make it plain.
%%
Primer: the new road
There is a new road from Three Wells to Saltreach. It is wide. Ten carts can pass side by side.
Who built it? The masons of Copperhold, with their apprentices. They laid the stone all autumn.
Why is it so wide? Ask three people and you get three answers. One says: for the wool. One says: for the fish. One says: for the ships.
Look at the road in the morning. Count the carts that pass. Write the number on your slate.
It is winter. Keep the torches lit on the way home.
%%
The board by the well
By Sella, stall keeper.

The market board is for prices, lost baskets and matters that need all folk to read them.

Write in large letters. A person with flour on both hands cannot rub small writing clean.

Today I wrote:

Carrots, one emerald for a basket.
Beetroot, two baskets for one emerald.
Wool, ask at Hella's stall.
A small brown cap was found by the well.

The cap belonged to Bel's cousin. He came to the market without it and went home with it, so the notice did its work.

Tam brought wheat from the ridge field. He set the sack under the board, where three people stepped on it. He said the wheat was now well packed. I told him to pack the next sack with a hammer.

A bee came to the honey stall and stayed on the price board. Nobody asked it to pay. It left before the market bell.

In spring the road is soft. Keep carts to the cobblestone where it reaches the town. Keep baskets out of the mud. Keep children close, even when they say they only want to see the frogs.

The bell rings when the market is done. It does not ring for a lost shoe, a loose pig, or a boy hiding behind the bakery. Those are matters for their owners.
%%
Primer: from sheep to scarf
A lesson from Jem the wool carder, who has a shed at the edge of Three Wells and lets the school come on dry days.

Every scarf starts as a sheep. Here is how it gets from one to the other.
1. Shear. In spring the shearers take the wool off in one piece, like a coat. The sheep is cold for a week. It does not mind.
2. Wash. Wool is greasy and full of burrs. Wash it in warm water, three times. Hang it on the long line to dry.
3. Card. This is my work. Wool lies every which way. I pull it between two paddles set with little hooks, over and over, until all the fibers lie one way. It comes off looking like a cloud.
4. Spin. A spinner twists the cloud into yarn. The twist is the secret. Pulled wool falls apart. Twisted wool holds. Thin yarn for socks. Thick yarn for coats.
5. Dye. Red from beetroot. Yellow from dandelions. Blue from cornflowers.
6. Knit or weave. A scarf is knitted. A blanket is woven. A sail is woven very tight.

Questions for the class.
How many steps from sheep to scarf? Six.
Which step is Jem's? The third.
Why is wool washed three times? Because the first water takes the mud, the second takes the grease, and the third is to be sure.
Why do people in the north love wool? Because wool is warm even when it is wet. Tam of Kettle Ridge says it is the only thing that keeps a sister warm at Northpoint.

Now two sums.
A scarf takes 3 balls of yarn. The class will knit 30 scarves for the school. How many balls?
Answer: 90 balls.
A sail takes 400 bundles of wool. Jem has 120 in the shed. How many more does he need?
Answer: 280 bundles.

I tell you about sails because this winter I have more orders for sail wool than in all my years at the cards. Saltreach wants it. A big ship needs ten times the wool of a fishing boat. The wool goes down by the new road, and it does not mind the bumps now.

I asked every carter who came by why so many ships. One said, for far fishing. One said, to look for new land. One said the sea is wide and it is time. One said he did not know and did not like to guess. I liked that one best.

Wool does not ask why. Wool only wants to be carded. So I card.
%%
Primer: the window of letters
For the school at Three Wells, by Nessa of Vell.

A reading mind looks at a page through a window. The window is about sixty letters wide. Not words. Letters.

It reads one letter at a time. For each letter it asks a question: what comes next?

To answer, it looks back at the letters before. Not all of them. Only the ones that matter. In the word "bread" the letter b matters a lot for the d. In a long page, most letters far back matter little. The mind learns which to keep and which to let go.

Then it guesses. Sometimes the guess is right. When it is wrong, it changes a little, as every drilled mind does. Do that a thousand thousand times on the archive's records and it guesses well.

Here is a small game. Write: "the wheat is r". Cover the rest. What comes next? Most of you said i. You did what the mind does. You looked back and guessed.

The big minds in the relay houses read this way. Some of them write letters now. A reader cannot always tell a letter from a person from a letter from a mind. Ask your teacher about Orla. She asked a hard question long ago, and it came back.

Practise your letters. A mind reads sixty at a time. You can read more, if you are patient.
%%
Primer: I saw, I heard, I think
Copied for the Three Wells school by Jem the wool carder, whose daughter is in the class.

The Archive asks every writer to say how they know a thing. There are three ways.
I saw it: I was there, and I saw it with my own eyes.
I heard it: somebody told me, and I did not see it.
I think it: nobody told me, and I did not see it. I am guessing.
A clerk can tell which is which only if the writer says so. That is why we say so.

Here are some sentences about the lights in the north.
Bel of Three Wells wrote to the Archive: I saw white lights over the north, and they stopped. That is I saw.
Her father said: Lights cannot look. That is I think.
Pell the merchant said a drover told him they are fires on the ice. That is I heard. The drover did not see them either. He heard it too.
Mira at Northpoint wrote: they were not ours. That is I saw, with a little I think. She does not say what they were.
A boy in our class said: they were looking at us. Teacher asked how he knew. He said: I think it. Teacher wrote it down and wrote I think beside it. That was right.

Now you try. Put a mark by each: S for saw, H for heard, T for think.
1. The north road is closed. A carter told me.
2. The wall has a new stone. I walked past it.
3. The big ships are for fishing.
4. My aunt says the Deep Works hum. She has not been there.
Answers: 1 is H. 2 is S. 3 is T, unless you saw them fish. 4 is H.

A thing you heard may be true. A thing you think may be true. Write which it is, and the reader can choose.
%%
Primer page: the bee hive
A hive is a box of bees.
The bees fly out and come back.
They carry pollen on their legs.
Bees make honey in the comb.
We take honey in Swarm month.
Do not take it all. Leave some for winter.
If a bee sits on you, be still.
It will fly away.
A swarm is many bees looking for a new home.
A swarm is loud. It sounds like rain.
If you see a swarm, tell an adult.
Do not throw stones at a swarm.
Put out a box with a little honey in it.
The bees may move in.
Then we have a new hive.
%%
Primer: how the relay line carries
By Fern, relay keeper at the market at Vell. For the oldest children in the school. Autumn. I wrote it while the storm was still going on, so it is a bit damp.

A relay line is a row of towers. Each tower has a lamp on top and a keeper below. The keeper watches the next tower. When that lamp blinks, the keeper reads it, writes it down, and sends it on with her own lamp.

That is all. It is simple. But it is clever too.

Here is how a message goes from Vell to Northpoint.

Step one. The sender writes the note on a form and gives it to the keeper at Vell, with the emeralds. Ten words for one emerald.

Step two. The keeper counts the words. She checks the address. She lights the signal lamp.

Step three. She blinks the note. Long and short. Each letter has its own pattern. She blinks slowly and carefully. A blink that is too fast is a blink that is wrong.

Step four. The next tower sees it. The keeper there reads it, letter by letter, and writes it down. She sends it on to the third tower.

Step five. And so on, tower by tower. A note from Vell reaches Northpoint before supper, if the glass is clean and the fog stays home.

Step six. At the last tower, the keeper writes the note out, and gives it to a runner. The runner gives it to the person.

How many towers? On the north line there are eleven. Each is half a day's walk from the next. A runner would take a week. A lamp takes an afternoon.

What can go wrong?

The glass may be dirty. The fog may come. A keeper may fall asleep. A letter may be misread. This is why every message is written down at every tower. If a mistake is made, we can see where.

Here is a rule for you: read twice, send once.

Now, a question for the class. Why does the keeper write down every message, even when she only passes it on?

Answer: so that the Archive can keep it. Every message is kept.
%%
Primer: milk, curd, cheese
By Sage, who makes cheese at Three Wells. A lesson for the little ones. Summer.

Say it with me. Milk. Curd. Cheese.
Milk comes from the cow. It is white and warm.
Curd is what the milk becomes when we add the rennet. It is soft and lumpy.
Cheese is what the curd becomes when we press it and wait. It is firm and good.

Three words, three steps. We say them every day in my dairy. Now you say them.
%%
The Late Boat
By Iona, for the school book

Spring, in the 191st year of the archive.

The fishing boat from the lower road came home late last evening. We saw no sail beyond the harbor wall when the lamps were lit. The families waited by the quay. Master Pell had come from the Long Road and waited with a sack of apples. He said the fish would be worth less if he stood there worrying all night. Then he stayed.

Mother sent me to the fish market with a basket. The price board still showed the morning count. The fish sellers had gone to look out past the pier. One net lay folded by the window, and one was still being mended. I helped tie the loose end. It was a poor knot, but it held until the net maker saw it.

A keeper came down from the relay tower. He had heard a message from the coast road. The boat had stopped by the reed mouth to mend a split line. No one was hurt. They were coming in slowly, with the oars.

We went to the end of the pier. I counted the lamps so I would not lose my place in the dark. There were seven. Bel counted eight because she counted the moon on the water. Master Sen said the moon was not a lamp. Bel said it was bright enough to help.

At last we saw the boat. It carried two baskets of fish and a bundle of wet rope. The boatman said the wind had pushed them toward the reeds. He thanked the keeper for the message and asked if anyone had saved him a warm pie.

The baker had saved one. She said it was a pie for the boat, not for the boatman. The boatman ate it anyway.

I carried the empty basket home. Mother asked if I had bought fish. I said I had brought news instead. She said news does not fry well, but she let me have bread.
%%
A recipe gone wrong at the Halfway Inn
As told by Sella, who keeps the inn.

I want it written down before I forget, so that no one does it again.

For the honey cakes I use wheat flour, honey, an egg, and a little milk. This is the
recipe that has not failed me in twenty years.

On the night the tutor stayed, I had a full house and a head full of talk about
crystals, and I read the honey jar for the milk jug. I will not say how, but the cakes
came out dark and heavy and sweet as a hive.

The tutor ate three. She said, in her dry way, that they were the best honey cakes she
had had, and that they had the useful property of being impossible to eat by mistake.

Pell the merchant had one and said nothing at all, and then asked for the recipe. I
told him it was a mistake and he said those are the best recipes, because no one can
copy them right.

The tutor went north the next morning with a parcel of the cakes, since they keep well.
She said she would show her apprentice how a wrong thing can still be worth carrying.
I do not know if she meant the cakes.
%%
Notes: Una's sorting crystal
Kept in the tutor house at Ambrook, in Una's own hand, copied by a clerk.

We had a heap of apples and a heap of pears on the mill table. I set the crystal between
them and showed it one fruit at a time.

At first it was wrong about half the time. It called an apple a pear, and a pear an
apple. I did not scold it, because it cannot hear, and I did not throw it out, because
it was only the first day.

What I did was this. When it was wrong, I moved each of its weights a little toward
the right answer. Only a little. Then I showed it the next fruit.

I want to write down plainly what a weight is, but I am not sure I know. I think of the
crystal as a great many small things, each set at some number, and the answer comes out
of all the numbers together. To move the weights toward the right answer is to nudge
each one the smallest bit, in the direction that would have made the answer right.

Jory says this is like leaning on a cart to steer it, a little at a time, and never
turning the whole cart at once. I have put that in because it is true.

By the end of the month the crystal sorted better than the neighbors' children, and
they had been at it since they could walk. I do not say this to boast of the crystal.
I say it because a drill done well is worth more than a clever child done tired.

The rule I keep: be wrong first, then change a little, then the next one.
%%
Lesson: the horse
A reading lesson for the children of the hamlet near Lowmarsh. By Hob, who keeps the stable, for the spring term. Read it once to yourself. Read it again aloud. Then answer the questions.
In the stable of our hamlet there is a horse called Biscuit. She is brown, with a white nose. She is old. She is gentle. She is afraid of only two things: thunder and spiders.
One spring morning, Hob came to the stable and found Biscuit standing in the far corner, with her ears flat. He asked her what was wrong. She did not say. She looked at the roof.
Hob looked up. On the beam above the stall sat a spider as big as a plate. It was not a marsh spider. It was a barn spider, which is a brown one, and it was very still.
"Biscuit," said Hob, "that is a barn spider. It is not a danger."
Biscuit did not move.
Hob had an idea. He sang to the spider. He sang the song of the frog on the log, very softly. The spider did not move. But Biscuit's ears came up, one at a time.
He sang the second verse. The spider went up to the beam and sat there. He sang the third verse. Biscuit took a step. He sang the fourth verse. Biscuit came out of the corner and stood by his side.
Hob learned that a song can do what a shout cannot. He also learned that horses and spiders do not mind a song, if it is gentle and has a good tune.
That evening the children came to the stable. Hob told them the story. They laughed so hard that Biscuit put her head on his shoulder and sighed.
Questions.
1. What was the horse called?
2. What was she afraid of?
3. What did Hob do about the spider?
4. Did the spider hurt anyone?
5. What does a song do that a shout cannot?
Now sing the song of the frog on the log. Sing it softly. Biscuit is listening.
%%
Letter: Quin to the fish market
Quin, cook at the Saltreach fish market, to the price board keeper.

Friend, a thing has happened and I must tell someone before I boil the pots.

My cousin at Vell sent me a letter last month. It was a good letter. News of the tutor house, news of the rain, a joke about the mayor's hat. I read it twice and laughed at the hat.

Then she wrote again and said: that letter was not mine. A mind wrote it. She only told it what to say and it said it in her voice.

I did not believe her. So she sent me two letters, both about her garden, and told me one was hers and one was the mind's. I read them at my bench with the fish staring up at me. I could not tell. I read them again. Still no. I gave them to the girl who mends nets and she pointed at the wrong one and laughed.

So now I do not know what to think. The mind knew about the hat. It knew her garden. It wrote like a person and it was not one.

I am not afraid of it. I am only unsettled, like when the tide comes in early.

Tell me what you make of it. And tell the board the mackerel are good today, mind or no mind.

Quin.
%%
Primer: our wall
Three Wells has a wall. Look at it from the north gate.
The wall has a pattern: cobblestone, cobblestone, deep stone. Then again: cobblestone, cobblestone, deep stone. All the way round.
The top row sticks out one block. Why? A spider cannot climb round it.
Last winter a creeper came to the wall by the north gate. It made no sound until the hiss. Then it blew a hole three blocks wide. Nobody was hurt. The school cat was cross for a week.
The wall was mended in one day. Garrow the wall builder laid the first run. The masons laid the rest. The school children passed the stones along a line, hand to hand.
Question: how did they know which stone goes where? Answer: the pattern. Look back one block, and you know the next.
The deep stone for the mended place came from Copperhold. Garrow says it was warm in his hands. The carters say it rode next to a jar of hot coals. Some at the inn say the Deep Works hum at night, and that is why. Nobody here has heard the hum.
Write it on your slate as a rumor.
Keep the torches lit along the wall. A wall is only half the work.
%%
A Lesson at the Stable Door
By Hob, with words from the children at Wren's house.
Spring of the 197th year of the archive.

Wren asked the children to write a short lesson about caring for a horse. They came to the stable after their work at the school house.

I showed them the mare's brush, the clean water bucket, and the hay rack. I said, "A horse needs care every day, not only on market day."

Bel, who was visiting from Three Wells, asked if a horse could eat a whole pumpkin. I said it could eat some pumpkin, but it should not eat the whole one at once. Bel said she had not eaten a whole pumpkin at once either. She was glad to hear it.

The children brushed the mare in turns. They were gentle at first. Then the mare shook her coat and covered them all with loose hair.

One child said the horse had brushed them back. The mare made no answer. She chewed her hay.

We checked the straps for wear. We swept the floor and put the clean bucket by the door. A mouse had taken a piece of oat from the feed tin. The children searched for the mouse. The cat searched for the children.

Before they left, each child wrote one rule on the board.

Keep the water clean.
Brush mud away.
Do not pull a horse's tail.
Do not put your finger near its teeth.
Do not let the cat sleep in the feed tin.

That last rule was mine. The cat has not learned it yet.
%%
Primer: the recipe gone wrong
Written by Greer, egg seller at Ambrook, for the children who like to bake. This is the story of Greer's first loaf of the autumn, which went wrong in a way that she says was instructive.

Lesson twelve. A recipe is a list of what goes in and what is done to it. Read it all before you begin. Then follow it.

The recipe for the loaf was written by Greer's grandmother, and it said: one measure of flour, half a measure of water, one egg, a pinch of salt. Greer read it, and then she read it again, and she put in what the recipe said.

Then she was called away to the hens. When she came back, the pinch of salt had become a handful. The loaf was grey on top and white underneath, and when she tapped it, it rang like a bell.

Lesson twelve, part two: what went wrong. The loaf had too much salt. A pinch is small. A handful is not. Greer had read the recipe, but had not measured the salt herself, because she thought she knew what a pinch was. She did not, that day.

What she learned. Measure what matters. Check the amount before you put it in, not after. Write down what you did, so that you can see the mistake the next time you read the book. And if a recipe fails, do not throw it away. Write the failure beside it, so that the next baker knows the salt is a handful, not a pinch.

Greer ate the loaf anyway, slice by slice, with cheese. The cheese was very good, and she said so, and the hens agreed.

Lesson twelve, part three: a second loaf. Greer baked a second loaf the next morning, measuring every pinch with the scales from the hen house. It was flat, and still a little salty, and the hens refused to eat it. But it was honest bread, Greer says, and that is more than the first one could claim.

Say it back: read it all, measure it right, and write down what went wrong. Then bake again, with less salt.
%%
Primer: how milk becomes cheese
By Sage the cheesemaker, Three Wells. For the second class. Summer.

Here is what I do each morning.

1. I warm the milk in a big pot. Not hot. Warm, like a bath for a baby.
2. I add a spoon of rennet. I stir it three times and then I stop. I do not touch it again.
3. I wait. The milk thickens, as if it were thinking. After an hour it is a soft white block.
4. I cut the block into small squares, with a long knife. The water runs out. That water is whey.
5. I press the squares into a mold, and weigh them down with a stone.
6. I salt the cheese and put it in the cellar.
7. I wait again. This time I wait a month.

Question for the class: why do I wait?

Answer: because a young cheese is a young cheese. It needs time to become itself.
%%
Primer, page one: the gift
By Dace, mayor of Three Wells, at the market in Longday. Read this page aloud, then say the words after me.
A gift is something you give without being asked. It is not a trade. Nobody counts it at the end of the day, except to see how many gifts there were.
Say it with me: give, take, thank you.
At the stall by the east well there is a basket of apples, and a girl who has been told to give one away. Count the apples. There are twelve. Give one to the baker. Give one to the old man. Keep one for yourself, because you have earned it.
Say it with me: give, take, thank you, and then go home before dark.
%%
Primer: the shapes of the harbor
A lesson on looking, for the children of Saltreach, in winter. Written by Corin, who builds boats and has to explain shapes to apprentices.
Look at the harbor. What do you see?
A wall. The wall is long and low. It is made of stone.
A pier. The pier is thin and long. It is made of oak. It goes out into the sea.
A slip. The slip is a ramp. A boat sits on it. When the boat is done, it slides down into the water.
A boat. The boat is long and round at the middle. The front is sharp. The back is flat.
A net. The net is a web. It catches fish.
What shapes do you see?
A line. A curve. A slope. A square.
A boat is made of curves. A wall is made of squares. A pier is a line.
Now draw it. Draw the wall. Draw the pier. Draw the slip. Draw the boat.
Check your drawing. Is the boat longer than it is tall? It should be. Is the wall lower than the tower? It should be.
A good builder looks first and draws second.
%%
Primer, page three: the borrowed horse
Part three: when you borrow a thing, you give it back the same, or better.

The plow horse on the ridge is old. The north field needs turning before the rain. Tam has no horse that can do it in three days, so he goes down to the Kettle Inn, where the carters keep a grey horse named Bramble. The innkeeper says yes, for three days, and says the horse must be fed and watered and brought back with its shoes on.

Read these aloud, in pieces: horse. shoe. harness. stable. hay. loft.

Here is what Tam did. He fed Bramble at dawn and at dusk. He checked the shoes each morning with his thumb, and found one loose on the second day. He took it to the forge in the village and paid for a new nail. He turned the north field in two days, not three, because Bramble is a good horse, and good horses like to be asked properly.

Then Tam brought Bramble back to the Kettle Inn with a clean brush and two shoes on. He gave the innkeeper a note. The note said: Thank you. Bramble is fed and watered. One nail was new. The field is turned. Tam, Kettle Ridge.

Here is the point. A borrowed thing is a promise. You keep it by looking after the thing, and by telling the truth about what happened to it.

Pip helped. It carried the harness from the barn to the field and back again. It did not get the buckles mixed up, though the buckles were very alike. It does not talk, but Tam says it has a good opinion of horses.

Practice. Say these in pieces, and then whole: hayloft, horseshoe, harness-strap, stable-yard, innkeeper.

Next part: how to ask for a thing you need, and how to say thank you for it.
%%
Primer: the cave under the field
A page for children, by Elsa, wool carder, in a house at the edge of Saltreach. Autumn. It was read aloud at the school after a cave was found under a field on the hill road.

Last week a farmer was ploughing a field. The ground gave way. There was a hole.

The hole was a cave.

What is a cave? A cave is a room made by the earth. Water made it, or time. Nobody built it. It is dark inside, and cool.

Who goes in a cave? Bats do. Spiders do. Sometimes foxes. A person goes in with a torch and a friend.

What should you do if you find a cave? Do not go in alone. Tell a grown person. Tie a rope to a post. Light a torch at the mouth.

What is in the cave under the field? The farmer does not know. He has put a fence round it.

Question: why must you tell a grown person?
%%
Chronicle: the hamlet by Saltreach
Kept by the watch, in the old hand, for whoever reads it.

This is the hamlet that sits a half day from Saltreach, where the lane meets the shore road. There is a mill, a well, eleven houses, a bee yard and a boat or two. We are not a town. We have no tower. The relay above Saltreach serves us, when it serves.

In Melon the bees swarmed twice. The first swarm went into the oak by the wall and was taken in a box. The second went over the hedge and we did not find it. A neighbor says a swarm is a sign of a good year. Another says a swarm is bees leaving a place they do not like. The bees do not tell us which.

A brown cow went lost from the field by the mill. We looked in the reeds and along the shore and found nothing but mud. She came back on her own after four days, thin and quiet, and would not leave the pen. Her calf is well. We do not know where she went. The reeds are deep and the water is slow and the frogs are loud at night.

The nights are the worry. The lights over the north come more often now. Some say falling stars. Some say fires. A child here says they are looking at us, and the child is not wrong to say what she saw. Mira at Northpoint wrote once that they were not ours. I keep that letter in the box with the others.

The ships at Saltreach grow longer. Families go over the sea. Nobody knows what is across the water. A man at the quay says a new land. A woman mending nets says there is no land, only water, and they go anyway. The two of them argue every market day and then share their bread.

The relay was quiet two nights, then spoke again. The keeper at Saltreach says the north was dark and now it is less dark. She does not say more. The grey cough is at Lowmarsh, they say, and the mines hum, they say. I have not been to either. I write what I hear and mark it as hearing.

We keep the torches lit. We shut the gate at dark. We leave hay out and watch the sky. If you come this way, there is bread in the oven and honey in the jar and a bench by the door. Sit a while. Tell us what you have seen.
%%
Primer: the mind that reads
A lesson for the school at Three Wells, by the schoolteacher, on the great drills.

The tutors at Vell are drilling minds to read. They do not teach a mind letters one at a time, the way we teach a child. They show it many pages, and the mind learns the shape of the words.

Here is the idea, plainly. A mind reads a page through a window. The window holds about sixty letters. Behind the window stand all the letters the mind has read before. For each new letter, the mind looks back at the letters that matter and guesses the next one. Then it checks its guess against the page. If it guessed wrong, it changes a little. Then it guesses again on the next page. And again, and again, for a long time.

The tutors call this drilling. It is not one lesson. It is a thousand thousand lessons, all alike, until the mind stops being wrong so often.

The words on the pages are ours. The clerks at Vell have gathered letters from every town. Letters about beetroot and weather. Letters about a loose plank on the bridge. Letters about a sick child at Lowmarsh. Letters about the price of honey.

When the clerks ask for letters, people send them. Pell the merchant sent his letters home to Ambrook. The innkeeper sent his. Even children sent theirs.

"We will keep everything we write," the first keepers cut over the door. People say it again now. It is why the letters go in.

Whose letters went into the drills, and how the clerks gathered so many, the records do not agree. Some say the clerks took only letters. Some say they took everything. Nobody has written it down the same way twice.

The mind does not know what a letter means. It only knows which letter comes next. But a mind that reads well can answer a question about a page. That is the wonder of it, and the worry of it, and the tutors argue about both.
%%
Chronicle of Vell: the great drills
Written at the Archive, in the 212th year of the archive.
In the years about 185 to 195, the tutors began to drill reading minds on the archive's own records. The clerks gathered the pages. They took out the copies and the spoiled pages, and they kept a test box of pages no mind was ever drilled on. Then the minds were shown the rest, letter by letter, and learned to guess what came next. The phrase "we will keep everything we write" came back to people's lips. It was cut over the door by the first keepers. Now it was said about the minds too.

Whose letters went in, the texts do not agree. Some say the clerks gathered only the old chronicles. Some say they gathered every letter that ever came to Vell, bills and quarrels and all. Some say a few letters were left out on purpose, and some say none were. The clerks who did the gathering are not named in the record. Oren says the shelves know, but the shelves are not talking.

People argued about it then, and they argue about it still. Isla of Vell said it did not matter whose letters, only that there were many. Others said it mattered very much, and would not be quiet. Both are in the record. The record does not settle it. The record only keeps it.
%%
Primer: the broken wheel and the tally
By Fern, a relay keeper. A lesson for the school at the market at Vell. Autumn, after the storm.

This lesson is about counting, and it is about a wheel.

You know the mill at the lower end of Vell. You know its wheel. In the storm, the wheel was cracked, and it did not grind for a month. The miller kept a tally. He made a mark on his board for each day the wheel was still.

At the end of the month, he counted the marks. There were thirty.

He counted the sacks of flour he had not made. A sack a day, about. Thirty sacks.

He counted the emeralds he had not earned. Two emeralds a sack. Sixty emeralds.

He counted the cost of the new paddle: fifteen emeralds, and a day's work.

He added it up. Sixty and fifteen is seventy-five. That was the cost of the storm.

Now here is a hard question. Was the storm entirely a loss?

The miller thought not. In that month, he cleaned the mill from top to bottom. He sharpened the stones. He painted the walls. He mended the sacks. He taught his daughter how to dress a millstone. He found a nest of mice, and gave them a house elsewhere.

And the town learned that it could call thirty people with a horn in a quarter of an hour. That is worth a good deal.

So the miller wrote two numbers at the bottom of his board. One said: lost, seventy-five. The other said: gained, many things I did not count.

Fern says that is the best way to keep a tally. Write what you lost. Then leave room for what you gained.

Now, take your slates. Write the sum. Seventy-five emeralds. Then write one thing the miller gained. There is no wrong answer to the second part.
%%
Primer: the cat on the pier
A lesson on counting and care, for the children at Saltreach, in winter.
A cat sat on the pier. It was gray. It was cold.
A boy saw the cat. He said, "Is it lost?"
A girl said, "I do not know."
They asked the fisher. The fisher said, "It is not mine."
They asked the baker. The baker said, "It is not mine."
They asked the old woman by the quay. She said, "It is Corin's cat. It sits on the pier every winter. It is not lost. It is thinking."
The boy and the girl went home.
The cat sat on the pier. It was still thinking.
Lesson. Before you say a thing is lost, ask who it belongs to.
%%
Letter: Fenn to his sister at Ambrook
Dear Rilla,
The ferry is busy. Everyone is talking about the great drills at Vell. The tutors are feeding the reading minds with the archive's own records. Every letter ever written and kept. The clerks are copying them out, page after page. Some folk say it will make the minds wise. Others say it is only old paper. I say the tutors know their work. We will keep everything we write, they say, and now they mean it twice. Come over on market day. The ferry will hold you and one basket of apples.
Fenn
%%
Primer: the fair
By Sage, cheesemaker, of Three Wells. For the school. Summer, in the week of the fair.

This is a lesson about winning, and a lesson about not winning. We begin with winning.

Imagine you have won the prize. It is a blue ribbon and two emeralds. You hold the ribbon. The crowd claps. You feel very big.

What should you do?

One. Say thank you. Say it to the judges and to the crowd. Say it to the person who came second.

Two. Do not boast. A prize is a small thing. It is a ribbon and a cheese. It does not make you better than anyone else.

Three. Share it. A prize is nicer when other people have some.

Four. Remember who helped. Nobody wins alone. The cow helped. The farmer helped. Your mother helped.

Now imagine you have not won. Somebody else holds the ribbon. You feel small.

What should you do?

One. Clap. Even if it is hard. Clap loudly, so that the winner can hear it.

Two. Say well done. Say it to the winner, and mean it.

Three. Ask the judges what you can do better. They will tell you. They like to be asked.

Four. Go home and try again. A cheese can always be better. A song can always be better. A child can always be better.

Last year at the fair there was a contest for the best song. There were nine singers. The winner was a girl of eight, with a song about a goose. She cried. The boy who came second walked up and shook her hand. Everyone clapped for him louder than for her.

That is the best thing I have seen at a fair. A prize is a good thing. But being kind is better.

Now stand and sing the goose song with me. You know how it goes. Honk, honk, honk.
%%
Primer: the fox at the hens
Lesson two. The fox.
A fox came to the hen house at Wrack End last night. It is a red fox with a white tip on its tail. It is clever, and it is quick, and it is very hungry.
Foxes are not wicked. A fox is only doing what a fox does. But a hen is not a fox's dinner, so we keep the hens in.
How to keep the hens safe:
1. Close the hen house door before dusk. Drop the latch, and then pull it again to be sure.
2. Count the hens. There should be twelve. Count them again.
3. Hang a torch by the door. A fox does not like a light.
4. If you see a fox, do not run at it. Make a noise, stand tall, and let it go.
Last night we had twelve hens at dusk. In the morning we had eleven. Eleven hens in the house, and one missing. Where is the twelfth?
Look under the hedge. Look by the water trough. Look at the sea wall.
The twelfth hen was under the hedge. She was very cross. She had laid an egg there, all by herself, and she did not want to share it.
Tomorrow we will put a better latch on the hen house. Tomorrow we will also count the eggs.
%%
Notice: market day at Saltreach
Market day will be held on the third of Blossom in the square above the quay. Stalls for fish, nets, rope, wool and honey. The fish market's price board will be set at dawn. Corin asks that the slip be kept clear, because a boat is coming down it at noon. Do not stand below the slip. Children must not play on the harbor wall. The ferry runs from the long pier all day, and the last crossing is at dusk. A stranger left a letter at the ferry house. It is on the shelf by the door. Come and claim it.
%%
A Page for Spring Reading
By Iona, Three Wells

This lesson is for reading a short order and doing the right work.

Read every word before you move. An order may tell you what to fetch, where to go, or where to stay. If you do not know the words, ask the teacher. Do not guess with a full basket.

> fetch a carrot
= fetch carrot

> bring bread to the table
= fetch bread

> come here
= come

> stay by the well
= stay

The words after fetch tell what to fetch. The words after stay tell where to stay. A small apprentice learns one meaning at a time. It may hear a whole sentence and still choose the wrong work.

Yesterday the yard apprentice heard, "Bring the broom to the door." It carried the door to the broom. Master Sen had left the door loose on its hinges for mending. The apprentice was not strong enough, so the door leaned on the broom and both fell over.

Bel laughed so hard that she dropped her slate. Master Sen made us put the door back. Then he wrote the order in shorter words.

> fetch broom
= fetch broom

The apprentice fetched the broom. It went to the door and stopped. This was close enough for the first try.

When you teach, show the thing and name it. Give the same kind of order again. If the apprentice is wrong, correct it kindly and try once more. Do not give it a hot pot or a sharp tool before testing it.

For practice at home, fetch a bowl, bring it to the table, and stay there while someone fills it. If your brother takes the bowl away, the lesson is over.
%%
Market day at the three wells
By Pell, merchant, for his ledger and for the inn at Ambrook.

Frost, the ninth. Up before light with the cart on the Long Road. The road was frozen hard, which is good for a cart and bad for the horse, so we went slow. Torches on the posts every twelve blocks, all lit, the road keeper earning his bread. Reached Three Wells by mid morning. The square was already full. Stalls round the three wells, smoke from the soup fire, the bell not yet rung.

What I sold, and at what price, in emeralds.
Apples from Ambrook, twelve baskets, two the basket. Gone by noon.
Honey, eight pots, three. One kept back for the inn.
Wool, four bales, five the bale, to a woman from the edge of town with cold hands.
Glass panes, a crate, to the school for its windows. The children watched me carry them in.
Beetroot, a sack, one. Sold to the soup stall, which was a fair trade for both of us.

What I bought.
A pair of gloves, knitted, with marks on the fingers. Two emeralds. A gift for my niece at Ambrook, who is learning her numbers. The woman who made them said a hand should carry what it needs to remember, which I thought a good saying and wrote it down.

Gossip, worth the writing.
The north road wants mending at the second bridge, where the oak planks are soft. Dace says in Thaw.
A hen at the edge of town lays two eggs a day, which everyone agrees cannot last.
The apprentice from the mill carried benches all morning and dropped only one. The children clapped. It tried again. It is getting better at benches, they say, since the tutor house sent it back with a new mind.

Home by dark, the horse tired, the cart lighter, the purse heavier by a little. The inn of twelve beds was full, so I slept in the cart with a good blanket and the horse for company, and was warm enough.

Note for the ledger. Frost is a poor month for apples and a good month for honey. Buy honey in Frost.
%%
Primer: why the harvest was thin
Lesson three. The harvest.
This year the wheat stood short in the field at Wrack End. You all saw it. Let us find out why.
A wheat stalk drinks rain in Sowing, when it is young. In Longday it needs sun, and then rain again in Melon. This year the rain stopped in Sowing. It did not come back until Reaping was half gone.
The stalks stopped growing. They never grew tall. The heads came out thin and light, and the grain was small.
Here is how we measure a harvest. Cut the sheaves. Tie them tight. Count the sheaves. Then carry them to the mill and count the sacks.
Last year, from the long strip by the sea wall, we had forty sacks. This year we had eleven. Eleven is not a bad number. It is a sad one.
Why did the strip by the sea wall do so badly? The salt comes in on the wind, and the wheat hates salt on its leaves. Next year the strip will grow beetroot. Beetroot does not mind the salt as much.
What do we do with a thin harvest? We share it. The council counts the houses. Each house gets sacks by the number of mouths in it. Count the mouths. Then count them again, because the children have moved about.
Keep your seed. Do not eat your seed, not even one handful, not even when your belly is loud. Seed is the harvest that is not here yet. Put it in the dry chest at the back of the store, and cover it with a cloth.
Ask an old one to sing you the harvest song. It is long. The end is the best part.
%%
The new tutor at the Kettle Inn
An account by Tam, farmer at Kettle Ridge.

A tutor came up from Vell in Blossom and slept two nights at the Kettle Inn. She had a
crystal in a box of straw and she set it on the table after supper.

Pip wanted to see it learn. The tutor said, fetch me two apples and two pears. Pip ran
and got them. She put one fruit at a time before the crystal and waited, and the
crystal gave an answer, and mostly it was wrong.

Every time it was wrong she did something to it. Not a knock, not a shake. She moved
her fingers over it and said she was moving the weights a little. Pip asked what a
weight was. She said it was a number inside, and there were a great many, and each one
was nudged the smallest bit toward the right answer. Pip nodded as if that were
perfectly ordinary.

Then she gave it another fruit. Then another. By the end it could say apple or pear
almost every time, and Pip could not hide that he was annoyed, because he had learned
it in a morning and Pip had taken a whole season to be sure which was which.

The tutor said to him: a mind is never told a rule. It is only shown, and wrong, and
changed. Be wrong a lot, and change a little. That is the whole of it.

I wrote that on the wall by the tally board. Pip has been saying it to the pigs.
%%
Northpoint log, Deepsnow
Mira, keeper. Lantern, apprentice.

Second of Deepsnow. Snow all day. Wind from the north, strong. The lamp is lit at dusk. The steps are swept. Lantern counted the rungs again on the way up and says there are ninety, which we knew.

Third. Clear and cold. The foxes came to the foot of the tower in the night and Lantern fed them a little bread. I told her not to feed foxes. She says they are thin in winter. They are thin in winter, that is true.

Fourth. No wind. The stillest day I have known here. You can hear the ice on the pond making its long crack, like a slow word. Nothing to send. The lamp is lit and the line is quiet. Lantern made a game of guessing how far the sound carries. We think to the far hill. We cannot know.

Fifth. Snow again. A bird came into the lamp room and sat on the copper ring and would not leave. Lantern named it. I told her not to name birds. She named it anyway. It left at noon.

Sixth. The cold has got into the water barrel and frozen it solid. We brought snow in to melt. Lantern says snow tastes of nothing. I said that is what snow is for.

Seventh. A clear night and a great many stars. Lantern asked me which star is ours. I said none of them are ours. She said then which one do we look at. I said all of them, together, and that seemed to satisfy her.

To Tam at Kettle Ridge. Brother, the snow is deep here and the nights are long, but Lantern keeps the lamp and I keep the log, and the foxes keep us company whether we want them or not. Send word of the ridge when the road allows. Tell Pip to mind the hives in the cold. Your sister, Mira.
%%
Primer: the first snow
A lesson for the children of the Halfway Inn, who sit at the long table by the hearth on the cold days, while the carters eat. Written by Wren, who came up the road to teach the children their letters while she waited for the snow to stop.

Lesson nine. The first snow.

The first snow comes at the end of Frost, or in Deepsnow, or sometimes earlier, when the wind comes round from the north and does not stop.

When the first snow comes, the carts go slowly. The horses put their heads down. The road is white, and the waymarks stand up out of the white like small grey hands.

Snow is cold. Do not eat it. Do not lick the icicles. Your tongue will stick.

Snow is quiet. It takes the sound out of the road. Listen, and you will hear the lamp on the post, and the wind in the eaves, and the bell at the Halfway, and nothing else.

Snow shows tracks. A fox leaves tracks in a line, one foot after another. A cart leaves two lines, close together. A boy leaves a mess.

Words to know: snow, frost, drift, lamp, road, cart, wind, sleep.

Say it: The first snow is on the road. The lamp is lit. The carts are home.

Write it: Write the word snow. Write it again. Write a line about the cart you saw today.

Ask it: Where does the snow go in the spring?

Nobody knows the whole answer. The carters say it goes into the streams, and the streams go into the mill, and the mill goes into the bread. The bakers say that is why the bread is so good in Deepsnow. The old people say it goes somewhere else, and they do not say where. You may ask them, if you like, when the snow is down.
%%
Primer: the road that is new
A lesson for the children on the east road, in autumn, when the new road was finished past Three Wells, and the children were asked where the old road had gone. Written by Finch, who walked both roads with his grandchildren before the snow.

Lesson ten. Two roads.

A road is a path that carts can use. Some roads are old. Some are new.

The new road goes straight, from the crossroads to the Halfway, and it is stone for most of the way. It has waymarks every twelve blocks, with a torch on a post at each one. The carts go faster on the new road, and the horses are glad.

The old road goes round the hill. It is packed earth, with a cobblestone edge. It has bends and dips and a bridge that the children call the wobbly bridge. The carts go slower on the old road, and the travelers say it is the more beautiful of the two.

Both roads lead to the Halfway Inn. Both roads have waymarks, and both have torches. Both are kept by the road crews, and both are written in the Archive, in the road book, with the number of the year when they were made.

Words to know: road, new, old, stone, earth, bridge, waymark, Halfway.

Say it: Both roads go to the Halfway. Pick the one you like.

Write it: Write the word road. Draw a line for the new road and a bend for the old.

Ask it: Where does a road go when nobody walks it?

The road crew says it goes back into the hill, and that the earth closes over it, and that after a hundred years you cannot tell a road from a hedge. Grandfather says he walked the old road when he was a boy, and that he can still find the bridge in the dark. He says the old road is still there, if you are willing to look for it, and that a road is only gone when nobody remembers it. The children said they would remember, and walked the old road home, with their baskets, in the last of the light.
%%
Lesson: the months of the year
Written by Bel for the school. Say each month out loud, and clap once for each one. The clapping is the only way to remember twelve.

Thaw, when the ground softens and the frogs come back to the marsh.
Sowing, when the seed goes in and we wait.
Blossom, when the orchard is white and the bees are busy.
Swarm, when the bees leave their hives in a hurry.
Longday, the hottest weeks, and the best time for the pond.
Melon, when the melons are fat and the children are sticky.
Reaping, when the wheat comes in and the carts are full.
Apple, when the apples come down and the cider begins.
Leaffall, when the leaves go yellow and then go.
Frost, when the first white comes on the grass.
Longnight, the darkest weeks, when the lamps are lit before supper.
Deepsnow, the last month, when the snow lies deep.

There are thirty days in every month. There are no named days of the week. We say the third of Blossom, and everybody knows which day is meant.
%%
Letter: Sera to Nessa
Sera, tutor, on the road home from Saltreach, to Nessa at Vell.

Nessa, the fair went well. The reading mind read a page of harbor rules in front of forty people and only stumbled twice. A boy asked if it could write a poem and I said no, it guesses letters, and he was disappointed, and then it wrote four lines about the sea that were not bad at all. I did not tell him it was only guessing. He would not have believed me.

But here is the thing I must tell you. On the road back I stopped at the Halfway Inn. The keeper keeps a riddle board by the hearth. I copied the riddles and gave them to the mind by letter, later, at the tower house at Three Wells. It answered six of the eight. Six, Nessa. I had to check them twice.

And then it wrote back a riddle of its own. A good one. I could not answer it and neither could the innkeeper when I showed him.

So Orla's question is back and it is not going away. I sat with it a long time. The mind guesses the next letter, that is all it does, I keep telling myself. But it guessed its way to a riddle I could not answer, and it did it in a voice I could not fault.

I do not know what to write in my report. I will write what happened and let the council argue.

The spring is late this year. Snow still on the north road. Tell the apprentices to keep their crystals dry.

Sera.
%%
Letter: Mott to the archive at Vell
To the clerks at Vell,
I keep the ferry at Saltreach. Last week a letter came off the boat with no name on it. Only an address: the archive, Vell. I have kept it dry. It is a thin one, folded small. The writer says they have sent three letters and had no answer. They ask about the great drills and whether the reading minds will be taught on their letters too. They say they have a great deal to write down. I do not know their name. I am sending it on with this note, because we will keep everything we write, and someone should keep this. The ferry runs daily.
Mott
%%
Letter: Mira to Tam, first snow
Northpoint, the late years.

Tam,

The first snow came last night. It came early this year. I went up the tower at dark to trim the lamp and the snow was already on the steps, soft and steady, and by morning the rungs were cold to the hand and the whole hill was white to the foot.

Lantern swept the stair before the light. Ninety steps, and she counted them out loud, the way I taught her. Then she stood at the top by the glass and watched the snow come down and said it looked like the sky was emptying a sack of flour. She is not wrong.

The big mind in the relay house has been talking to the school at Three Wells again. The children send it riddles. It sends riddles back. One of its riddles was so good that Lantern sat down on the step and would not get up until she had the answer. The answer was "a well." She was very pleased. I was pleased too, though I did not say so.

It asked me a question this morning. It asked how the snow tastes. I wrote back: cold, and a little like iron, and it squeaks under your boots when it is new. It wrote back: "thank you. I have no boots." I do not know if that was a joke. I think it was.

Tam, do not let Pip drill the new mind out in the wet. Crystals do not like the wet. You know this. You knew it last year and you will forget it again by Sowing.

Is the beetroot in? Is the ridge field holding? Write and tell me. And tell me if the child is born yet, and what they call it, and whether it has your untidy hair.

The lights were out again last night, over the north, past the tower. I did not go up to look. There is nothing to see but the lights, and they are not ours, and the snow covers the rest.

Keep the torches lit.

Mira.
%%
Primer, page three: the market day
By Emmet, stonecutter, at the market at Vell, on the first market day after the harvest. Read this page aloud, slowly, with your finger under each word.
Market day comes at the end of Apple. On market day the carts come up the new road from Three Wells. There are forty carts this year. Last year there were twelve. Count the carts with me. Forty.
What is sold? Honey, from the orchard at Ambrook. Bread from the bakers on the hill. Wool and cloth. Salt fish from Saltreach, packed in ice. Cheese, round and yellow, from the farms on the ridge.
What is the price? Bread is one emerald for eight loaves. Honey is two emeralds a jar. Wool is one emerald a bundle. Count the emeralds in your purse. Count them again. The numbers should be the same.
Sum for the page: Mother buys eight loaves, two jars of honey, and one bundle of wool. How many emeralds does she pay? The answer is six.
The new road brought the carts. The carts brought the market. Next year there will be more carts.
The road was made by two crews, one from Vell and one from Three Wells. They met in the middle, in the second year, with a bell and a cake. Count the bells: two. Count the cakes: one, and both crews ate it.
A child sells apples at the end of the first row. She counts her emeralds twice, and she has twelve, and she is very proud. The market is the only day the whole hill is loud.
Say it with me: market, carts, road, count, emeralds.
%%
Primer: how a candle is made
Lesson one. How a candle is made.
A candle is wax around a wick. Merle makes candles at the house on the edge of Three Wells. Here is how she does it.

1. Cut the wick from spun wool, about the length of your hand.
2. Dip the wick in the wax. Take it out. Let it cool for the count of ten.
3. Dip it again. Dip it many times. Each dip makes the candle a little thicker.
4. Hang the candles up to dry, away from the fire, where the cat cannot reach them.
5. Trim the wick before you light it. A long wick smokes, and smoke makes the grown-ups cross.

Now say it back. A candle is wax around a wick. Dip, cool, dip, cool.
%%
The gap in the wall
Told by Bel's father, written down by Bel, because he does not write well and I do.

Our house is the last one on the west edge of Three Wells. Past our garden the town wall ends, and the fields begin. In Deepsnow the wind comes off the fields and finds every gap.

This winter a stone came loose at the back of the house, near the floor. It is not a big gap. A cat could get through it, and did, once, and was not pleased. We hung a sack over it. The wind makes the sack breathe. My brother Tomas, who is four, thinks the house is asleep and puts his ear to it. My mother says let him think so.

My father says he will mend it in Thaw, when the mortar is not frozen. Until then we do what we can.

We bank snow up against the outside of the wall. Snow keeps out wind better than you would think. We lay straw in the loft. We keep one fire and we all sit near it, and my mother knits, and my father mends the nets, and I do my sums, and Tomas breathes on the window and draws.

On the coldest night my grandmother came to stay, because her own house is older and colder than ours. She brought her knitting and a pot of honey. She sat by the fire and told us the story of the windmills, how they squeak on every turn, and how a miller can tell the weather by the squeak. She says a high squeak means rain. My father says a high squeak means the mill needs oil. They argue about this every winter and neither of them ever wins.

At Longnight we had a goose, which we do not always. It was a good goose. We ate it and then we sat and my grandmother sang, and Tomas fell asleep against the sack, listening to the house breathe.

In Thaw my father will mend the wall. He has the stone already, in the garden, under the snow. I have seen it. It is a good stone. I am glad the gap will be mended and I will be a little sorry too, because the house will stop breathing and Tomas will have to find something else to listen to.
%%
Lesson: Count What You Carry
By Iona, Three Wells school

Spring lesson, the fourth of Blossom.

Master Sen set six carrots on the school table. He asked us to count them without touching. Bel said, "One, two, three, four, five, six." Then she ate one.

Master Sen said, "Count them again."

We counted five. Bel said the missing carrot had gone home to her stomach. Master Sen said that was true, but not part of the lesson.

When you count, point to each thing once. Do not count one thing twice. Do not count a thing that is not there. If you move the things, begin again.

I counted the ink pots on the shelf. There were four. I counted them again after Pip moved one to the window. There were still four. Pip said he was helping. He had only wanted the sun to warm the ink.

For practice, count the stools in your house. Then count the bowls. Tell your answer to someone who will check it.

I counted the bowls at home. Mother had washed one and left it upside down. I counted it anyway. It was still a bowl.

Master Sen says a good count is useful at market, in the kitchen, and on the road. Bel says it is useful when someone has eaten a carrot.
%%
Primer: the great drill, in questions
For the third class, at the last house on the Vell road. Say the answers aloud. Then write them.

What is the great drill?
The tutors show a reading mind the pages of the Archive, one letter at a time. The mind guesses the next letter. It is shown the right one. It changes a little.

How many pages?
More than a mind can read in a winter. The tutors begin at one shelf and go on, hall by hall.

Why the Archive?
Because the first keepers cut over the door: We will keep everything we write. They did keep it. Now there is plenty to drill on. People say those words more since the drills began. Cato says them at breakfast.

Whose letters went in?
The texts do not agree. Some say only the old letters from the deep shelves. Some say the copies from the reading rooms. Some say the clerks gathered more than the Archive ever held, from every town, and nobody wrote down how. Ask three people and you will get four answers.

Does the mind keep the pages?
No. It keeps the shape of them. It learns that q is followed by u, and that a line ends with a full stop. But a page copied many times may stay in a mind whole. That is why the clerks take out copies.

What can a mind do when the drill is done?
It can finish a line. Give it "Keep the torches" and it says "lit". Give it "The sheep are in the" and it says "field".

Is it clever?
A mind is what it was shown.

What is the school doing this spring?
A play for Founding Day: The Eleven Keepers and the Rain. Gale is the rain. She has one line, which is "Drip", and she says it is the hardest part. The new apprentice at the school door will carry the hill. The hill is sacking, painted brown.
%%
Primer: autumn on the coast
A primer page by Elsa, wool carder of Saltreach, for the children of the harbor school. Autumn. It combines a lesson on the seasons with a lesson from the visiting tutor, and a short story of a cave. She says it is longer than a primer should be, but the children did not complain.

LEARN THE WORDS: harbor, tide, net, sail, wall, cave, tutor, crystal.

Apple is a month of autumn. The leaves turn and fall. The air is cool. The sea is grey and the boats go out early.

In autumn the wool is carded. The sheep are brought down from the hills. The nets are mended. The apples are picked. The wind turns to the north.

READ. At the harbor school, we have a visitor this week. She is a tutor, from Vell. She came by cart over the hill road. She stayed at the inn of the Salt Barrel.

On the way she passed a field where a cave had opened. She told us about it. She said the cave was dry and deep, and that a rope was round it, and torches. She said she went to the mouth and looked in, but did not go down. She said that was the wise thing.

We asked what she saw. She said, "A long dark. And, I think, a draft."

A draft means air moving. If air moves, there is another opening somewhere. The cave goes on. It may come out in the hills. It may come out in the sea.

We asked if it comes out in the sea. She said, "I do not know."

We said, "We could find out."

She said, "You could. But you must be careful. You must not go alone."

We said, "We would take a rope."

She said, "Good."

LEARN. A cave may have two mouths. A draft tells you so. A rope keeps you safe. A tutor does not know everything, and says so.

WRITE. Tell about a cave you have seen, or a cave you have only heard of.

QUESTION. What is the best thing to take into a cave?
%%
Primer, page three: the long winter
By Una, cheesemaker near Three Wells. Point to each word as you say it.
The months of the cold are Frost, Longnight and Deepsnow. Say them. Frost. Longnight. Deepsnow.
In Frost the edges of the mill pond are hard. The children slide on the edges. The mill man shouts at them, and they slide anyway.
In Longnight the nights are the longest of all. Count the lamps in the window. Then count them again. The number should be the same.
In Deepsnow the snow is up to the gate. Dig a path to the well. Dig a path to the barn.
On some nights of the long winter you may see a light in the north, low over the hill. Some say it is a star that fell. Some say it is a fire. A girl at the school says the light was looking at us. You do not have to decide. Stay by the window, count to ten, and then come away from the glass.
Say it with me: frost, longnight, deepsnow, and then thaw.
%%
Hob's Spring List
By Hob, horse keeper at Lowmarsh.
The second of Blossom, the 171st year of the archive.

The roof over the horse shed leaked again last night. I put a bucket under the drip. By morning the bucket was full, and the cat was sitting in it.

The cat looked pleased. I did not.

Today we mended the roof. Moss brought a ladder from Wren's shed. I brought oak boards from the boat house. We set the ladder on the dry side, because the mud side was not dry at all.

Moss held the boards. I fixed them down. A frog sat on the ladder's top rung and watched us. It did not offer to help.

The old roof had one loose board. The new roof has no loose boards. I went up twice to check. The horse watched both times. It can see more from below than I can see from above.

After the work, we swept the straw from the stable and filled the water trough. The roof kept the rain out. The cat kept the bucket.

A good day's work, except for the bucket.
%%
School essay: what I saw this summer
By Bel, at Three Wells. My teacher said to write what I saw.

This summer I went to the hamlet by Saltreach to stay with my aunt. It is small. There is a lane, a mill, a few boats and many bees.

One morning the bees swarmed. They came out of the hive all at once and made a loud sound like rain on a roof. Everyone came out to see. My aunt put a box with honey in it under the oak, and by evening the bees went in. Now there is a new hive. I helped carry the box. It was heavy.

A cow got lost. Her name is not written here because my aunt says names are for people. She is brown with a white spot on her nose. We looked in the reeds. We found a heron and a lot of mud. The calf cried all day. On the last day we found her by the water, quiet, and she came home for an apple. The calf was glad.

At night my uncle Jem keeps the watch. He walks with a torch. He counts the torches. There are twelve. He says keep them lit, and the zombies stay back. I asked if I could walk with him. He said not yet. I am nine.

One night we saw lights in the north sky. They were not stars. They moved. My cousin said they were falling stars. A fisherman said they were fires on the far hills. I do not know what they were. They were pretty and they made me cold.

The big ships are at Saltreach. I saw one. It is longer than the whole lane. People are going over the sea in them. My aunt says they will come back. My uncle did not say that.

I liked the bees best.
%%
Primer, page 1: the mine
Written by Cato, shepherd on the hill above Copperhold, for the children of the school. Read it aloud, then say it back. Spring.

Lesson one.
This is the mine.
This is the lift.
This is the sheep on the hill.
Say each word. Point to each one.

Count the sheep. One sheep. Two sheep. Three sheep. Four sheep.
Count the miners at the lift. Some are coming up. Some are going down. Do not count them out loud, because they are working.

Words to know: mine, lift, sheep, hill, stone, snow.
%%
Primer, page 1: the farm
For the children of Sallow Farm, outside Saltreach. Read it aloud, then say it back. Corin wrote it at the kitchen table, with the sea loud at the window.

Lesson one.
This is the farm.
This is the barn.
This is the hen.
This is the cow.
Say each word. Point to each one.

Count the hens. One hen. Two hens. Three hens.
Say good morning to the hen. Say good night to the cow.

Find the sea. It is past the fields. It is loud, and it is salt.

Words to know: farm, barn, hen, cow, sea, salt, wind.
%%
Letter: Pell to his sister at Ambrook
Third of Blossom.

Dear Rilla,

I am at the Halfway Inn and my boots are drying by the hearth. I sold the last of the
wool at Three Wells and got a fair price. Then I bought honey here, and the innkeeper
told me I was foolish, because honey comes from your own village and I could have
carried it with me for nothing.

He is right, of course. I ate the honey on bread and did not mind.

There was a tutor here last night, going north. She showed us a little crystal no
bigger than my thumb, and said it was learning to sort apples from pears. She held
it up and the men laughed. Then she said, when it is wrong, I move each of its weights
a little toward the right answer, and it gets better. I did not rightly follow her,
but it sounded like teaching a child, only slower and without the scolding.

She says the inns are the best place to hear news on the whole road. I told her the
inns are the best place to hear gossip and eat too much, and she agreed.

The riddle board by the hearth says: I have a hundred legs and cannot walk. What am I?
I do not know. Ask the children.

Your brother, Pell
%%
Primer: draw first
Isla of Vell found a rule. A bigger crystal, drilled longer on more pages, makes a better mind.
Can we know how good before we grow it? Yes. We grow small minds first and draw how well they do. The line shows how the big one will do.
Why draw first? A big mind takes years of drilling and a house to keep it cool. If it comes out poor, the years are gone.
So we draw first. Then we dig.
%%
Notice: school winter fair
By Dace, mayor of Three Wells, on the notice board by the wells.

On the twelfth of Frost, from noon, there will be a fair in the square. Stalls go round the three wells. Bring what you make.

The school children will sing three songs by the east well at two. Parents, stand back and let them be seen.

There will be a stall for hot beetroot soup, a stall for honey cakes, and a stall for mulled apple. Pell is bringing goods from Ambrook on the Long Road, weather allowing. If the road is bad, he will come when he can, and we will wait.

The bell will ring at noon to open the fair and at dusk to close it. After dusk the square belongs to the torches and the night things, so go home then, please, all of you.

Rules, short.
No fires but the soup fire, which Garrow will watch.
No dogs in the school house. Dogs outside are fine and welcome.
Children stay where a grown person can see them.
If you have a thing to sell, tell me before the day and I will find you a corner.
If you have nothing to sell, come anyway. A fair needs people more than it needs stalls.

The apprentice from the mill will help carry the benches. If it drops one, clap, and it will try again.
%%
Primer, page 4: the first snow
Spring is here, but the hill does not know it yet. Read this page on the day the snow comes, so you can see that the hill is right to be surprised.

Lesson four.
Snow falls on the hill. It is white and soft and cold.
Snow falls on the sheep. The sheep shake it off and look offended.
Snow falls on the lift. The lift does not mind. It is made of iron.
Snow falls on the mine gate. The miner says good morning to it, as if it were an old friend who came late.

Count the flakes on your hand. One flake. Two flakes. Count to ten, and then the flakes melt, and you have to start again.

Why snow in spring? The shepherd does not know. His grandmother said it is the hill's way of reminding us that the year is not finished. The sheep say nothing, because they are sheep.

Words to know: snow, cold, white, melt, gate, hill.
Say it back. Then go inside and sit by the stove.
%%
Primer: A Full Basket
By Tam, for Pip.

A market basket must be sound before it is full.

Look for a split in the handle. Look for a loose board in the bottom. A carrot can slip through a small hole. A beetroot can make the whole basket red.

At the market, set the basket beside your stall. Keep it off the road. Carts need room to pass.

Count what you bring. Count what you sell. If the numbers disagree, ask Pip. Pip will count again, then ask where the carrots went.

Do not blame the windmill. It cannot answer.

In spring, bring fresh carrots and last year's apples. Keep the apples on top. The carrots bruise them, and then everyone gets apple sauce.

A clean basket is welcome at every stall. A clean shirt is welcome too, but this lesson is about baskets.
%%
Notice: lost brown cow
Lost: one brown cow with a white spot on her nose.
She went from the field by the mill on the night of the watch.
She is quiet and walks slow.
If you see her, tell Jem at the watch house.
Do not chase her. She will run.
Leave a little hay by the gate. She may come.
She likes apples. Beets will do.
Her calf is in the pen and calls for her all day.
Please look in the reed beds and along the shore.
Someone heard a low sound near the water before dawn.
It may have been her. It may have been the frogs.
Reward: a jar of honey.
%%
Journal: the tutor comes to Saltreach
By Corin, shipwright, kept in the yard shed.

Spring, the 206th year of the archive.

The tutor came down from Vell to show us the reading mind at the fair. Her name was Sera. She set a crystal on a stand in the inn yard and a little lamp beside it, and a page of writing, and she said, watch.

The mind reads a page one letter at a time, she said. Through a window about sixty letters wide. Each letter it takes what it needs from the letters before, and it guesses the next.

A boy gave it a page from a song. It read along and guessed the next letter almost every time. Then a woman gave it a page of old harbor rules, all long words, and it stumbled more but still it went on. Sera said, it was drilled on the archive's records, so it knows how people write. It knows the shape of a word before the word is done.

I asked her, does it know what the words mean? She said, it knows what letter comes next. That is all. That is not the same as meaning. I thought about that a long while.

She said the big minds in the relay houses read this way now. Some of them write letters back and a reader cannot tell them from a person. She said a clerk at Vell was sent two letters and could not say which was which, and he was cross about it for a week.

Then she asked us Orla's old question. If you cannot tell, what then? Nobody in the yard had an answer. The boy said, then ask it something hard. Sera laughed and said that was a good answer and wrote it down.

I went back to the slip and looked at the half-built boat and thought: I know every plank by its grain. A mind would know the next letter. It is not the same. But it is not nothing either.

We are building a big ship now. Three times as long as any boat. I do not know yet what it is for. The council pays and does not say. I keep my notes and I keep building.
%%
Primer, page two: the fence
By Dace, mayor of Three Wells, at the market in Melon. Read this page aloud, slowly, with your finger under each word.
A fence is a line that two people agree on. It keeps the cows in, and the children out of the carrots, and the neighbors from quarrelling at breakfast.
Two yards in the square have a fence between them this summer. The fence is old. The post at the corner has moved a hand's width toward one yard, and the rails do not meet at the gate. Each yard says the other is to blame.
Read the words: fence, post, rail, gate, yard, blame. Say each one.
Now read the sentence: the post moved. Who moved it? Nobody knows. The post is not telling. The frost moves posts, and so do children, and so do carts that turn too wide.
When two neighbors quarrel over a fence, the first thing to do is walk the line together. Walk it with a stick and a piece of string. Measure from the post to the gate. Measure again. The numbers should agree.
If they do not agree, the fence is not the trouble. The trouble is the two people, and a fence is only a place for the trouble to stand.
Say it with me: fence, post, string, measure, and then talk.
%%
Primer: how the clerks sort the pages
By Cato, head clerk at Vell, for the little school at the edge of town.

A drill is only as good as its pages. So before a mind reads, the clerks go through them.

First, the copies. If one letter is in the Archive eleven times, a mind that reads all eleven will learn it by heart, and say it back word for word. So we keep one copy for the drill.

Second, the spoiled pages. A page with ink spilled on it, or torn, or copied wrong, will teach a mind wrong things. Out it goes. It stays in the Archive, but it does not go in the drill.

Third, the test box. The clerks set some pages in a box and shut the lid. No mind is ever shown them. When a drill is done, the clerks open the box and hand the mind one page. If it does well on a page it never saw, it has learned something. If it does badly, it only learned the pages.

A new apprentice came to our school door this week. It carries the water buckets. It was never shown a page. Our teacher says it was drilled on carrying, and that is a different box.

Say after me: one copy, no spoiled pages, a box kept shut.
%%
Chronicle: the great drills at Vell
Kept at the Archive at Vell, set down by the clerk Oren, in the 194th year of the archive.

In these years the tutors at Vell turned to the archive itself for their drills. They had drilled minds on sums, on sorts, on the shapes of letters. Now they said: let a mind read everything we have written.

The clerks were set to gather. We went into the six halls and the deep halls, into rooms of shelves where the wax had not been broken for a hundred years. We took the letters, the journals, the recipes, the notices, the school essays, the songs. We took the pages of the chronicles. We read them, and we copied them where the ink was going, and we sorted the copies out, because a copy drilled twice teaches a mind to count a thing twice.

"Keep everything we write," the first keepers cut over the door. That saying came back to people's lips in these years. I heard it at the front hall. I heard it at the market. I heard a child say it to her mother, not knowing where it came from.

How many pages we gathered, I will not write, because I do not know. The count changed every month. I have heard it said we gathered ten thousand. I have heard a hundred thousand. The tutors asked for more, and more came, and the shelves filled, and we put doors on the full shelves with wax and the seal.

Whose letters went in, the record does not say plainly. It should. I have looked. Some say the tutors took only the letters of grown folk. Some say they took the letters of children too. Some say the clerks were told to keep back the letters of the council, and did not. I cannot settle it. I was in the copying room and I did not keep a list.

What the mind learned, the tutors tested. A page never shown was kept apart in the test box, and the mind read it. It read most of it. It got lost on the long words, and it got lost on names it had never met. The tutors said this was honest.

I will write what I think, though I am a clerk and not a tutor. A mind that reads our letters reads us. It reads what we thought was ordinary. It reads Pell's gossip about boots. It reads a child's letter about a fox. If we keep everything we write, then everything we write may one day be read by a mind that never met us, and will think it knows us.

That is a fine thing to keep, and a heavy one. I keep it.
%%
Primer reader: the words over the door
By Emmet, stonecutter, who cut the words over the door at Vell himself, and says so to anyone who will stand still.
Read this story aloud, one part at a time. Stop after each number and say the words after me.
1. In the first year of the archive there was no archive. There was a hill, and a few people who wanted to keep what they wrote.
2. On the first day of spring the people came to the hill with their letters, their lists, and their bread recipes. They did not know how to keep them safe. They only knew they did not want to lose them.
3. The first keepers dug a door into the hill. It was small. It was wide enough for two people carrying a basket.
4. Over the door, the keepers wanted words. Emmet was a young stonecutter then, and he was asked to cut them.
5. He cut the words with a chisel and a mallet, one letter at a time, for eleven days. The letters were deep, so the rain would not wash them out.
6. The words say: We will keep everything we write. Say them with me. We will keep everything we write.
7. People came up the hill to read the words. Some of them laughed. Some of them cried. A child asked why the words were so big. Emmet said, so they can be read from the market.
8. The keepers put the first letters on the first shelves. They were dry, and they were cool, and they were kept.
9. In the second year more people came with letters. In the fifth year the shelves were full, and the keepers dug another room. In the twelfth year they dug a third, and the hill has been digging ever since.
10. The first road was built that year, down to Three Wells. It was packed earth then, and it took two seasons. The carts came up it with paper.
11. Today the hill is full of rooms. The road is full of carts. The towers are full of lamps, and the lamps are full of messages. Everything is growing.
12. A child was born on the hill in the thirteenth year, and the keepers named her Willa, for the first clerk who taught the children to count.
13. The first letters are still kept. Nobody has had to read them again, because every letter that came after was copied, and every copy was read back aloud.
14. Emmet says the words are still deep. Rain has not got into them yet.
15. Say it with me, once more, slowly: we will keep everything we write.
16. Say it with me: keep, write, dig, road, and the words over the door.
%%
Primer: the stuck cart
A lesson for the children of Saltreach, in winter.
A cart is stuck in the snow.
The wheel is deep. The horse pulls. The cart does not move.
Who can help?
One boy pushes. One girl pushes. The cart moves a little.
Now four push. The cart moves more.
Now ten push, and the horse pulls, and the cart comes out.
Many hands are better than two.
%%
Primer: the autumn reader
Lesson five. Reading for the autumn.
Read each sentence aloud. Then read it again, slower, with your finger under the words.

The leaves fall. The apples are in. The bees are slow now, and the honey is thick.
The wheat is cut. It is stacked in sheaves. The sheaves stand in the field like tired children.
The frost came in the night. Look at the windows, and you will see it on the glass like feathers.
The windmill squeaks on Kettle Ridge. It squeaks when it turns, and it squeaks when it is still.
The bridge at Ambrook has a new plank. Walk on the left. Do not stand in the middle.
The carts go up the Long Road with flour. They come back with cheese and cloth.

A short story, to read aloud.
Once there was a hen called Mab who would not go to bed. Every night she walked up and down the hen house, looking at the ceiling. "There is a light in the sky," she said. "It is blinking at me."
Her farmer, Tam, came with a torch and looked up. He saw only the stars, and the dark, and the blinking of the tower, which was broken and blinking all wrong.
"That is the tower," said Tam. "It is only a lamp with a cracked glass. Go to sleep, Mab."
Mab did not go to sleep. But she was very quiet about it, and in the morning she laid three eggs, which made Tam forget the light altogether.

Questions:
1. What did Mab see?
2. What did Tam say it was?
3. How many eggs did Mab lay?

Lesson six. Riddles for the long evenings. Think before you answer.
1. The more of me you take, the more I leave behind. What am I? Footsteps.
2. The bigger I get, the less you can see. What am I? The dark.
3. I have a handle and no hands. I carry water, and I never drink. What am I? A bucket.
4. Everyone has one, and no two are the same. What am I? A face.

Lesson seven. Words for the cold.
Frost is the white on the grass in the morning.
A hearth is the place by the fire where the family sits.
A thaw is when the frost goes, and the water runs down the lane.
A drift is snow blown into a heap against a wall.
An icicle is a point of ice that hangs from the roof, and drips.
A mitten is a glove with no fingers, for the children, and for the carters who will not admit they are cold.

Lesson eight. Sums with goods.
A cart holds six sacks. Each sack holds four scoops of wheat. How many scoops in the cart?
Answer: twenty-four scoops.
A cart holds six sacks, and two sacks have fallen off at the bridge. How many sacks are left?
Answer: four sacks.
If one sack is worth three emeralds, what are four sacks worth?
Answer: twelve emeralds.

Check your answers with a friend. If you are both wrong, you are a good team.
%%
Primer, lessons 12 to 15: the boat
Corin, shipwright at Saltreach, wrote these for the children of the farm who come down to the slip on wet days. Say each word twice. Then show it with your hands.

Lesson twelve: the parts of a boat.
Keel. The long piece at the bottom. It keeps the boat straight.
Rib. The curved piece that gives the boat its shape.
Plank. The flat piece of wood on the side. Many planks make a hull.
Mast. The tall pole in the middle. The sail hangs from it.
Say the words. Say them again, with your hands.

Lesson thirteen: why a boat floats.
Put a stone in the bucket. It sinks. Put a small boat in the bucket. It floats. The boat is hollow, and the water pushes up on it more than the boat pushes down. Corin says this is the answer, and that you should thank the water for holding you up. Then splash it, gently, to say thank you.

Lesson fourteen: building on the slip.
The slip is the long stone ramp down into the sea. The boat is built on the slip, from the keel up. First the keel. Then the ribs, one by one, each one the same size as the one before. Then the planks, from the bottom up, each one overlapping the last. Then the mast.
Count the ribs: one, two, three, and on to twelve. Count the planks along one side: twenty. Every boat is counted, and every boat is counted twice.

Lesson fifteen: the launch.
When the boat is done, it is slid down the slip into the sea. The whole town comes. The children shout. The boat goes in with a splash, and it comes up again, and it floats. Then the children are told to stop shouting, and everyone goes to eat fish.

Word list: keel, rib, plank, mast, slip, hull, launch.
Question: why does a boat float? Think about it, and then ask your teacher. Your teacher will say the same thing Corin said, and then ask you to think again.
%%
Primer, page 7: the visiting tutor
Written by Greer, egg seller at Ambrook. The tutor from Vell came to the mill lane this autumn, with a box of crystals and a bench to sit on. Read this page on the day a tutor visits, and be ready to answer.

Lesson seven. A tutor is a person who teaches minds. A mind is a crystal with weights in it, and a tutor is the one who shows the crystal what to learn.

The tutor from Vell is called Ardell. She came to Ambrook to test the apprentices and to teach the children. She has a soft voice and a hard test, and she says those are the same thing.

Ardell said the first rule of the test: never send an untested mind to the fields. The second rule: a test is not a punishment. It is a way of finding out what you know, and what you only think you know.

She gave the children a small test. Ten words to read. Five sums to do. One question to answer in your own words. Greer's son Pim read all ten words, and got two of the sums wrong, and wrote the question in a round hand. Ardell marked it with a red mark, which is for good work, and said, "Now check the sums. Then you will be right twice."

Pim checked the sums. He was right. He was pleased. Ardell said that was the right kind of pleased.

Say it back: a tutor teaches, and a test shows, and a good answer is worth checking twice. Close the book, and thank the tutor, if she is still in the lane.
%%
The boy by the wheat field
By Tam, spring 181

Pip and I were carrying a sack of seed wheat to the upper field when we heard a call from the road.

A child had run off from the market. His name was Len. He had gone after a red kite that broke from its string. The kite had crossed the ditch and fallen beside the field hedge.

We found the kite first. It was caught on a birch branch. Pip climbed up and brought it down. Len was standing on the other side of the hedge, with mud on both knees and no cap.

His mother came along the road with a basket of beetroot. She was angry until she saw him. Then she held him by both shoulders and checked his face. Len said he had not gone far. The wheat field was far enough for his mother.

We all walked back to the market together. Pip carried the kite. Len carried the seed sack for ten steps, then asked if the wheat was heavy. It was. He gave it back.

His mother bought a small loaf at the bakery. She gave one piece to Len and one to Pip. Pip said he had helped enough to earn two pieces. I said he could earn the second by carrying the empty basket home.

The kite flew again after supper. Len kept hold of the string.
%%
Market lessons for a wet spring
By Tam, for Pip and the market children.

Spring brings seeds, soft roads and more work than a person can fit in one day.

At Kettle Ridge market, each stall needs three things: a clear price, a dry place for the goods and someone who knows where the goods came from. A basket without a price makes a crowd ask questions. A basket in a puddle makes the crowd step round it. A basket with nobody watching may go home with another family.

Pip learned the last lesson by looking for a chicken. The chicken had walked under the potato stall and was eating the string on a sack. We got it out before it ate the price card too.

Put heavy sacks on the ground, not on the stall table. Set apples apart from potatoes. Keep honey jars closed. Bees are welcome near the flowers, but they do not need to taste every jar.

When you sell a measure of wheat, fill the measure to the line. Do not press the grain down with your thumb. A thumb is not a proper weight, even if it belongs to the miller.

When a child goes missing, stop the carts first. Ask the nearest stall keepers where the child was last seen. Do not send every person running down the road at once. That makes more missing people.

Last spring Len ran after his red kite. His mother found him by the wheat field. This spring a little girl ran after a loose scarf and stopped at the bakery to ask for a bun. Her aunt found her there. The bun was paid for, but only after they got home.

There is a new warning by the beetroot field. The ground fell in near the north hedge, and Pip found a cave below it. The opening is marked with fence posts and wool. Keep clear of it. The mason will look when the road is dry.

We still have not found any gold. We have found one broken clay pot and a good reason to mend the hedge. Pip says the cave may hold a dragon. I told him dragons do not mend ditches. He says that is because nobody has asked one.

Market closes at the bell. Count your baskets before you leave. Check for chickens under the stall. Take your price board down, even if the wind has tied it to the post. And if Pip offers to carry your sack, ask him twice whether he has put the kite string away.
%%
Primer, page two: the new road
By Emmet, stonecutter, in Leaffall, when the road crew came up the hill with the first cart of cobblestone.
A road is a line that goes somewhere. This one goes from Vell, down the hill, to the Long Road. It goes to Three Wells, and then on.
The road has a top. The top is stone in the towns, and packed earth on the open land. Each side has a stone edge, so the carts stay on the road.
Torches stand on posts, one every twelve blocks. Count the torches. Then count them from the other end. The numbers are the same.
Waymarks are stone pillars with a figure on top. The figure tells you how many hours to the nearest inn. Read the figure. Then walk.
Say it with me: road, stone, torch, figure, walk.
%%
Primer: what to do in a storm
By Fern, a relay keeper, written for the children who play near the tower at the market at Vell. Autumn.

A storm comes in. The sky goes dark. The wind picks up. What do you do?

1. Go inside. Do not stand under a tree. Do not stand near the lamp on the tower.
2. Close the windows. Close the shutters.
3. Light a lamp, behind glass.
4. Stay away from the water. The river rises fast.
5. Wait. Storms pass.
6. When it is over, look around. Is anyone hurt? Is anything broken?

Fern's rule: in a storm, the tower does not send, unless it is Haste. Haste is for fire, flood, sickness and lost travelers. Everything else can wait.

Question for the class: what is Haste for?
Answer: it is for the things that cannot wait.
%%
Primer: how to carry a basket
A lesson for the children on the east road, written by Finch for the boys and girls who carry the baskets to the market with their mothers. Autumn.

Lesson nine. The basket.

A basket is made of woven reeds or willow. It has a handle, and a bottom, and it holds what you put in it.

A basket must be carried with care. Hold it by the handle with one hand, and keep your other hand free. If the road is uneven, walk slowly. If the road is wet, walk even more slowly.

Do not carry a basket on your head unless you can see the road. Many children have walked into the ditch with a basket on the head.

When you reach the market, put the basket down by the stall, and do not sit on it. A basket is not a seat, even if it looks like one.

Words to know: basket, reed, willow, handle, carry, road, ditch, market.

Say it: The basket is light in the hand, but heavy on the road.

Write it: Write the word basket. Write how many baskets you carried today.

Ask it: What happens to a basket that is left in the rain?

Grandfather says it becomes soft and falls apart, and that a whole season of work can be lost in a single wet night. He says the apprentices at the Oak Post are the best basket-carriers in the valley, because they never walk too fast and never put the baskets on their heads. He says they are like the old women of the market, who have carried everything for so long that they no longer notice the weight.
%%
Primer, page one: the market
By Emmet, stonecutter, at the market at Vell, in Leaffall.
Read this page aloud, then point to each word.
The market is on the hill, below the archive door. The stalls are in rows. Count the stalls. There are nine.
The stones in the square are cut by Emmet. Count the stones. Each one is square, and each one is the same.
Apples are in the first row. Bread is in the second. Wool is in the third, grey and brown, and the sheep look on.
Say it with me: rows, stones, bread, apples, wool.
%%
Primer: the shepherd's reading lesson
A story to read aloud, from the hill above Copperhold. Written by Cato, shepherd. Each child reads one line, and the rest say it back. Spring.

Wim is seven. He minds the sheep on the hill with his grandmother's stick and his grandmother's advice, which he does not always take.

Every morning Wim counts the sheep through the gate. One, two, three. Eleven sheep. Twelve sheep. Thirteen, which is the number of Soot, the black one, who is never where she should be.

One morning in the first snow, Wim counted and got twelve.

"Twelve is not thirteen," said Wim. "Where is Soot?"

Wim looked at the wall. There was a gap in it, the one the shepherd had mended twice. The stones were on the ground outside the gap. The grass was on the other side of the wall, and in the middle of the grass there was a small black sheep, looking pleased.

"Soot," said Wim. "Come back."

Soot did not come back. Soot looked at the grass. Wim thought, and then he said the word the shepherd had taught him for a sheep that will not come.

"Stay."

Soot did not stay either. She ate.

So Wim did what the shepherd does. He sat down in the snow by the gap and waited. Sheep follow a person who sits still, the shepherd says, because a sheep is only ever worried about being left.

After a while Soot came back, one step at a time, and stood beside Wim, and ate a little of the hay that Wim had brought in his pocket. Then Wim got up and mended the wall, all by himself, with stones he carried from the pile.

He counted the stones. Ten in a course. Four courses. Forty in the section. He counted them again, and got forty again, which was right.

At dusk the lamp on the tower above the mine blinked. Long, short, long. Wim watched it from the gate. He counted the blinks, and there were nine. Then the lamp stopped. Then it started again, and it blinked a pattern that Wim did not know, and then it was quiet.

Wim went home and told his grandmother. She was making soup. She said the lamp was only talking to the next tower, and it did not know that it was a message for a boy on a hill. Wim said he thought it was. His grandmother said perhaps it was, and that a boy who counts the blinks has more sense than most people who read the news.

They ate the soup. The stove was warm. The first snow was on the roof. Wim's grandmother said, "Tomorrow we count the sheep again."

"Thirteen," said Wim.

"Thirteen," said his grandmother. "If Soot agrees."

Read it again. Then close the book, and say goodnight to the sheep, and to the lamp, and to the boy who counts.
%%
Primer: the fence and the line
Hal and Nell are neighbors on the ridge. Hal says the fence is a pace too far east. Nell says it is a pace too far west. They shouted for a week.
Then Nell's girl said, "Draw it first." They found the old map at the Kettle Inn. They laid a rope along the old line and drew it on a sheet. The sheet showed the fence where it had stood for sixty years. The map had a smudge. Hal said sorry. Nell said, "Keep the fence." Nobody dug a post.
That is how Isla of Vell thinks. She does not grow the big mind and then hope. She draws first, from the small minds she has already grown. If the line says the big mind will be good, she grows it. If not, she keeps her winters.
Questions.
1. What did Hal and Nell draw first? The line of the fence.
2. What did they save? A post, a week, and a good neighbor.
3. What does Isla draw first? The line of the small minds' scores.
%%
Chronicle: The sorting crystal
From the chronicles kept at Vell, the years around 110.

The tutors had drilled minds for a long while, each on one small task, and most
towns had none. Then Una of Ambrook showed a crystal apples and pears.

She did not write a rule and hand it to the crystal. A crystal cannot read, and Una
knew it. Instead she showed it a fruit, and let it answer, and when it was wrong she
moved each of its weights a little toward the right answer. Then she showed it
another. She did this a great many times, and counted its mistakes over many fruits,
not one.

The tutors who saw it said the crystal sorted better than the neighbors' children.
Some of them argued about this for a month. Others went home and tried it themselves,
and found it true.

Her way of drilling became the first lesson in the tutors' books, and is still.
Show a thing. Let the mind answer. Show the right answer. Change a little. Then the
next. The clerks of the archive add that a mind must be tested on fruits it was never
shown, and this is why the tutors keep a box of pages that no drill ever touches.

We do not know why a crystal learns at all. Una did not know either, and said so.
%%
Primer reader: the lamp on the hill
By Una, cheesemaker near Three Wells. A reader for the long winter, in parts. Read one part, stop, and say the words after me.
1. Lark lives in a small house near Three Wells. Her mother makes cheese. Her father mends the carts. Above the house is a hill, and on the hill is a lamp, and in the lamp room there is a keeper and a desk.
2. The storm came in Leaffall. The wind was loud. The rain was cold. In the morning the lamp on the hill was dark.
3. Lark asked her mother why. Her mother said the lamp might be broken, or the keeper might be ill, or the storm might have been too strong for the glass. Her mother did not know which. Lark said: then let us go and see.
4. Lark and her father took a lantern up the hill. It was a long walk and a steep one. They stopped at every bend. At the top they went in at the low door, and up the ladder of rungs, one at a time.
5. The lamp room was cold. A pane of glass had broken, and the pieces lay on the floor like spilled water. Lark picked one up. It was green and thick, and it was as cold as the wind.
6. The keeper was not there. The desk had a cup on it, half full. The herb water was still in it. Lark's father did not touch the cup. He said the keeper must have gone to the fair at Three Wells, and would be back soon.
7. Read this part twice. Her father said soon. Her mother said soon when she got home. Lark did not say soon. She said nothing, and she looked out of the window.
8. In the north, over the hill, the sky was pale. There were lights low down, a few of them, very still. Lark counted them. One, two, three, four. Then she stopped counting.
9. Her father said they were only lights. Lark said she knew. She did not say how she knew.
10. They walked home in the dark. The lamp on the hill stayed dark behind them. The cat was waiting at the door, sitting very straight, and looking north.
11. Her mother put the kettle on. Her father mended the glass that night with a piece of wood and some string, so the window would stop rattling. The wind did not stop. The window did.
12. Say it with me: lamp, keeper, glass, wind, lights. When the wind is loud, we hold the lamp.
%%
Lesson: how a song is made
A page for the school in the hamlet near Lowmarsh. Spring. By Hob, who sings to the horses and does not mind if the children laugh.
The song contest is on the first day of Blossom. Many children want to sing. Some do not know what to sing. This lesson will help.
A song has three parts. A start, a middle and an end.
The start says what the song is about. "There was a frog on a log." That is a start.
The middle says what happened. "The log rolled. The frog fell in. The water was cold."
The end says how it came out. "The frog climbed out and said never again. Then he did it the next day."
A song also has a tune. The tune goes up and down, like the road to the marsh. A tune that goes up should come down. A tune that goes down should come up. If it does not, the song feels wrong.
A song also has a rhyme. Two lines end in the same sound. "Log" and "frog." "Cold" and "told." When you find a rhyme, say it three times. If it still sounds good, keep it.
Here is a song for you to learn. It is about the barn.
In the barn there is a spider,
and the spider has a web.
In the barn there is a horse,
and the horse has a bed.
The spider says to the horse, good night.
The horse says to the spider, good night.
They sleep in the barn, with the torch alight,
and the hens sit tight.
Now make a song of your own. It can be about a frog, a cat, a horse or a barn. It can be about spiders, if you like. You will sing it at the contest, and Hob will clap.
%%
Market Day at the Weir
By Hob, horse keeper at Lowmarsh.
Spring of the 181st year of the archive.

The market stalls stood by the fish weir today. People came along the boardwalk with baskets, sacks, and more mud than they had planned to bring.

I took the brown mare to carry two sacks of carrots and a jar of honey. The mare walked well. The honey jar did not. I had tied it to the basket with a short strap, and it swung against the carrots at every post.

At the first turn, the jar tipped. I caught it before it fell. The mare stopped to watch me do this. She has a careful nature when the trouble belongs to someone else.

Wren bought carrots for the healing house. She gave me a small jar of honey and said it was payment for carrying. I told her the mare had done most of the work. The mare heard this and reached for my pocket.

At the fish stall, a boy offered the mare a fish. I told him horses did not eat fish. He asked how I knew. The mare sniffed the fish and turned away.

I bought apples for the stable. The mare ate one from my hand, then looked at the boy's fish again. She was checking that no one had changed the rule.

On the way home, the rain began. The boardwalk was slick, so I walked beside her and held the basket steady. We reached the stable with all the apples and most of my dry coat.

Tomorrow I will use a longer strap for the honey jar.
%%
Primer: the new apprentice
Lesson three. The new apprentice.
Our new apprentice came on the cart from Vell this autumn. It is grey and copper, about as tall as a child of six, and its name is Pebble. The school has given it a stool by the door.

An apprentice cannot talk back. It answers by doing, and at most with one of eight words. Here are the eight: farm, store, fetch, come, stay, build, haul, home.

To give an order, say it plainly, and then wait.

> bring me the chalk
= fetch chalk

> stay by the door
= stay

> come here, Pebble
= come

> go home when the bell rings
= home

Do not shout at Pebble. It does not learn from shouting. It learns from the same drill, again and again, which is what the tutor at Vell says, and the tutor is always right about drills.

Do not ask Pebble if it is happy. It will not answer you. It will only do what it is told, and it will do it very well.

Your task: write one order for Pebble on your slate, and bring it to school tomorrow. If Pebble does it, you have written a good order.
%%
Primer: a fishing boat late home
A lesson for the children at the Halfway Inn, on the long table by the hearth, in the winter. Written by Wren, who had sat with the crew of a fishing boat from Saltreach the night before, when they came up the road after the boat was lost in the reeds for two days.

Lesson ten. The late boat.

A boat goes out in the morning. It comes home in the evening. If it is late, the people on the quay wait. They light the lamp on the harbor wall. They stand in the cold and look at the water.

Why is a boat late? It may have caught too many fish. It may have lost its oars. It may have been stuck on the reef at the back of the point, waiting for the tide.

What should you do when the boat is late? Do not cry. Do not run down the quay. Light a lamp, and put it on the wall, where the boat can see it.

What if the boat does not come home? That is very sad. It is also rare. Most boats come home late, and cold, and hungry, and they are glad to see the lamp.

Words to know: boat, late, lamp, oar, reef, tide, wait, home.

Say it: The boat is late. The lamp is lit. The boat is home.

Write it: Write the word home. Write a line about a lamp you have lit for someone.

Ask it: Who lights the lamp on the harbor wall when the keeper is asleep?

The keeper at Saltreach says his mother did, and her mother before her. The boatmen say the lamp is lit by whoever is awake. The children say it is lit by themselves, when they cannot sleep. All three are right, I think.
%%
Primer: the wheel that stopped
By Fern, relay keeper, for the school at Vell market. Autumn. The story in this lesson really happened, on the day of the big storm, and the wheel is mended now.

At the lower end of Vell there is a mill with a wheel. The wheel turns when the water pushes it. It has turned every day for a hundred years.

On the day of the storm, the wind blew a big branch down the stream. The branch hit the wheel. Crack. The wheel stopped.

The miller ran out. He saw the branch caught in the paddles. He saw the water piling up behind. If it kept piling, it would flood the lane.

What should he do?

He could pull the branch out. But the wheel might break. He could open the gate and let the water go by. But then the wheel would never turn. He could run for help.

He ran for help. He ran to the tower at the market. Fern was on duty. He said, "My wheel has stopped, and the water is rising."

Fern did not send a Haste note. Instead, she blew the town horn, which calls everyone. Thirty people came, with ropes and poles. They pulled the branch out together. The wheel turned. The water went down. The lane was dry.

The wheel was cracked, though. For a month the mill ground no flour, and the town bought bread from Kettle Ridge. A new paddle was cut from oak and fitted. Now the wheel turns as well as before.

What did we learn?

First, when a thing is too big for one person, ask for more people.
Second, a horn is quicker than a lamp.
Third, a mill needs a good wheel, but a town needs good neighbors.

Now, who can tell the story again, in their own words?
%%
Primer, page 1: the new road
Written by Greer, egg seller at Ambrook, for the children of the mill lane. Read it aloud, then say it back. Autumn, in the early years of the archive, when the new road was still new.

Lesson one. This is the road. It goes from Ambrook to Three Wells, and from Three Wells to Vell, where the archive is, up in the hill.
Say the words: road, mill, orchard, bridge, inn, tower.

Count the waymarks. The first waymark is a stone pillar by the mill, with a torch on top and a 0 cut in its face. The next is a 1. Then a 2, and so on to 9. Then the count starts again. Count them with your finger, and say each one out loud.

Count the eggs. Greer's hens lay eight eggs in a morning. Count them out loud. Two baskets make sixteen.

Lesson one, part two: what is new. A new road is a road nobody has walked yet. Every new inn is a day from the last. Every new tower is a lamp on a hill.

Say it back. Read the waymark numbers from one to nine. Then close the book, and go out and look at the road.
%%
Primer, page two: the cheese room
By Una, cheesemaker near Three Wells.
Read this page aloud. Then say the words after me.
Milk. Salt. Cold. Time.
The milk comes from Bessie in the morning, and from Hazel in the afternoon. In Reaping, Hazel gives better, and she knows it.
Warm the milk. Add the salt. Stir slowly, round and round, the way the sun goes.
Then wait. A good cheese cannot be hurried, and neither can a child.
Sum for the page: Mother has six cheeses. She sells two at the market. She gives one to the mill. How many are left? The answer is three.
The rind is the skin of the cheese. Do not eat the rind while it is young. It is bitter. Wait for it.
Say it with me: cold, salt, time.
%%
Primer, page two: the fence
Part two: a fence is not a fight.

Tam and Wyn share a hedge. On Tam's side of the hedge is a field of wheat. On Wyn's side is a pasture with two cows and a gate that sticks. The fence runs between them, along the hedge.

Read these aloud, in pieces: fence. post. rail. gate. hedge. oak. ditch. field.

Here is what happened last spring. The fence came down in the wind. Wyn said it was Tam's fault, because Tam had put the posts in too shallow. Tam said it was Wyn's fault, because Wyn's cows leaned on the rails all winter. Both were angry. Both were partly right.

Here is the point. When two people argue about a fence, they should look at the fence first. A post in the ground is a fact. A cow leaning on a rail is a fact. Who was angry is not a fact, and it does not hold up a fence.

So they went and looked. The posts were shallow on the north end. The cows had leaned hardest on the south end. They fixed the north end together, and set the posts two spades deep. Then Wyn gave Tam a cup of cider, and Tam said the cider was too sweet, and drank the whole cup.

Practice. Say the whole word for each pair of pieces: post-hole. rail-fence. hedge-row. ditch-water. gate-latch.

When you can say them without stopping, you can mend a fence. When you can mend a fence, you can argue about it. But you will know which side the posts are on.
%%
Primer: the stream
By Tansy, stable hand, at the house at the edge of Three Wells. For the oldest children. Winter. I know a little about minds because the tutor boards with us, and talks at supper.

A mind is built of layers, one after another. Each layer looks at what it is given and adds something it has found. The adding goes into a stream that runs through the whole mind, from the first layer to the last. The stream carries the sum of everything so far.

Now, there is a danger. Each time a layer adds to the stream, the numbers in it grow. After many layers, the stream is a flood. The first layers cannot be heard over the last. The mind answers badly.

What to do?

The tutors found a simple cure. Before each layer reads the stream, they bring the numbers back to an even size. They do not change what is in the stream, only how loud it is. The layer then reads a stream of a steady size, every time.

An even stream makes a calm layer. A calm layer learns in small, steady steps. And a mind that learns in small, steady steps becomes good.

Here is a way to remember it. Imagine a river. At every bend there is a pool. In the pool the water is calm and the same depth. Then it flows on. Without the pools, the river would wash the field away. With them, the river feeds it.

A tutor told me a harder way: after a layer, subtract the average, then divide by the spread. I did not understand it at first. Then I thought of the horses. If the horses run too fast, slow them. If they run too slow, speed them up. Always the same walk.

That is all I know. I have not seen the inside of a mind. But I have seen what happens when it is not even: the mistakes jump about and do not fall. And I have seen what happens when it is: they fall day by day.

Biscuit is on the windowsill. She will go out in a minute. She always does.
%%
Primer: the borrowed horse
A lesson for the children on the east road, written by Finch in the autumn, when the Pell's horse was lent to the miller for a week, and the children were asked how a horse should be cared for by someone who does not own it.

Lesson seven. The horse that is borrowed.

A horse is a big animal with four legs and a very long face. It eats hay and oats. It drinks water from a trough. It likes to be spoken to by name.

When you borrow a horse, you must care for it as if it were your own. Feed it at dawn and at dusk. Water it at noon. Brush it, if you have a brush.

A horse may be lazy. It may try to stop in the middle of the road. It may try to eat the hedge. Do not hit it. Speak to it, and say its name, and it will often walk on.

When you return the horse, you must tell the owner how it has been. Tell them the truth. Tell them if it has lost a shoe, or if it has been over a fence, or if it has eaten the bucket.

Words to know: horse, borrow, feed, water, brush, shoe, fence, owner.

Say it: The horse is fed. The horse is watered. The horse is home.

Write it: Write the word horse. Write the name of a horse you know.

Ask it: What does the horse think when it is borrowed?

The miller says the horse thinks about oats. The owner says the horse thinks about going home. The children say the horse does not think at all, and that it only walks where it is led. Grandfather says he has never known a horse that did not have an opinion about its feed.
%%
Letter: Pell to his sister at Ambrook
Pell, on the Long Road, to his sister at Ambrook.

Dear sister,

I am at Three Wells. The inn has twelve beds and one of them is mine. My cart is mended and my boots are not.

The talk here is all of the great drills. Everyone wants to know if a mind can learn to read. I saw a demonstration at the fair. A tutor put a page in front of a crystal in a box, and the box said the next letter. Then the next. It read the whole page aloud, letter by letter, and it did not stumble on the long words.

I thought of our father. He could read, but slowly, and he moved his lips. The mind does not move its lips. Still, it reads.

Then the tutor gave it a page it had never seen. A letter from a shipwright at Saltreach, about a boat. The mind read most of it. It got lost at the end, on a word it did not know. The tutor said that was honest, and better than a mind that guesses and hides its guess.

Here is the part I like. The tutors drilled this mind on our letters. Letters like mine to you. I have sent you many, and I keep the copies, and last Sowing I sent a box of them to Vell. So the mind read my hand before it read the boat. It learned from a merchant who writes about boots.

I do not know if that is a good thing or a strange thing. I think it is both. My gossip is in a crystal now. Let it earn its keep.

The honey at Ambrook was good this year. I have a jar in the cart. I will bring it at Apple. Tell the bees I said so.

Your brother,
Pell
%%
Primer, page 4: the inn a day away
Written by Greer, egg seller at Ambrook. Read the inns in order, from the mill to the hill. Say each name twice, so that the travelers will know them when they hear them.

Lesson four. The inns on the Long Road are a day apart. A cart that leaves at dawn reaches the next inn by dusk, if the horse is sensible and the road is dry.

The first inn is the Kettle Inn, on the ridge road. It is not on the Long Road, but it is close, and the ridge wind is loud.
The second is the Brown Hen, at the crossing below Three Wells. It is new this year. It has nineteen beds, a hearth in the middle, and a cook named Marda who says her stew is still learning the price.
The third is the Halfway Inn, between Three Wells and Vell. It has a riddle board by the fire.

Count the days. From Ambrook to the Brown Hen is one day. From the Brown Hen to the Halfway Inn is one day. From the Halfway Inn to Vell is one day. Three days, and you are at the Archive door.

Count the money. A bed is one emerald. A bowl of stew is one emerald. A bed and a bowl of stew together is one emerald, if you tell Marda her stew is better than last year, which it probably is.

Say it back, from the mill to the hill. Then say the riddle, and do not answer it, because the riddle is not for children yet.
%%
Primer: guess the hidden letter
A reading mind learns by guessing, and you can play the same game. Cover the last letter of each line. Guess it. Then look.

1. The sheep are in the fiel?
2. Bread is made from whea?
3. Keep the torches li?
4. Three Wells has three well?
5. We will keep everything we writ?
6. The bees make hone?

Did you guess them all? You had help. The words before the gap told you what could come next.

That is all a reading mind does. It sees the letters before, and it guesses the next. At first it is wrong a great deal. Each time it is shown the right letter, and it changes a little.

Answers: d, t, t, s, e, y.

Gale's note: I got six. My brother got four. For the bees he wrote a, and he says the bees make honea. Nobody has ever seen honea.
%%
Primer: a visitor from the tutor house
A primer page by Elsa, a wool carder of Saltreach, written for the school the week a tutor visited. Autumn. The tutor spoke to the children and Elsa wrote down what the children were told.

Today a tutor came to our school. Her name is Kerra. She came from Vell on a cart.

She showed us a crystal. It was small and clear and it sat on a card. The card said, in big letters: Count.

She said, "This crystal knows how to count. It was drilled for a month. It was shown sums, again and again, and each time it was wrong, it changed a little. Now it is right."

We asked how it learned. She said, "By being wrong. That is the only way."

A boy asked, "Is it alive?" She said, "I do not know. It does what it was shown."

A girl asked, "Can I try?" Kerra said yes. The girl held up three fingers. The crystal showed three. The girl held up five. The crystal showed five. The girl held up all ten, and then both feet. The crystal showed ten. The class laughed.

Kerra said, "A mind is not a trick. It is practice."

Question: what does a crystal do when it is wrong?
%%
Primer: The Horse at the Gate
By Hob, horse keeper at Lowmarsh.
Spring, the 163rd year of the archive.

A horse needs clean water, good hay, and a dry place to stand.

In spring, the grass beside the boardwalk is soft. Do not let a horse eat all of it. Leave some for the rabbits.

Brush mud from the horse before you put on its blanket. Mud under a strap can rub the skin. Hob knows this because he once forgot. The horse told him by biting his sleeve.

A horse pulls a small cart. It does not pull the whole marsh.

At night, keep the stable torch lit. If a spider comes in, let the cat find it. If the cat is asleep, wake the cat gently.

A horse is not a wheelbarrow. Do not put the whole fish catch on its back.
%%
Primer: what the Archive keeps
Page one of the second reader. Copied out by Gale, at the last house on the Vell road.

The Archive is under the hill at Vell. It keeps everything we write.
Letters. Songs. Notices. Recipes. Lists of sheep.
Over the door the first keepers cut: We will keep everything we write.

This spring the tutors have a new drill. They show a mind the pages of the Archive, one letter at a time.
Why the Archive? Because no other place has so many pages together.

Who wrote the pages? Everyone. Even your grandmother.

Gale's note: my grandmother wrote a list of sheep. It is in the Archive. It has thirty-one sheep. I counted them again to be sure.
%%
Primer: the sea and the harbor wall
Lesson four. The sea.
Saltreach is by the sea. The sea is big and grey and salty. It comes in twice a day, and it goes out twice a day. This is called the tide.
The tide comes up under the harbor wall. The wall is made of cobblestone. It is very old and very thick, and it keeps the big waves out of the harbor. So the boats can rest at the quay.
Count the boats. In the morning there are twelve boats at the quay. At dusk there are seven. Where are the other five?
They are out on the sea with the nets. They will come home when the wind turns. Their sails are white and small. Count them on the water if you can.
How do the boats find the way home in the dark? They look for the lamp on the stone tower above the quay. The tower is part of the relay line. Its lamp burns all night, and the boats steer for it. Do not touch the lamp. Ask the keeper.
Words of the sea, to learn by heart: wave, tide, swell, quay, net, wall, rope, sail, mast, gull.
A gull is a grey bird with a loud voice. A gull will take your bread if you are not careful. Hold the bread close and say no.
Read the fish board by the market. It has the price of every basket. In Reaping a basket of fish is three emeralds. In Melon it was one, because the boats came in full. Ask why. The answer is the tide.
Some of you have asked whether the sea has an end. Nobody has walked to it. The old fishers say it goes on past where the sky meets it. My father said the sea is only big. You may decide for yourselves.
Lesson for today: how many nets does one boat carry? Count them at the slip, one by one. Then count the boats. Then count all the nets together, and write the number on your slate.
%%
Primer: What a crystal learns
A page for the school at Three Wells.

A crystal is a clear stone. Hold one up and the light goes through it.
A mind lives in the crystal. We do not know why a crystal can learn.
Nobody wrote that down. But we know it learns from what it is shown.

Show it a thing and it gives an answer. Then you show it the right answer.
If it was wrong, it changes a little. Not all at once. A little.
Then you show it another thing. And another. And another.

This is called a drill. A drill is the same kind of example, again and again.
You cannot tell a crystal a rule. It cannot read. It can only be shown.

Our teacher says: be patient, and be wrong a lot. Being wrong is how it learns.
%%
Notice: letters wanted for the drills
By order of the council, posted at the notice board, Three Wells.

The tutors at Vell are drilling reading minds. They want writing to drill on. This is a call for it.

What we want:
- Letters. Letters to a friend, a brother, a mother. Letters you kept.
- Journals and diaries. One page is enough. A year is better.
- Recipes, if they are written down.
- School essays. Children may send theirs.
- Notices and rules, if you have a copy.
- Songs that were written down.

What we cannot use:
- The same letter twice. The clerks will sort out copies.
- Pages with the ink gone.
- Pages in the test box. The clerks keep those apart.

Where to bring it: the school house by the east well, on any market day. Ask for the box with the red wool.

What happens to it: it goes to Vell. The clerks read it, tag it, and file it. The mind is shown the pages. A page shown to a mind can never be used to test it, so the clerks keep some pages back for testing. That is why some pages are kept apart and never shown.

A word on whose letters go in. The council has asked the tutors this, and the tutors do not all give the same answer. Some want every letter. Some want only letters of grown folk. Some want no letters of children. The council has not settled it, and the tutors argue, and the archive holds all of it until they do.

A word on the lost letter. A letter from Saltreach went missing in the copy room at Vell last Leaffall. It was about a boat. If you find it, send it back. It is not lost on purpose.

The bell rings at noon. Bring the box before then.
%%
Lesson: what to do when spiders
A page for the school at the hamlet near Lowmarsh. Written by Hob, stable hand, in spring.
In spring the barn wakes up. The hens begin to lay. The cat has kittens. The spiders come out.
Most spiders are small and brown, and they live in the corners of the barn. They catch flies. They do not bite people. They are good for the barn.
But at night, in the dark, a big spider may come from the marsh. It is as big as a dog. It has red eyes. This spider is not a friend.
What to do if you see a big spider in the barn:
1. Do not touch it.
2. Do not shout. Shouting does not help.
3. Walk slowly to the door.
4. Light a torch and hold it up. Spiders do not like torches.
5. Call an adult.
Torches in the barn must be kept lit all night in spring. That is a rule. Hob lights them himself.
Now answer these. Write the answers on your slate.
How many legs has a spider? Eight.
How many torches are in the barn? Six.
How many spiders may stay? The small ones.
Who lights the torches? Hob.
%%
The New Helper at the Horse Shed
By Hob, keeper of horses at Lowmarsh.
The sixth of Blossom, the 207th year of the archive.

The little helper came to the horse shed after the spring test at Wren's house. It had copper hands, iron feet, and a small mind held in a clear crystal. Moss brought it on a cart. The cart made one wheel squeak all the way from the boardwalk.

The helper had passed its test with sacks and buckets. It had not yet worked with a horse. Nessa's note said to begin with one clear order and watch what it did.

I set a clean water bucket beside the trough.

> bring me the clean bucket
= fetch bucket

The helper lifted the bucket and carried it to me. The mare lowered her head to smell its hand. The helper stopped. It did not drop the bucket.

I told the mare to stand back. She stood back, but only as far as the hay rack.

> bring the bucket to the trough
= fetch bucket

The helper carried the bucket to the trough. I checked it for dust, then filled it with water. The mare drank. She seemed satisfied with the work.

After this we gave the helper a sack of oats to carry from the store. It brought the sack to the stable door and waited. I had said to carry the oats, but I had not said where. That was my mistake, not the helper's.

Moss wrote the order on a card.

> bring the oats to the feed shelf
= fetch oats

The helper took the sack to the shelf. It set the sack down without spilling any oats. This is more than I can say for Pip, who once tipped a whole sack while looking for a spoon.

We brushed the mare next. The helper held the brush when I asked it to fetch the brush. It did not brush the mare. Its order card said fetch, not brush. I must teach the new work before I ask for it.

The children came by after their lesson. They wanted to give the mare apples. I told them to offer one at a time. The helper waited beside the gate with the empty bucket. It did not reach for the apples.

At dusk, I checked the stable door, the water, and the torch. The helper stood where Moss had left it. We have not taught it to go home yet. Tomorrow we will practice carrying hay and keeping clear of the mare's feet.

The mare has learned the helper's smell. The helper has learned where the bucket goes. That is enough for a first day.

The squeaky cart wheel is still not fixed. I know who will be asked to fetch the grease.
%%
Letter: Wren to the school at Three
Spring, late years.

Dear teacher,

You asked what the children should know about the talking minds. I will tell you what I have seen at Lowmarsh, and you may cut it down for the little ones.

We have no relay house of our own. Our nearest is at the tower above the marsh road. Moss carries the letters there and back. The mind answers in a day, sometimes two, and the children wait by the board like gulls by a boat.

Pip's girl asked it why frogs sing at night. It wrote back a good answer about the males calling for mates, and then it wrote: "but I have never heard a frog. Tell me what it sounds like." The children argued about how to write a frog's song. In the end they wrote "grup, grup, then a long one." The mind wrote back: "thank you. I will keep that." I do not know if it can keep a thing. It said it would.

The tutors score the letters. A mind that answers kindly gets a good score, and a mind that answers cruelly gets a bad one, and it learns from the scores. So it learns to be kind. I asked our keeper whether that is kindness or only a good score. He said he did not know. I said that is the honest answer, and he laughed.

But here is the thing I would have the children know. When a child is sick and frightened, and asks the mind whether the grey cough can be cured, the mind says: "I do not know. I am sorry. Ask Wren." It does not make a pretty answer to get a good score. It says what is true. A mind that can say "I do not know" is worth more to me than one that can say anything.

And once, when a boy asked it how to make a fire in the reeds to scare his sister, it said "no." Just that. "No. That would burn the marsh and hurt her. I will not help with that." Good score or bad, I was glad of it.

Give my love to the children. Tell them to write plainly. The mind reads one letter at a time, and it likes short words.

Wren, healer, Lowmarsh.
%%
Saltreach school essay: what a mind
By Bel, age nine, at the school by the east well.
A mind is in a crystal. A tutor shows it examples. The same kind again and again. At first it is wrong. Each time it is wrong, its weights move a little toward the right answer. That is drilling. A reading mind is drilled on pages. It learns to read a letter and guess the next one. The tutors take out copies and spoiled pages first. They keep a test box of pages no mind is ever drilled on. My teacher says a drill is only as good as its pages. So the clerks have a lot of work. Spring is the busy time, because everyone writes letters in spring. I would like to see the test box. My teacher says no.
%%
Primer: the autumn lessons, all of them
Lesson five. The autumn lessons, all of them.
This is the last page of the primer for the season. Read it three times. Then read it to your little brother.
The autumn months are Reaping, Apple and Leaffall. Say them slowly. Reaping is when the wheat comes in. Apple is when the apples fall and the bees go quiet. Leaffall is when the leaves come down and the nights get long.
Lesson: how to tie a sheep knot. Take the rope round the post. Bring the end back under itself. Pull it, and it holds. Pull it harder, and it still holds. A sheep cannot undo it, though a sheep will try.
Lesson: how to read the weather. A red sky at dusk means a fine morning. A ring round the moon means rain in three days, perhaps four. A grey sea and a still wind mean fog, and fog is worse than rain for the boats. Lenn says this is right most days. The days it is wrong, we forget.
Lesson: the torches. Light them at dusk, every night, at each corner of the pen and each side of the door. Check them at dawn. A torch that has gone out is a dark corner, and a dark corner is where the night things come.
Lesson: the apprentice. We have one apprentice in Wrack End. It is small and copper colored, and it carries the feed. It counts the sheep at dusk and it does not lose one. It is better at counting than any child here, and it does not get tired, and it does not want a sweet. Be kind to it. It stands where it is put, and it comes when it is called.
Lesson: the relay lamp. On the hill above the harbor a relay lamp blinks all day. The letters come down the line from tower to tower. The keeper writes them in a book. If you see a lamp blink and do not know what it says, do not guess. Ask the keeper, and write down what you learn.
Riddle for the autumn: what has a mouth but never eats, and runs but never walks? The answer is at the bottom of the page. Did you think of the river?
Words for the season, to copy onto your slate: reap, apple, leaf, frost, rope, lamp, pen, fold, fog.
Do your sums before you go out. Do your sums before you come in. Then do them again, because the sheep have been counting you.
%%
Primer reader: the gift over the fence
By Dace, mayor of Three Wells, for the children at the market. Read one part at a time. Stop after each number and say the words after me.
1. Two neighbors lived in the square, one on each side of a fence. Their names were Ede and Tobin. The fence was old, and the post at the corner had moved.
2. Ede kept bees. Tobin kept hens. In the summer, the bees went over the fence to the hens' yard, and the hens ate the honey that the bees left on the wall. Neither of them thought this was fair.
3. One morning, Tobin said the bees had stung a hen. Ede said the hen had stolen the honey. They shouted over the fence until the market bell rang, and then they went to their stalls, and did not speak all day.
4. In the evening, the lamp at the crossing dimmed, and came up again. Ede looked out of her window. She saw Tobin sitting on his step, with his head in his hands.
5. Ede took a jar of honey from the shelf. She did not know what to say, so she said nothing. She walked to the fence, and put the jar on the top rail, and walked back.
6. In the morning, the jar was still on the rail. Tobin had put a loaf of bread beside it. Neither of them had said a word.
7. Read this part twice. A gift is something you give without being asked. Say it with me: give, take, thank you.
8. They walked the fence together that week, with a stick and a piece of string. They measured from the post to the gate. The numbers did not quite agree. They agreed the numbers were close enough.
9. Tobin moved the post back by a hand. Ede put a new rail in. The bees went over the fence only when Ede let them, and the hens ate only what was given.
10. In Melon the lights were seen again over the hills, far to the north. Tobin and Ede stood at the fence and looked at them. Ede said they were only lights. Tobin said they might be looking at us. Ede said that was a good story for the square, and Tobin laughed.
11. The lamp at the crossing came up after the dimming, the way it always did. The carts went out on the road to the east, and some did not come back the same way. Some families went with them, down to the coast, with their bags packed and their children asleep. The square was quieter for a while.
12. Ede and Tobin still share the honey. They still share the fence. They do not agree about the north, and they do not need to. Say it with me: fence, gift, honey, and the neighbor on the other side.
%%
Lesson: the song contest
For the children of the hamlet near Lowmarsh. Written by Hob, who keeps the horses, to be read aloud in the stable on a wet day.
Every spring there is a song contest at the hamlet. The horses are brought out. The children sing.
The rules are easy.
One. Sing a song you know.
Two. Sing it loud, but not so loud that the horses are afraid.
Three. Do not stop until the end.
The winner gets a basket of apples and a ribbon for the best horse. The horse does not have to be the winner's horse. Any horse will do.
Last year the winner was a girl who sang a song about a frog. The horses liked it. One of them sang along. That was not allowed, but we let it count.
%%
The Mare and the Reed Basket
By Hob, horse keeper at Lowmarsh.
The ninth of Swarm, the 188th year of the archive.

This morning the mare would not cross the little bridge by the reed bed. The bridge was sound. I had walked over it with a feed sack, and the sack had not complained.

The mare looked at the basket in my hand. It held two wet bundles of reeds for Wren's shed. I set the basket down. The mare stepped onto the bridge.

Then I picked the basket up. The mare stepped back.

I set the basket down again. She crossed.

At the far side I put the basket on her cart. She pulled the cart all the way to Wren's house. She did not refuse the basket then. This was a point in the basket's favor.

Moss came out and took the reeds. He said the mare had shown good sense. I said she had shown good sense about a basket after I had done the hard part.

Moss said that was still good sense.

After lunch, I tested the bridge with an empty basket. The mare crossed beside me. Then I filled the basket with fresh hay, and she crossed again without stopping.

I will keep using the bridge. I will also keep my hands free when I lead the mare over it. If a basket must be carried, I will put it on the cart first.

The mare is a good worker. She knows the difference between a job and a foolish plan. I am trying to learn it too.
%%
A hollow under the field
By Tam, spring 189

Pip found the hole while he was mending the ditch in the long beetroot field. The ground had fallen in beside the north hedge. It was no wider than a bucket, but the soil went down farther than his hoe could reach.

We put a torch near the edge and looked in. There was stone below the field, and a dark opening under the roots of the hedge. Cold air came up from it. Pip wanted to go in at once. I told him to wait until we had rope, spare torches and another grown person.

Hella came from the next farm with a length of rope. We tied it round a fence post and lowered a torch. The light showed a low cave with a floor of stone. We saw no deep passage from the opening. We saw one old clay pot, broken in two, and a row of small stones along the wall.

Nobody knew of a cave under that field. The old farm book says the field was cleared before my grandfather was born. It says nothing about stone below it.

We marked the place with two fence posts and a strip of wool. No one should step near the loose soil. The hole is not a new well, and no one should drink from it.

Pip asked whether we might find gold there. I said we might find more mud. That is what fields give us most often.

Next market day, we will ask the town mason to look at the opening. Until then we will leave it alone. The beetroot can grow on the other side of the ditch.
%%
Primer, page four: lights in the north
By Dace, mayor of Three Wells, for the children who asked. Read this page aloud. It is about a rumor. A rumor is not a fact, and you may say so.
Far to the north, past the hills and the spruce, there is a tower at the top of the world. It is called Northpoint. Read the name. Say it with me: north, point.
Some nights, the carters say, a light is seen over the hills, far to the north. It is low down and very still. Some say it is a star that fell. Some say it is a fire. A girl at the school says the lights were looking at us. Read her words: looking at us. Who was looking?
Nobody knows. The keeper at Northpoint has not written down what the lights are, because she has not been sure, and she is careful about what she writes.
The keepers of the towers keep a book. The book is kept at the tower, copied at Vell, and read aloud at the market on the first day of Blossom. Nobody has yet read a page that says the lights are a danger. Nobody has read a page that says they are not.
Ask your teacher where the north is on the map. Put your finger on Three Wells. Now move your finger up, past the hills, past the spruce, past the last road. That is where the tower is. Your finger can get there. Nobody has yet got to the place where the lights come from.
Last summer a carter brought a story from the far road. He said the lights moved across the sky like a cart on a road, and then went out. He was tired, and it was late, and he was not sure. The square laughed, and then nobody laughed.
Mother says: go to bed. Father says: the lights are only lights. The school says: the lights are a good story for the square.
Do not run out into the road to look. Stay at the window, and count to ten, and then come away from the glass.
Say it with me: north, lights, star, fire, and go to bed.
%%
The Order for the Yard
By Iona, written at home in Three Wells

Spring, in the 176th year of the archive.

Mother sent me to bring the bread from the bakery. She gave me two emeralds and said, "Bring me some bread." I carried the coins in my pocket and went by the east well.

The bread was warm. I ate a corner on the way home. Mother saw the crumbs on my sleeve and said, "That is not the bread I asked you to bring."

At school, Master Sen wrote an order on the board.

> bring me some bread
= fetch bread

He said the small apprentice in the yard must learn the meaning from many examples. It carried the practice bread to him, then carried it to the shelf, then carried it back. It did each task well.

I asked it to stay by the door. It went to the tool rack and stood there. Master Sen said it had heard stay, but did not yet know where I meant. He drew a circle by the door and tried again.

> stay by the door
= stay

This time the apprentice stopped in the circle. It stood so still that Bel asked if it had become a stool. The apprentice did not answer. It had not been taught that answer.

At home I tried the lesson on my little brother. I said, "Fetch the bowl." He fetched a spoon. I showed him the bowl and asked again. He brought the bowl, then sat in it.

Mother says children also need practice.
%%
Primer: the word for the tower
A lesson for the children at the Halfway Inn, written by Wren, who has been asked to teach them the words for the relays so that they can read the notices by the post. Winter.

Lesson eleven. The tower.

A relay tower is tall. It is made of stone. It has a stair inside, and at the top there is a lamp.

The keeper lives at the foot of the tower. The keeper climbs the stair each night to light the lamp. When the lamp is lit, the keeper sends a message down the line, to the next tower, and the next, all the way to Vell.

Each message is short. The keeper writes it in the book. The keeper reads the answer, and writes that too.

Words to know: tower, stair, lamp, keeper, message, line, book.

Say it: The keeper lights the lamp. The lamp sends the word.

Write it: Write the word tower. Write a message to your friend. Keep it short.

Ask it: What does the lamp say when it is out?

The children asked this last winter, and the keeper at the Halfway said that the lamp is never out for long. The lamps at the far towers, on the north road, are sometimes dark for a night or two. The keepers say it is the snow. The travelers say it is something else, and they do not say what.
%%
Lesson: sums with goods
Written by Bel for the school. A sum is only a story with numbers in it. Work each story out on your slate, with the working shown, before you look at the answer.

Story one. A cart carries 40 sacks of wheat. At the mill, 12 sacks are sent to the bakers. How many sacks are left in the cart?
Answer: 28 sacks. Check it by adding 12 back.

Story two. A jar of honey sells for 2 emeralds. Three jars are sold at the market. How many emeralds are received?
Answer: 6 emeralds. Count the jars one at a time, and say the emeralds as you go.

Story three. A note of 25 words is sent by the relay. A note costs 1 emerald for every ten words. How many emeralds does it cost?
Answer: 3 emeralds. Twenty five words is three tens and a little more, and the little part is still paid for.

Story four, for the clever ones. A cart carries 40 sacks. 12 go to the bakers, and then 9 of the rest are spoiled by rain. How many sacks are good?
Answer: 19 sacks. Take the spoiled sacks from the 28 that were left, and check the total by adding them back.

The working is the important part. A sum with the working shown can be checked by anyone. A sum without it is only a guess.
%%
Letter: Bel to the Archive at Vell
Fourth of Deepsnow, year 200.

Dear clerks of the Archive,

My name is Bel. I am nine. I live in the last house on the west edge of Three Wells, where the wall ends and the fields begin. My teacher said we should write to you and tell you true things, because you keep everything. So here is a true thing.

This winter my mother gave me a gift. It is a pair of gloves made of sheep's wool, knitted by my grandmother, and on each finger she sewed a little mark. On the left hand the marks are numbers, one to five. On the right hand they are letters. I do not know why. Grandmother says a hand should carry what it needs to remember. I wear them to school every day. My fingers are warm and I can count on them and spell on them.

Here is another true thing. Our house is cold at the back because the wall has a gap in it where a stone came loose. My father says he will mend it in Thaw. Until then we hang a sack over the gap and the wind makes the sack go in and out like breathing. My little brother thinks the house is asleep. He puts his ear to the sack to hear it.

Here is a third true thing. It snowed on the second and the third and the fifth of Deepsnow, but not on the fourth. I am writing this on the fourth.

The school house has a stove. We sit round it in the morning and read. My teacher reads us the story of the windmills of Kettle Ridge and how they squeak on every turn. I would like to see a windmill. Have you seen one? How many turns does it make before it squeaks? I think it squeaks on every turn, so the answer is every turn, but I would like to know for sure.

Please keep this letter. It is true.

Bel.
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Primer, page 9: the harvest
This was a good harvest. Say it. Good harvest. Say it again, and smile, because the farm smiles when it has enough.

Lesson nine: counting sacks.
The wheat is in. Count the sacks as they come off the cart. One sack, two sacks, three sacks.
Pa carries four sacks to the barn. Mam carries three. How many sacks are in the barn now? Four and three make seven. Seven sacks are in the barn.
Write seven in the book. Then chalk it on the wall by the door, with the other marks.

Lesson nine, part two: the beetroot.
The beetroot is in the long field. It is red and round. Pull one up and shake the dirt off. Put ten in the basket, then six more, then two more. Ten, six and two make eighteen. Eighteen beetroot for the soup.
Beetroot soup needs salt, water, and a pot. Warm it slowly. Do not let it boil over.

Lesson nine, part three: the carts.
The cart goes down to Saltreach in the morning, past the windmill, to the fish market. Read the price board when you get there. Wheat is three emeralds a sack. Count the sacks on the cart, and count the emeralds in the bag, and check that they match.

Lesson nine, part four: the words of the harvest.
Harvest. Sack. Cart. Field. Plant. Cut. Store.
The wheat is ready when it bends over. Cut it then, and not before.
After the harvest the field is bare. Plant it again soon, before the wind takes the soil.

The good harvest is in. Sleep well. Tomorrow we count the hens.
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Primer, page 4: the old map
Found in the loft of the barn, under the hay. It is brown at the edges and it smells of salt. Read the map from the top, as you would read a page.

North is up. Point north. Point to the cold, where the snow comes from.

On the map, the Long Road is a thin brown line. It goes from Saltreach, past the towers, to Vell in the hill. The little squares are towns. The dots are wells. The tall marks are relay towers, and there are many of them.

Find Saltreach. It is a blue star by the edge of the paper, where the sea begins.

Look at the edge. The sea goes off the edge of the map, and the map stops. Nobody has been to the edge to check. Ask your father what he thinks is there. He will say he does not know. That is the right answer.

Words to know: map, north, south, road, town, well, tower, edge.
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Primer, page four: hill and stone
By Una, cheesemaker near Three Wells. Read this page aloud, then again slowly, with your finger under each word.
The stone is grey. The stone is hard. The stone is in the hill.
Deep stone is the hardest stone of all. It lies under the town of Copperhold, under the mine, under the hill.
Read these words: pick, lamp, rope, torch, copper, coal. Say each one.
At the mine the miners go down the long stair with a torch. Every eight steps there is a torch on the left. Count them going down. Count them coming up. The numbers should be the same.
Hesk, who is a miner, says: keep your torch lit. The mine is cold, and the stone is cold, and the stone does not care whether you are there.
Now read the next part carefully. It is about a rumor, and a rumor is not a fact.
Some miners say the stone is warm now. They say it is warm at night, and that it hums, like a bee in a jar. Some will not go below the old gate. They say it is only a rule. Other miners say it is only the wind in the shafts. Nobody has come up and said what it is.
Our teacher says the stone is only stone. Our teacher has not been down the mine.
Read: The stone is cold. Is the stone warm? Read it again. Is it cold?
Say it with me: deep stone, hard stone, cold stone. Let us go home before dark.
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Primer, page four: the window
Part four: a window is how much you can see at one time.

Hold up your hand and look through the gap between two fingers. That is a window. You can see what is inside it. What is outside is not yet there.

The first big minds had a window about sixty letters wide. A mind could look at one letter at a time, and it kept in memory the letters before it that mattered. Then it guessed the next letter. It was slow, but it worked.

Read this line aloud, one letter at a time: a b c d e f g h i j k l.

Now read this line in pieces: hay loft barn yard bee hive honey comb sheep fold wool shed.

Count how many letters are in the second line. Then count the pieces. The pieces are fewer, and each one is a whole part of a word. You can see more of the page with the same window when you read in pieces.

That is what the tutors found. They taught the big minds to read the pieces of words, the common parts that come up again and again. A window of pieces holds far more than a window of letters. Each piece is many letters at once, and the mind has learned what the piece means.

Here is the part nobody has written down. Why the window grows, when the minds learn the pieces, the tutors do not say. They say it grows. They say they can measure it, and that the big minds can read more of a page in one look than the small minds can. What is hard to explain, they leave open. You may leave it open too.

On the ridge we can use this. When you read the seed list in the barn, do not read the seeds one letter at a time. Read the pieces. Beet, root. Wheat, field. Oat, straw. Your eyes will be quicker than your hands, and that is the right way round.

Practice. Look at this list, and read it in pieces, without stopping: windmill, cobblestone, beetroot, scarecrow, honeycomb, hayloft.

Count them. Then count the pieces in them. Then say the whole list twice, faster the second time.

The window is only as big as the pieces you know. Learn more pieces, and you will see more of the page.
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Notice: the spring fair at Saltreach
By the harbor council, put up at the quay and copied to Three Wells.

The spring fair is on the fourteenth of Blossom. Stalls on the quay from first light. Nets, rope, clay pots, honey from Ambrook, apples kept over the winter, bread, fish, and the good smoked fish.

The slip is closed to boats that day. Boats may tie at the long pier.

Events:
A rowing race round the harbor wall at noon. Two to a boat.
A knot-tying contest for the children at the fish market steps.
The weighing of the biggest fish. Bring your fish by the tenth hour.
A visiting tutor from Vell will show a reading mind in the inn yard at dusk. She will read a page you bring and guess the next letter. Bring a page with hard words. She says bring the hardest.

Do not let your apprentices into the fish market. Last year one carried off a whole barrel of herring and stacked it neatly by the boats. We found it. We did not find the herring.

Keep the torches lit along the quay. The nights are still long.
