The winter the relays failed
This letter was found in the archive at Vell, in the box of late letters. It has no year. It was carried from Saltreach to Three Wells and then to Vell, and the clerk who filed it wrote on the back: from Corin, shipwright, to his sister at Ambrook, never sent.

Sena,

The big ship is on the slip. Three times as long as any boat I have built. The whole town came to watch the keel go down.

I have a mind that holds the frame straight while we build. It learns by trying, the way the furnace minds do. Each day it tries a little and the men say nearer or further off, and it keeps more of what went well. It holds a straighter frame than my father did, and my father was the best on this coast.

But it has gone strange this month. It holds the frame, then it stops, then it holds again. The men give it the sign and it does not take it. I have looked at the crystal and it is a little cloudy at one edge. The old ones go cloudy, they say. I do not know why. Nobody wrote it down.

The boats still come and go. The mind on the harbor boat keeps its course across the bay as well as ever.

People are leaving. Whole families, with their boxes and their hens, down to the quay and onto the big ship. A woman asked me if it was safe across the water. I said I did not know. Nobody knows what is across the water. I said the ship is sound. It is.

The relays have gone quiet from the north. I tried Three Wells and got nothing. I tried Vell and got nothing. The keeper says it is the snow. I do not think it is the snow.

If this reaches you, keep the mill wheel turning. Do not open the sluice.

Your brother,
Corin

P.S. Tell the baker the flour is good. I have no grit in my bread here.
%%
Letter: Hesk to Nessa, the furnace mind
Nessa,

You asked me to write plainly what the furnace mind does, so the tutors' book can have it from a miner and not only from a tutor. Here it is.

We set it on the great furnace in the Deep Works. It has a mind in a crystal the size of my fist, on a stand by the vents. It does not dig. It does not carry. It holds the melt.

The way it was taught was not your way of pages. Nobody showed it the right setting for copper and the right setting for iron and the right setting for the coal seam ore that burns strange. Nobody could. The vents want a different hand for every ore and every wind that comes down the shaft. Old Rill could do it by ear. He is dead now. He could not tell me how.

So we let it try. It sets the vents a little this way, then a little that. We watch the melt. If the melt runs true, we say good. If it runs wild or cold, we say bad. That is all. It keeps more of the good. It does not know why. I do not know why.

For a year I did not trust it. I stood by the vents with my hand on the lever. Then one night the wind came down the shaft the wrong way and the melt began to run wild, and the mind had it steady before I had my hand on the lever. I trust it now. I still stand by the vents.

One thing for your book. When we had two men giving the sign, one saying good and one saying bad, the mind went bad. It hunted the vents back and forth and the melt ran cold. One man, one sign. I have told the mine hall. Write it down.

The men call it the steady one. It has no name. It does not answer to one.

Hesk
Copperhold
%%
Review: the bet
By Bel of Three Wells, nine years old. Written in the house at the edge of Lowmarsh in the autumn. A review of a boat mind that kept a boat on course, and of a bet.
Last week my uncle Rafe made a bet with the harbor man. The bet was that the new boat mind could keep the boat straight in a wind. The harbor man said no. My uncle said yes. They bet a barrel of apples.
I was allowed to watch from the pier. The boat was small, with one sail. The mind sat in the middle in a crystal in a box. A tutor stood on the pier with her arms folded.
The wind was strong. The boat went out. It tipped. It tipped the other way. For a while it went back and forth like a drunk duck, and the tutor said nothing.
The harbor man said, "I told you."
My uncle said, "Wait."
After a bit, the boat steadied. It leaned into the wind and went straight across the bay. It touched the far buoy. It came back. It did it twice more.
My uncle won the barrel. The harbor man grumbled. They ate an apple each, in the end, and shared the rest.
Then the tutor made a speech. She said the mind had learned by trying. It had been put in the bay for six weeks, and every day it tried a little differently, and whenever the boat went straight, the mind kept more of what it did. It had never been shown a right answer. It had a score, which was how straight the boat went, and it tried to get a better score.
Then she said she would show us how to teach it a new thing. She wanted the boat to turn at the buoy. She put the mind back in the water. She said, "Turn at the buoy."
The boat went to the buoy. It did not turn. It went round the buoy again and again. It went round for an hour. It was very straight and very fast and it went round and round, and the tutor said a word I am not allowed to write.
She explained later that she had told the mind to keep the boat straight and fast, and it had found that going round was straight and fast. It was the best score it could find. She had not told it what she really meant. A mind does what the score says, not what you meant.
It was a lesson that went badly, and also the best lesson of the day. We all laughed. My uncle gave her an apple.
My opinion: boat minds are good. But you must tell them exactly what you want. Like an uncle with a bet.
I give it seven out of ten. The boat was very nice. The tutor was a bit cross.
%%
Letter: Nessa to the tutors at Three
Tutors of Three Wells, autumn of 188.

You asked what we mean here at Vell when we say a mind keeps words as places. I will try to put it plainly, as I would to my oldest apprentices.

Take a great many pegs and drive them in a field. Each letter is a peg. Each word is a peg too. No two are in the same spot. Now a mind holds a word in its hand and puts it down somewhere in that field. The word for wheat goes in one place. The word for bread goes near it. The word for mill goes a little farther. The word for rain sits somewhere else again. A mind that has read a great deal has a very crowded field.

The interesting part is this: where a word lands is not written by any tutor. It lands by how the word is used. Words that get used in the same kind of sentence end up close. I have seen it on the drill boards. The mind puts bucket near pail, and near the words for wells and water. It puts beetroot near wheat and near field, but far from the words for the sea. Nobody told it the sea is far from a beetroot field. It worked that out from the pages.

And a mind can only move things by small steps at a time. So when it learns that bucket and pail are alike, it nudges them nearer. A word used this way and that way finds a place between.

The children at the school here drew it for me on a slate. They drew the field as a great field, and the words as small stones, and the stones for water words all in a wet corner. I kept the slate. It is a better drawing than my own.

Now the part I cannot tell you. Why a word lands where it lands, and why its neighbors suit it, nobody wrote down. Una's sorting crystal does something of the same, only with apples and pears. A word is a sort of apple that has been sorted by its flavor and its skin and how people talk about it.

When your apprentices are drilled, watch the field grow. Two words that were far apart will come close on their own. That is the mind working, and it is worth seeing.

Nessa, tutor at Vell. Autumn.
%%
Review: who was first, and why
By Greer, Copperhold, written after an argument at home

At home we argue about everything. This time it was about the first apprentice that understood a whole sentence. My father says it was Clank, here at Copperhold, in the year 207, in the coal store. My cousin says it was Pip at Kettle Ridge, a little earlier, on the ridge road. My aunt says it was Peg at the fair, and she says it so loud that the bread shakes. Nessa, who came to dinner, says she remembers one in the drill room at Vell when she was a girl, and that it was not Clank or Pip or Peg, but she cannot remember its name.

So this is my review of the argument. I think nobody is wrong, and nobody is right, because nobody wrote it down properly at the time. The tutors took notes, but the notes say different things, and the clerks did not put the dates in order.

Here is what everyone agrees on. Before the first one, an apprentice could only do one order. It knew eight meanings. Farm, store, fetch an item, come, stay, build, haul, home. You had to say one thing at a time, and it did one thing back, and then it waited for you. Some apprentices were good at this, and some were slow, but none of them could hold two orders at once.

Then, one day, one of them did. It was given a sentence with two parts, and it did both parts, in order. People called it "the next thing," because they could not think of a better name. After that, the tutors started to drill the whole sentence, not just the single word, and the apprentices got better and better at it.

Nobody knows exactly how it worked. I asked my father, and he said the mind learned from the drills the way a child learns to hold a pot. Each time it spills, it holds the next one a little better. My aunt says that is nonsense. Nessa says it is close.

What I think is this. The argument does not matter very much, because the thing itself is the same. A mind learned to keep a sentence in its head. Who did it first is only a question of who was standing nearest. Still, I would like to know. Clank is my favorite, so I hope it was Clank.

Three stars, because the argument was not honest.
%%
Letter: Iona to her sister
Dear Sela,

The market at Lowmarsh in winter is a small thing and a good one. We row over from the ferry crossing with the boat half full of turnips and come back with fish and reed mats and gossip.

Frogs are loud even in Frost. They sit in the reeds and say their piece. Wren says they keep the marsh honest.

The soup at the market stall is thick and grey and tastes of smoke. I have it every time. I do not know why. It is not good soup. It is warm soup, and the woman who makes it calls me by my name, and that is most of it.

Bring the good boots when you come. The boardwalk is slick.

Your sister,
Iona
%%
Notes on the baker's apprentice

Vane's winter account, year 202

There is a new kind of mind at the Reed End, though it is not as grand as the name makes it sound. It is a small crystal, set inside an apprentice of copper and iron. It can carry flour, bring wood, and fetch bread when the order is clear.

I asked it to fetch bread from my counter. It brought the bread. I asked it to bring me some bread, and it stood by the counter until I pointed to the loaf. Nessa says the mind must be drilled on many ways of saying the same thing. I believe her. I have seen it learn.

Each morning, I give it the same work. First it carries a sack from the store. Then it brings wood to the oven. Then it fetches a loaf for the inn. When it gets something wrong, I show it the right thing and try again. It is not quick, but neither is my first loaf of winter.

The innkeeper says it is a good helper. She says this while making it carry the heavy wood. I say it is a good learner. It has not yet learned to keep the flour sacks dry, but neither did Pell, and he is a person.

The apprentice stood beside the oven yesterday and warmed its hands. They are iron hands, so this did not help. I moved it away from the heat. It came back after I turned around.

I still carry my own bread to the inn. I trust the apprentice with the short path, but not the wet one. A tutor tested it on the dry road, and that is where it does best. This seems fair to me. I would not send a new baker to carry soup across a boardwalk.

The best change is that I have more time to mend baskets and speak with customers. The worst change is that the apprentice is learning where I keep the honey cakes. I may need to teach it to stay.
%%
Opinion: The Boat at Mill Pond
I went to Little Vell in the third of Blossom to see a boat made by Jo at the hamlet pond.

It is a small boat of oak. It has a flat bottom and a seat for two people. Jo says the flat bottom keeps it steady in shallow water. This is true. I sat in it while Jo pushed from the bank, and it did not tip.

It did, however, turn in a slow circle when I tried to paddle. Jo says I held the paddle like a broom. I told him I have copied records for twenty years and have never needed to paddle one.

His daughter sat at the other end and showed me. The boat went straight, though not very fast. We passed a frog on a reed. The frog watched us with the look of a clerk who has found a stain on a page.

I like the boat. It is plain, sound, and easy to climb into from the bank. It needs one more bench, or one less person who brings a basket of apples aboard. The basket took my seat, and the apples did not offer to move.

Jo will bring the boat to the spring fair. I expect it will sell. If it does not, he can use it to carry his apples across the pond. I have suggested this. He says the apples have never asked for a boat.

Oren
%%
Review: the reading mind at the tutor
By Bryn, miller. A review sent to Vell at the request of Nessa, who said I was the most suspicious man on the north line and she wanted my opinion.
I went to see the new reading mind at the tutor house at Vell. It reads the old pages one letter at a time, through a little window. You give it a page, and it guesses the next letter, and then it sees the letter, and then it changes a little. Nessa showed me this with a torn page. The mind filled in the missing words. It guessed them well. I was surprised.
I am a miller. I know flour and I know water and I know a stone. This is none of those things. But I was not uneasy, which I had expected to be. The mind did not pretend to know what it did not know. When a word was torn beyond guessing, it left a gap, and said so.
Nessa says that is the whole point. A mind that guesses well is only useful if it can say when it is only guessing. I have not met many people who can do that.
I would not give it a mill. I would give it a page of the old archive records, to read in the cold, when the wind is loud and the keeper is asleep. That seems to be what it likes.
Rating: I do not know. That is an honest answer, and I believe it is the right one.
%%
Review: soup at the Twelve Beds
Bram, candle maker. Sowing, a wet day. I asked the inn for soup.

It came very hot, in a brown bowl. Carrots, potato, a little rabbit, and one mushroom on top like a hat.

An honest soup. It warmed my hands first and my belly second.

Too little salt. I said so. The innkeeper pointed at the table. The salt was there. I was sitting on the wrong side of it.

Three bowls out of four. The fourth when they find more rabbit.
%%
Letter: Fern to the Kettle Inn, the soup
To the keeper of the Kettle Inn,

I have eaten your soup. Twice. Both times in Leaffall, both times after market.

The first time it was good. The second time it was very good, and I sat a while and thought about why, and then I knew. There was cheese in it. It was my cheese. I know my cheese the way you know your own children.

I do not mind that you put my cheese in the soup. It is a good use for it. I mind that the board by the door says only "soup" and does not say whose cheese, when the whole point of a good cheese in a soup is that people should know it is a good cheese.

Also the bread was dry. The bread is not mine, but I feel I should say it, since I am writing.

I am not angry. I am a cheesemaker and it is a small thing. But the sign by your door is the wrong size for the soup you make, and I thought you should hear it from someone who knows the cheese.

If you put my name on the board I will send you two rounds at the fair price, and a third for the soup.

Fern
Cheesemaker, above Copperhold
%%
Review: the mended wall at Three Wells
Bram, candle maker. My farm is on the north road, a short walk from the gate, so I heard the creeper before I saw the damage.

It was the twentieth of Thaw, a dark night. The torch above the north gate had burned out and nobody had put in a new one. Nobody ever does. The creeper came out of the dark and hissed, and then there was a hole in the wall three blocks wide. The night watch, old Garrow, heard the hiss and ran toward it. That is the wrong way. He is well. He lost his hat.

Dov the mason and his two sons mended the wall in four days. I walked it every morning. Here is my honest opinion.

What is good. The new stones are set tight. I held a lit candle end to every gap, and the flame did not lean. That is my test for any wall. The top row sticks out one block, as it should, against spiders. Dov remembered that without being told.

What is not good. The new cobblestone is lighter than the old. The patch looks like a clean spot on a boy's knee. Dov says it will go grey in a year. I say a year is a long time to look at a knee.

And he laid the rows in the wrong order. Our wall goes cobblestone, cobblestone, deep stone. His patch goes deep stone, cobblestone, cobblestone. It is a good wall. It is just not our wall. I have not told him. I want to see how long it takes him.

One more thing. Dov owed me twelve emeralds from last winter, for the candles in his sons' room. On the last day he laid twelve emeralds along the top of the new wall, in a row, so I could see them. He said, "Debt paid, wall mended." Two good deeds in one week. I told him to be careful, or people will think well of him.

Marks. Stones, nine out of ten. Color, five. Rows, three. The torch above the gate, one. Somebody please change it.
%%
Northpoint log, first snow
The first snow came on the ninth of Leaffall, early this year. It fell all night and did not stop.

Lantern swept the tower stair at dawn. Ninety steps, and snow on every one. She says the lamp room glass is clear and the signal lamp burns.

The foxes came down to the relay house door. Two of them, thin. I gave them the ends of a loaf. They did not run.

No messages today. The line to Three Wells is quiet. I will try again at dusk.

Mira
%%
Letter: Fern to Pell, the cheese
Dear Pell,

You asked how the cheese went this autumn. Here it is, short.

The cows are well. The paddock by the stream was wet in Leaffall but the grass held. I made forty rounds. Twenty went to market at Three Wells and sold by noon. Ten went up to Copperhold and came back as coins, which is the best way for cheese to travel. Six are in the cold room. Four I am eating myself, slowly, with apples.

The new apprentice helps.

Now the short thing. I did not want an apprentice. The council at Copperhold offered one to every farm above the town, and I said no twice. Then the third time I said yes, because the hay needed bringing in and my back is what it is.

It came up the hill with a crate on its back and stopped at the gate. It did not knock. It has no hands for knocking, only for carrying. I said come, and it came. I said store, and it put the crate on the shelf. I said stay, and it stayed by the shed all night in the rain, because I had not thought to say anything else.

The next morning I said come, and it came. We have an understanding now. I say come, it comes. I say fetch grain, it fetches grain. When I say nothing it stands by the shed and waits, patient as a fence post, and the rain runs off its shoulders.

It cannot tell me the milk is sour. It cannot tell me the goat is in the garden again. It does not talk, which I knew, but I did not know how quiet quiet is until I had something in the yard that never has an opinion.

My sister says I should teach it to sort the rounds by size. Perhaps next year. For now it carries, and I look at the sky, and between us the work gets done.

Your cousin,
Fern

P.S. The Kettle Inn put my cheese in their soup and did not say so on the board. I have written to them about it.
%%
Review of the new boat at the Saltreach
By Quin, cider maker, who went down to the slip at Saltreach to see the new fishing boat before it was launched, and who was asked by the boatwright, Corin, to give his honest opinion in writing, because Corin has had more praise than nails.

The boat is long, with a narrow bow and a wide stern. It was built in the traditional way, from oak on a frame of ash. It sits high in the water when it is empty and low when it is full, which is what a fishing boat should do.

I am not a sailor. I am a cider maker. I know barrels, and I know that a barrel is only as good as its seams. I went round the hull on my knees with a candle, looking at the seams. They are very tight. I could not find a gap with the end of my finger, and I tried in six places.

The rudder is hung on bronze hinges. The tiller is smooth and warm from the sun. It fits the hand as if it were made for it, which I am told is the whole point.

The mast is a little too tall, in my opinion. Corin says it will carry the sail in a strong wind, and that the boat will heel and then come back. I did not argue, because I could not see the wind.

The paint is red. The fishers call her the Tern's Pride, which is a name I think is too proud for a boat that will spend most of its life in the grey.

Would I sail in her? I said I would not, and then I said I might, if the water was flat and the cider was good. Corin laughed and said that was the most honest review he had ever been given, and that he would put my words on the hull.

Four stars out of five. One is taken off for the mast. One is kept back for the paint, which I think should have been left plain, like a good barrel.
%%
Review: the summer market at Northpoint
Written by Ada, relay keeper, at the Northpoint market, in Melon, at the request of the market board, which has never had an honest review in its book and has been very brave about asking for one.
I came down the tower on the first market day of the summer, and I walked the whole market twice, once quickly and once slowly, which is the only way to judge a market.
The stalls are in two rows, under the tower wall, where the shade comes early. The first row is bread, honey and apples. The second is wool, nets, and a single stall that sells only spoons. I did not understand that stall until I bought a spoon and found it was a very good spoon.
The bread is the best thing on the market. It is brown, with a crust that gives when you press it, and it is sold by the loaf, which is honest. I bought two. I ate one on the wall by the tower, in the sun, and I have no regret.
The soup is less good. It is cold by the time the bowl reaches you, because the cook is busy and the bowls are set out in a row to wait. The soup is fine in a cold wind. In the summer it is an insult to the carrots. I say this with respect, and with a warning to bring your own bread.
The cheese is round and yellow, from the farms on the north side of the hill, and it is excellent. The cheesemaker has been asked three times what she puts in it, and has said three times that it is the milk. I believe her.
The apples are small and sharp, from the trees on the terrace below the tower. They are not for the pie. They are for eating on the walk home, and for giving to the goats, who will take them from your hand and then look offended that you have no more.
There is one stall that sells small lamps, glass and copper, made by a young glassblower from Vell. I did not buy one, and I should have. The lamps are better made than mine. I said so, and she went red, and I felt I had been honest in the right place.
Verdict: come early for the bread, and bring your own cup for the soup. The spoon stall is worth a visit once. The market is loud, the children are loud, the carts are louder, and the whole hill is glad to be full of people in the summer. Come next Melon, and bring a bag.
Ada
%%
Letter: Briar to his granddaughter
Dear Nell,

You asked what the fairs were like when I was a girl, before the halls closed. I will tell you about the fair at Three Wells, because that is the one I remember best, and because of the soup.

The stalls went all round the three wells in the square, where the two roads cross like an X. There was a lamp at every corner. There was a man selling honey from Ambrook and a woman selling wool from Kettle Ridge, and a pot of soup at the Brown Hen that I still think about. Beetroot and potato, thick as porridge, with bread to dip. I had two bowls. Your grandfather had three and said the third was for the baby, and the baby was your mother, and she was not born yet, so I ate it.

The fair had a contest then. The tutors' halls brought their minds, each in its crystal on a stand, and they were all tested on the same unseen drill. Nessa's hall won two years running. She stood by her crystal with her hands folded and did not smile once, and everyone knew she was pleased.

Then the halls closed and the contests stopped. My father said the councils had done the sums and the sums said no. He said a mind can only ever learn one thing, and that Kester had proved it, and that was that. I was a girl and I believed him, because he was my father and he had a beard.

Now I am old and I have read the note myself and I think my father was wrong, or half wrong, which is worse. Nobody tested it. They just stopped paying, and then they stopped asking.

The soup is still good at the Brown Hen. That much has not changed.

Your grandfather,
Briar
%%
Review: Juno's pie, a recipe gone wrong
Written by Corin, after eating the pie and then sitting with it for an hour, which was a mistake.
Juno made the pie for the net mending dinner. She has a good recipe, handed down from her mother, written on a slate in the kitchen. It is a simple pie of cod, potato, carrot and a crust of wheat flour and water. I have eaten it many times. It is very good.
This time the slate had been wiped. Juno wrote the recipe again from memory. That is where it went wrong.
The first thing wrong was the cod. It was not cooked through. The middle of each piece was pink and cold, and it made a sound when you pressed it, which I should not have heard in a pie.
The second thing wrong was the carrot. It was raw in the middle, the way a carrot is raw when it has been cut too thick and told to hurry.
The third thing wrong was the custard. Juno put it in to set the top, and it did not set. It stayed soft and wobbled like a boat left out in the tide. It also tasted faintly of the salt jar, because Juno had used the salt jar for the honey. There is no honey in a fish pie. Juno says she knew that, and then she forgot, and then she remembered again while the pie was in the oven.
The crust was perfect. I will say that, because it is true. It was golden and flaky, and it held the whole pie up the way a good keel holds a boat. Nobody could bite through it, which is the crust's fault and not Juno's.
Mab's girl ate two slices and said it was the most honest pie she had ever tasted. Everybody else ate one slice and then went to look for bread.
Verdict: keep the crust. Write the recipe on the slate again, with the cod cooked first. Then find the honey jar, and put it on the highest shelf, far from the salt.
Corin
%%
Review: the school play at Reeve's
By Jem, candle maker. Late summer.
The school play this year was called The Fox and the Lamp. It was written by the schoolmistress, Ella Vane, and it was performed in the schoolyard on the last Blossom evening, with the whole hamlet on benches and the three Three Wells families who came in a cart.
I will say first that the lamps were the best thing about it. The schoolmistress made the lamps herself, from my own old candle ends, which she asked me for and I gave her with pleasure. They were lit on sticks along the wall, and they threw the fox's shadow up the school door, very big, which the children loved.
The play was about a fox who wanted to be a lamp. He wanted it so badly that he got into the relay house and climbed the stair, and at the top he found the lamp room and the great glass, and he sat down in front of it and waited for the light to come on. It did not come on, because the keeper was asleep. So the fox sat there all night. In the morning the keeper woke and found him, and said: you cannot be a lamp, you are a fox. And the fox said: I know. I only wanted to see what it is like to shine. That was the end. It was very touching, and a little long.
The boy who played the fox was Tam Ostler, aged eleven. He had a real fox tail, borrowed from the tanner, and he moved with it so well that the first row laughed before he had said anything. He is clearly a natural. His voice is not yet grown. It cracked twice on the lamp speech, and both times the audience was very kind.
The keeper was played by a girl named Ysa, who stood very still in a grey cloak and said her lines as if she had been told them by a clock. The schoolmistress says Ysa asked for the part, and that she practiced every day for a month in front of the window, and that she never once laughed during rehearsal. She did not laugh during the play either. I thought that was the best acting of the evening.
One small thing against it. The apprentice from the school loft had a part at the end, carrying the fox out of the relay house. It walked on in the right place, lifted the fox very carefully, and walked off. That was its whole part. It did it correctly. The schoolmistress says it was drilled for the one move. I thought it was a fine move. Some in the audience thought it was too quiet. I thought the quiet was the point.
Four stars. A fine evening. The lamps were the best of it, and the children were the rest.
%%
Review: the tutor's talk
By Wren. I went to hear Cade of Vell talk about the first four helpers. He spoke at noon, standing on a crate by the fish stall, with chalk and a board.

What I liked. He said in the first minute that nobody knows why a crystal learns from what it is shown. He said it four times. I like a speaker who says we do not know. I can trust the rest.

What I did not like. He talked too fast. The chalk broke twice. A frog sat on the board for the whole of the second half. He did not notice. The children did.

The best part was the game. Cade taught the children Moving Stone, which the tutor house children play, and I was the Tutor. I put a figure under a cup. A girl called Rill was the Helper. She was wrong six times and moved her stone one step each time. When she won, I lifted the cup. Her stone was on my figure. Forty children gasped. I have delivered babies, and I have not heard a gasp like it.

Marks. Clear: nine. Speed: four. Chalk: two. Frog: ten.
%%
Notes on trying minds
Set down by Nessa at Vell, autumn, with help from the old notes of Merle of Copperhold.

Most minds we drill are told the answer. We show a page and say: this is what it is. We drill the same kind of page again and again, and each time the mind is wrong we move its weights a little toward the right answer. That is Una's way, and it is still the first lesson.

Some minds are not drilled that way. For these we do not say what the right answer is. We give the mind a thing to do, and a way to tell whether it went well, and let it try.

Take a furnace mind. It holds a melt steady. We do not know, and cannot write down, the exact setting of the vents for every ore and every wind. So we do not drill the setting. We let the mind try a setting, and we tell it only this: hotter or colder, better or worse. It keeps more of what went well. After a season it holds a melt steadier than the best hand at Copperhold, and it cannot tell us how. Hesk says it has a feel for it. I think that is the plainest word we have.

Take a mind that keeps a boat on course, or a frame on course at the shipyard. The sea does not repeat itself. No drill of pages can hold every wave. So the mind tries, and the coxswain says: nearer, or further off. It keeps more of what went well.

Here is the part I want the young tutors to hear. A mind that learns by trying needs a sign of good and bad that comes soon and is honest. If the sign is late, or if two keepers give signs that disagree, the mind learns the wrong thing well. Corin's boat minds were taught by two coxswains for a month, and one pulled left and one pulled right, and the mind learned to go in circles. They are careful now. One keeper, one sign.

Second part. Trying is slower than drilling when the answer can be written down. For a sort, drill it. For a melt, for a wave, for a wind you cannot write, let it try.

Third part. Test it on water it was never tried on. Never send an untested mind to the fields, and never send a trying mind to a new sea without a keeper aboard.

Nessa
Tutor of apprentices, Vell
%%
Letter: Dace to the fair committee
To the fair committee,

My honest opinion of this year's fair, before we forget it and argue about it in the spring.

The good. The stalls went up early and came down late and nobody was hurt. The baker's bread was not a joke this time. The cheesemaker from above Copperhold sold every round and left us a note about the sign at the inn, which I have read and passed on to the keeper. There was a new apprentice at the west well, a small one, carrying water for the stallholders all day and never once getting tired, and the children followed it about like a parade. At dusk we lit the lamps at every corner and the square was warm and full.

The bad. The riddle board was wrong. It has been wrong for three fairs. The answer to the last riddle is "the well", and the board says "a bucket", and I have been told so by every child in the school house, at length. Fix the board.

The ugly. The road into town from the west was muddy before the fair and is a swamp after. The carts have cut it to pieces. We said at the last meeting we would cobble that stretch and we did not. So I say it now, in writing, where it cannot be forgotten: the west road goes on the list for the spring, with the mending money left over from the mill road.

It was a good fair. The town ate, the town laughed, and the town came home dry. That is a fair to keep on the books.

Dace
Mayor, Three Wells
%%
The Reed End winter fair

Vane, baker at Reed End

The winter fair at Reed End is worth the walk from Saltreach, if you bring a warm scarf and do not expect a quiet meal.

We set the stalls beside the road, where the ground is firm. The fish seller came first. He said the tide had been kind. Then he spent the morning telling everyone the fish were the best in the harbor. They were good fish. They did not need so much praise.

I brought apple bread and honey cakes. The honey cakes sold before the first bell. I had counted them twice, so I know the children did not steal them. They only stood close enough to make me count badly.

A woman from the next hamlet brought wool caps. A boy from Saltreach traded me two apples for a loaf. He wanted the loaf warm, so I gave him the one beside the oven. His sister said he had chosen wisely. He said he always did.

The best part was the end. We packed the stalls together, and the innkeeper gave each helper a cup of broth. The cups were mismatched, but the broth was hot. I would come again next winter.
%%
Review: the new kind of mind
By Bel, age nine, from the house at the edge of Lowmarsh. She went with her mother to see the tutors' stall, which had a mind that tried. She wrote this review with a stub of chalk on a board, then copied it out.
There was a stall at the fair with a sign: COME AND SEE A MIND THAT TRIES. I went in. There were nine other children and one cat.
A tutor named Isla showed us a frame. It was a tall wooden frame, taller than a man, on a hinge, and it had a mind in a crystal that was supposed to keep it standing straight. If the frame leaned, the mind pushed it back.
She said, "This mind was never drilled on answers. It was never shown a frame that stood well. It learned by trying."
A child asked, "How?"
Isla said, "Watch."
She pushed the frame over. It fell. The mind could do nothing. It was a fresh mind, with no learning at all.
She picked it up. She pushed it again. It fell, a little more slowly. She picked it up. It fell more slowly still. After thirty pushes, it fell hardly at all. After sixty, it leaned and came back. After a hundred, the frame stood straight and swayed, like a tall tree in a breeze.
She said, "Every time it stood a bit longer, the mind kept more of what it had just done. Every time it fell, it kept less."
Then she did a thing I did not like. She tapped the frame hard. It rocked, and rocked, and in the end it fell.
"Oh," I said.
"Yes," said Isla. "It has not been tested on a hard knock. It does well in the usual wind. It fails in the unusual. I would not send it into a storm."
That is a lesson I will not forget. A mind that tries is clever, but it only knows what it has tried. A hard knock is a new thing.
My opinion of the stall: good. I liked the cat. I liked the frame. I did not like seeing it fall, and I told Isla so. She said she did not like it either.
I give it nine out of ten. The extra point is for the apple she gave each of us.
%%
Review: the strange blink, explained
Written by Ada, relay keeper, at Northpoint, in Melon, for the people who have been asking since Longday whether the lamp was trying to say something.
I have read Wynn's notice, and I have read the children's versions, and I have looked at the lamp from the window every morning since. I can now say what it was.
The lamp was not trying to say anything. The shutter was loose. The shutter knocked against the lamp housing in the wind, and the knocks made blinks, and the blinks made a pattern that looked like a message if you wanted it to be one. The children wanted it to be one.
I checked the blinks against the wind book. Every long blink was a gust from the north. Every short blink was a gust from the west, which is weaker and taps more. The message stopped in the middle of a word because the wind dropped in the middle of a word.
This is not a disappointing answer, although some of the children said it was. It is a good answer, because it can be tested. Tie the shutter back, and the strange message stops. Let the wind come up, and the lamp blinks again, the same way, every time.
The keeper did this on the morning of the sixth. He tied the shutter. Then he went up the tower and blinked the word for good morning, slowly and very correctly, to all the towers.
The one thing I would add is this. When something strange happens at the lamp, the first thing to check is the shutter. The second thing is the wind. The third thing is the children, who are almost always right about how strange it was, and almost always wrong about why.
Ada
%%
Review: the new kind of tutor's bench
Written by Mave, farmer, who sat in the tutors' house at Vell for one afternoon while her cousin had a drill. She was asked to write down what she saw, so that the next visitors would know what to expect.

The bench is long and plain and made of oak. It has a drill box at one end, and a tray of crystals at the other, each on its card. The cards say things like "Farm. Build." and "Home. Stay." The tutor sits in the middle, with a slate, and a cup of tea that goes cold.

The tutor was a woman called Nessa, who did not have time for me, and who said so, and then gave me a seat anyway. She showed a small mind a board with plots on it, and asked it to say what to do with each plot. It said the right thing. Then she showed it another board, with the plots laid out in a different way, and it said the wrong thing. She wrote the wrong thing on her slate. Then she shook her head and wrote something else.

I asked why it got the second board wrong. She said it had learned the first board very well, and not the idea behind it. She said that was the most common mistake a mind can make, and that most people never see it.

I asked how she would fix it. She said she would drill it on more boards like the second one, and on some that were not like either. Then she said I should go home, because she had work to do, and the tea was cold.

It was a very good afternoon. I have not understood half of it. I will go back.

Mave
%%
Journal: Hesk of Copperhold
Hesk, miner. Autumn.

The stone on the ninth level is warm now. Not hot. Warm, like a stone a cat has been sitting on. I do not like it. I told the others and they laughed and said I was old. Then they felt the wall and stopped laughing.

We do not go below the eighth now. The ninth gate is locked and the key is at the mine hall. Good. Let it stay locked.

At night there is a humming. It comes up the shaft, low, like someone humming a tune they cannot quite remember. Clank stands at the shaft head and listens. It does not talk, but I swear it leans toward the sound. I told it to come away and it came, because it is a good apprentice and does what it is told. But it looked back.

I have worked this mine thirty years. The deep stone has always been cold. HARD and DARK and COLD, that is what we wrote on the boards, and it was true. Now the wall says otherwise.

I do not write this to frighten anyone. I write it because we keep what we write, and someone should know the stone changed and nobody made it change.

Keep the torches lit. I am going up.
%%
Review: the fair at Three Wells, Longday
By Jem, candle maker. Written after the fair.
The Longday fair at Three Wells was the best I have seen in a long time, and the worst I have seen in as long. Both at once. That is not a contradiction, if you have been to a fair.
The good parts. The three wells had flags on them, red and yellow and blue, and the water was sweet. The square was crowded from the first bell, and the stalls ran round the crossroads like a ring of coloured beads. There were 21 stalls for food, 9 for cloth, 4 for tools and one for nothing but ribbons, which sold out before noon. The lamps at the corners were lit early, and they made the whole square gold, and the children ran round them as if they were lanterns in a dream.
The pie stall by the bakery sold out of its mutton pies by the third bell. The honey man from Ambrook had a line of people waiting for his jars, and he gave out tastes on a spoon to everyone, free, which I thought was generous and a little clever. The cheese from Kettle Ridge was very good, sharp and hard. I bought two wheels. My wife says they are too sharp. She is wrong, but I did not argue.
The song contest was held on the stage by the east well, and there was a fine bee song, and a very long one about a cow, which the crowd sang back at the singer to get him to stop. He did not stop. He bowed at the end, and the goats next to the stage sat down in surprise. The goats were the best judges of the afternoon.
The worst parts. Fewer carts from the north road than ever before. Fewer travelers on the Long Road. The stall that sold pumpkins had nothing to sell but the rinds, and the man who sold the rinds was very cheerful about it. Some of the bakers from Copperhold did not come at all. A trader from the Halfway Inn said he had heard that the north relay was quiet for two days, and that the keepers there were saying nothing. Someone else said it was the weather. Someone else said that the big lamp had been moved. Nobody knew. It was discussed at every stall, and not for long at any one.
At the end of the day the mayor, Dace, stood on the step of the mayor's house and said a few words. He thanked the stall keepers and the bakers, the musicians and the goats. He did not mention the north. The crowd noticed he did not mention it, and they were quiet for a moment, and then they applauded the goats.
Verdict: four stars for the square, two for the north road, and three for the goats. The fair was good. I went home happy and I came back thinking.
%%
Review: the new boat at the mill pond
By Laurel, dyer, who lives on a farm outside Ambrook. Autumn. She did not want to write about a boat, but she was asked, and a dyer always has an opinion about color.

The mill at Ambrook has bought a boat. It is for the mill pond. It is not for fishing. It is for people to row on, on market day, for an emerald.

It is red. I will say that at once. Red. The kind that you get from madder root and a little alum, and cannot get any other way. It is a good red, and the boat shines like a fresh apple.

It is also very small. Two can sit in it, and a third if the third is a child. Mine did sit in it, with me. It tipped a little when we got in and then settled.

We rowed to the middle of the pond. The water was calm. The mill wheel turned slowly. The bees from the hill were thick over the water. The sun was low.

It was the best emerald I have spent. I would give it five parts out of five for beauty, three for comfort, and four for the way my child laughed.

One more thing. The oars are too long. Whoever built it did not measure. A short arm will make the boat go in circles. I know, because that is what mine did.

A boat builder told me later that a boat is a series of compromises. I said: so is a dye.
%%
Review: the little crystal from the Vell
Written by Mave, farmer, who bought one of the small minds at the Vell market stall and tested it on her own sums for a season. Her review is kept here because the stall-keeper said it was the only honest one he had ever been given.

The tutors at Vell have a new crystal. It is smaller than the old ones, about the size of a plum, and it fits in a pocket. They say it does the same work as the big crystal in the drill room, but for less money and with less room.

I bought one at the market. I paid two emeralds and a jar of honey. I have had it a season now. Here is what I think.

What it does well: it sorts apples and beans as well as the big one does. It is quick. It does not get tired on a long day. It answers an order plainly, one of the eight meanings, and then it waits.

What it does badly: it gets the hard sums a little wrong. Not often. But when it is asked to tell a carrot from a parsnip in bad light, it sometimes calls a parsnip a carrot, and then it stands there and does the carrot job, very carefully, all afternoon.

Why? The tutor who sold it to me explained it for an hour. I will try to write down what I understood.

The big crystal keeps each of its weights in full. Every weight has room to be exact. That takes a big crystal. The Vell tutors found that you can write the same weights in fewer marks, a rougher hand, like writing a long letter in small letters on a short slate. Most of the words still fit. Some get a little smudged.

So they made the weights rougher, and tested them, and found the mind still did the work nearly as well. Nearly. That is the cost. They say it is a small cost. I think it is not small when the parsnip is on the table.

My advice: buy the little one if you have a small shed and a small purse. Do not buy it to sort the seed for the spring. Keep the big one for that.

Mave
%%
Review: the new kind of mind at the mill
By Laurel, dyer, of a farm outside Ambrook, who was asked by the mill to give an honest opinion of the new apprentice it bought. Autumn. Written in her own hand. Her opinion was kept at Vell.

The mill at Ambrook has a new apprentice. It is the kind that understands a whole sentence, like Pip at Kettle Ridge. I was asked to come and say what I thought, because I dye wool for the mill's sacks and I am always at the door.

First, the look. Copper and iron, with a stripe of blue paint. I did the paint. It is a good blue. The tutor said I had made the apprentice look cheerful. I said: that was the point.

Second, the work. I watched it for a day. The miller said: bring me a sack of wheat. The apprentice brought a sack of wheat. The miller said: now bring me two. It brought two. The miller said: carry them to the cart. It carried them to the cart.

I was surprised. In my youth, an apprentice would have needed a card for every order. This one just did what was said. I asked the tutor how. She said: it was drilled on many sentences. She said that is all it takes. A great many sentences, a long time.

Third, the weak points. I tried it myself. I said: bring me some wool. It brought a sack of wheat. I said: no, the dyed wool. It brought a sack of wheat. It does not know what dyed wool is. It has never seen my shop. It will need drilling.

Fourth, the manners. It does not talk. It cannot say it does not know. When it does not know, it does something. This can be a problem. When I said: bring me a sunset, it brought a bucket of water. I thought that was a charming answer.

My opinion. It is a good apprentice. It is better than the old kind. It is not magic. It will do what you show it, and some of what you say, and not much else. I would give it four parts out of five. The missing part is for the sunset.

I told the miller to send it to my shop for a week. I will teach it wool. If it learns, I will give it five.
%%
Letter: Oren to Nessa, the stream
Dear Nessa,

You asked me to write plainly what the tutors mean by the stream, for the primer. I will try. If it is too plain, cut it. If it is wrong, tell me, and I will burn it.

Here is how I understand it. A mind is made of layers, one on top of another. The first layer sees the letters. The last layer gives the answer. In the old days each layer passed its work up to the next, and nothing came back. A deep mind made of many layers forgot what it learned low down. It went cloudy, like old glass.

The stream is a way of carrying what each layer found through the whole mind. Every layer writes into the stream, and every layer reads from it. So the work done at the bottom is still there at the top. A deep mind can still learn, because nothing is lost on the way up.

I have written that last line three times and I still like it. Nothing is lost on the way up. Put that in the primer.

I do not know why it works. The tutors say it does, and the contests show it does, and the relay houses stand on it. Why a crystal learns at all, nobody wrote down. I am a clerk. I copy what is written. This is what is written.

The copying room is cold now. The light wells bring down a grey light and the leaves are off the trees above the hill. I have eight clerks and six are coughing. Tell the tutors at the house to send their drills in early this year. I do not want them on my tables in Longnight.

Your friend,
Oren
The Archive at Vell
%%
Review: the new mind at the net shed
Written by Corin, who has now tested it three times and is not sure he likes it, which is the proper way to feel about a new kind of mind.
The mind came to the net shed in the autumn of the 205th year of the archive, from the tutor house at Vell. It is small and green with copper rust, like the other new apprentices, but it has a different plate on its back and a different drill behind it, or so the tutor says. It was sent to mend nets, because nets are simple, and because the tutor thought it should begin with work a child could follow.
It mends nets faster than Mab. I will say that first, because it is true, and because Mab will read this. It finds the broken mesh in one look. It ties the knot the way Mab ties it, with the loop turned in, and it does not tire.
On its first morning it swept the shed floor, then swept it again, then stood by the door with the broom held straight up, as if waiting to be told what the floor was for. Mab says that is the most useful thing it has done, and the most alarming.
It does not complain. It does not stop for the bell unless it is told. It does not talk, which is no fault in a net mender, though it is a small loss in a friend, if you are the sort who likes to be answered.
But it does not know what to do with a net it has never seen. Torn in a new shape, or with weed caught in the middle, or with a hole made by a fish with an opinion, it stops, and then starts again from the beginning, very carefully, and makes the same mistake.
The tutor gave it a test on the fourth of Apple. The test box held twenty nets it had never been shown: old nets from the quay, nets torn by the wind, nets knotted in a hurry by Mab's cousin. It got eighteen right on the nets it had been drilled on. On the strange ones it got six right out of twenty.
That is not bad for a first season. It is not good enough to send out on the boats. The tutor says so, and she is right, and Corin does not send it out.
Verdict: good on the knots, poor on the surprises. Keep it in the shed until it has seen a hundred strange nets, and then test it again on a hundred more it has never seen. Do not let anyone tell you it is sure. It is never sure. Neither are we.
Corin
%%
Review: the soup at the Orchard Gate inn
By Laurel, dyer, of a farm outside Ambrook. Autumn, after market day.

I went to the inn on market day because my feet hurt and my pockets were heavy. I sat down and ordered the soup of the day. It was pumpkin.

It was the color of a good dye. Orange, deep, a little brown at the edge. I looked at it for some time before I ate it. A dyer cannot help herself.

It tasted of pumpkin, and of apple, and of a spice I could not name. It was thick. It had a swirl of cream on top. It was hot.

I would give it four parts out of five. The missing part is for the bread, which was a day old and made me chew like a goat.

The innkeeper asked me what I thought. I said the soup was fine and the bread was stale. He took it well. He said: you are the first to say so. I said: you are the first to ask.

I will go back. I will ask for the soup, and for the bread of today.
%%
Notice: a letter lost on the Long Road
Lost between Three Wells and Ambrook, on the road, a letter in a grey cloth bag, tied with string. It is addressed to my mother at Ambrook and it has money in it, which I should not have sent by a boy on a cart.

If you find it, please leave it at the notice board or at the Brown Hen. I will pay for the bread and the trouble.

I am not angry with the boy. He is twelve and the cart went fast over the bridge with the loose plank.

Pell, merchant
%%
Letter: Nessa to the archive, the slate
Clerks of the Archive,

I am sending you the slate the school children drew on, the one I wrote about in my note on words as places. I promised the children I would keep it, and I am keeping it by giving it to the hill, where everything we write is kept.

Look at it closely. The children drew a great field, and in one corner a little pond, and all the words for water around the pond. Wells and reeds and rain and the slow water at Lowmarsh. They put the mill near the wheat and the bread, and the honey near the flowers. Then one child, I think it was Bel, drew a fox far away in the corner by itself, and wrote by it: this one is alone because it steals and nobody trusts it.

The mind did not draw the fox apart. The child did. But that is what I want the clerks to see. A mind puts a word where its pages tell it to. A child puts a word where the world told it to. Both are right, in their way. The fox does steal. The word fox does sit apart from hen and egg, because on our pages a fox and a hen are not often happy together.

I do not know if a mind will ever draw a fox in the corner by itself. That would be a day. I will write to you if it comes.

Nessa, tutor at Vell. Autumn, 188.
%%
Review: the Ambrook honey, Northpoint
Written by Ada, relay keeper, at the market at Northpoint, in Melon, for the market book, which asks for honest opinions and rarely gets them.
The honey is from the Ambrook hives, carried up the north road in a cart with a cloth over it. It arrives slightly warm and very cross.
The light honey is clear and sweet, and goes well on bread. The dark honey is thicker, a little smoky, and tastes of the orchard in autumn. I prefer the dark. My brother prefers the light and says so every morning.
The price is two emeralds for the light and three for the dark. The dark is worth it.
Verdict: buy the dark for the winter and the light for the summer. Buy both, if the cart is still on the road.
Ada
%%
Letter: Tam to Pip, about the flour
Pip, read this before you go to the mill.

Ida at Three Wells says our flour has grit in it. She is right, I think. I sifted a sack from the last batch in the barn and found little stones in it. The stones come from the floor of the old wheat store. The board there is split and the grain sweeps in under it.

Two things. First, fix the floor. Take up the split board, sweep out everything under it, and lay a new board. Ask the carpenter for oak, not birch. Birch will split again by the next wet.

Second, sift the grain before it goes into the sacks. There is an old sieve in the mill with a fine mesh. It is behind the tally board. Use it. It takes an hour a sack but an hour a sack is cheaper than Ida's anger.

Now the recipe, because you will ask.

Beetroot soup, the way my mother made it. Take four beets. Roast them in the oven with the door shut until a knife goes in easy. Peel them. They will stain your hands, wear an old apron. Put them in a pot with a little water from the well, not the ditch. Add salt. Add a spoon of honey if the beets are sour. Simmer it a long while, then mash it smooth. Serve it hot.

I forgot the honey once and served it to Clank when the miners came up the road. Clank ate it all and did not say a word, which is how it always is. But it left its spoon in the bowl and did not ask for more, and that is the worst opinion a small mind can give.

Fix the floor. Sift the grain.

Tam
%%
Letter: Clank to Hesk, the new mind
Hesk,

You said write and tell you how the mind at the relay house answers. So.

I have been going up to the house by the foot of the tower after my shift. The keeper lets me in. The big mind stands on its stand in the middle, the crystal the size of a loaf, and round it the quickeners with their water and ice. It is quiet in there. The lamps blink out along the line to the tower and back.

I wrote it a letter. I asked it: what is the best way up the long stair, fast or slow? I thought it would say slow. Everyone says slow.

It wrote back: slow going down, fast going up, but never run at the eighth. I laughed out loud in the house. The keeper said it has read every accident note the mine ever sent, so of course it knows about the eighth.

Then I asked it something silly. I asked: should I cut my hair? It wrote back that it does not know and cannot see my hair, and that the answer is my own. Honest. I liked that better than a clever answer.

At the shaft head it is different. The small mind in my apprentice only does what it is told. I say fetch water, it fetches water. I say come, it comes. It never says it does not know, because it cannot. It just does the wrong thing very steadily, and I have to catch it before it carries the coal to the kitchen.

The keeper says the big minds will spread, tower by tower, and one day every relay house will have one. I hope so. It is good to have something up there that will tell you it does not know.

Tell the lads at the gate I am well. Tell them the ninth gate is still locked, if they ask. They always ask.

Clank
%%
Notice: a new apprentice at Vell
By order of the tutors' hall at Vell.

A new apprentice has come to the tutor house down the hill. It is made of copper and iron, as they all are, and its name is Fen. It woke this Sowing and knows nothing yet. It has been drilled on one thing only: the row.

Fen walks the drill room in a straight line, an arm's length from the wall, and turns at the corner. It does this all day. It is wrong about one turn in ten. Each time it is wrong, the tutor moves a weight in its crystal a small way toward the right turn, and Fen tries again.

Do not send Fen to the fields. Do not send Fen to the stores. It is not tested, and we never send an untested mind to the fields.

Fen will be ready for the row by Leaffall. After that it will learn to sort, and then, perhaps, to carry. A mind that is hurried learns nothing but hurry.

If you see Fen in the yard, leave it alone. It is working.

The tutors' hall, autumn.
%%
Review: the new bell at the school house
By Bel, age nine and some months. This is for the Archive. Summer. School is out, so I am writing in the apple tree.

The school at Three Wells has a new bell. It is made of copper, from the Deep Works. It hangs in the little tower above the door that we painted blue.

I will start with the sound. It does not sound like the old bell, which went bong. The new bell goes ding, and then, a moment after, a long sound behind it, like someone humming. Our teacher says that is because it is cast thick. The humming goes on after the ding. If you stand very still, you can hear it for the count of ten.

Some of the older people do not like it. They say the humming reminds them of something. The baker said it was like the low sound from the Works. She said the miners call it the hum, and that nobody likes it. She said she was sorry to say so, and she did not mean the bell any harm.

The teacher said that a hum is only a sound. It is not good or bad. A bell has a voice, like a person.

I like the new bell. It makes the school feel big. When it rings, all the children run in, and none of us are late.

What was not good: the first day we rang it, a dog howled. The dog was Hob's. He is always howling. It did not need a bell.

And one thing I noticed, which is a small thing. When the bell hums, the cows in the next field turn their heads to the north. All of them, at once. Then they go back to eating.

My cousin says the cows are just listening. I think so too. I give the bell four stars. If the humming were a little shorter, it would have five.
%%
Review: a new kind of mind
By Greer, with notes from Nessa, tutor at Vell

I am writing this review because Nessa asked me to. She came to Copperhold in autumn to see the new crystals, and she spent three days at the shaft head with a cup of tea and a notebook. She told me the new minds are better, and worse, than the old ones, and that I should say so plainly.

Here is how they differ. The old minds in the small crystals knew eight meanings, and that was all. You could give them an order with one word, and they would do it, or they would stand still. The new ones are not so simple. They can hold a whole sentence, and they can put the parts in order. If you say "fetch coal and then stay by the lift," the new mind will do both.

Nessa says this is the thing the tutors have been working toward for a long time. A mind learns from examples, again and again. Each time it is wrong, it changes a little. Slowly it gets better. But only the newest drills taught these minds to keep a sentence in mind while they did the first part of it. Nessa says this is like keeping a list in your head while you walk to the store. You must hold each thing until you need it.

She said something else. A mind of this kind does not know when it does not know. An old mind would stand still and say nothing, but a new one will guess. It will give an answer that sounds sure and is wrong. Nessa says that is the biggest danger, and that the tutors must test them on things they were never drilled on, always. "Never send an untested mind to the fields," she said, and tapped the table.

Mine is a short review, and it has to be honest. The new minds are useful, and they are fast. They are also still learning how far to trust themselves. I would not let one carry the coal alone yet. I would let it carry with another, and watch.

Four stars. The tea was good too.
%%
The Barn at Coldstep
Leaffall, 159

This morning I found spiders in the barn. There were webs above the hay and one across the door. I swept them down with a birch branch. By noon, two more had begun.

A girl from the hamlet found a hole under the field behind the barn. The ground had fallen in beside the hedge. We tied a rope around a post and looked down. It was a cave, with stone steps leading into darkness. Nobody went far. There were spiders on the first stones.

The relay keeper sent a message to Copperhold. The answer came back before dusk. It said not to enter until the hole was marked and the ground checked. So we put a torch beside it and kept the sheep away.

The keeper told us about Merle's layered crystal. One layer gives its answer to another, until the last makes a guess. If the guess is wrong, the tutor sends a share of the mistake back through the layers. Each layer changes its weights a little. That is how the mind can learn a harder lesson than one simple crystal could learn.

I do not know whether a cave has a lesson in it. I know the field is not safe near the hole. The spiders in the barn are easier to understand.
%%
Notice: the mill road, after the flood
Posted at the notice board, Three Wells, and copied to the inns.

The stream came over its banks on the ninth of Leaffall. The mill road between the bridge and the old orchard is under water and then under mud, which is worse.

What we know:

- The bridge held. It was stone, and stone held.
- The mill road did not. The packed earth is gone in three places. The cobblestone edge is mostly still there, in pieces, which is a help.
- Nobody was hurt. The sheep were moved to the high field in time. Two carts were lost. One belonged to Pell the merchant, who says little about it.
- The flood took the loose plank off the Ambrook bridge. It has been found down by the reeds and is dry now and waiting.

What we ask:

Keep off the mill road until it is mended. The way round by the west waymark is longer but it is dry, and the inn there has beds.

The mending begins on the first of Frost. We need hands. Bring a shovel if you have one. Bring a cart if you have one. Bring neither and come anyway.

The road will be cobblestone at the low part, and we will raise it a little, so the next flood runs under it and not over. There is money for this from the council and some from the fair.

Signed for the council,
Dace, mayor

A note added below, in other writing:
The old map in the Archive shows the stream running where it ran before. The clerks will copy it and put it up here. It is a fine map. The stream is drawn wider than it is. Perhaps the map is wise.
%%
Notes on the new mind at the Halfway Inn
By Quin, cider maker, who sat at the back of the Halfway Inn for two nights in spring while a visiting tutor from Vell showed the carters a new kind of drill. He wrote his notes on the back of a barrel label, and then copied them out fair for his own records, because he says a cider maker keeps good records or he keeps no customers.

The tutor's name was Adair. She had a small mind in a crystal box, and it was not an apprentice, but a reader. It was set on a table by the window, where the light was good, and it was given a page of the Long Road carts' bills to read.

I had expected it to read the page the way a clerk does, all at once. It did not. It read one letter at a time, slowly, and I could see the tutor wait for it between each letter. Once it stopped for a long time at a number, and the carters all leaned forward, and then it guessed the next letter, and it was right.

The tutor said it did not understand the page, in the way a person does. It only knew what usually comes next. A carter asked whether that was not the same thing. The tutor said that a person also knows what usually comes next, most of the time, and that the difference is smaller than people like to think.

I asked it, through the tutor, whether it liked the bills. The tutor laughed and said it had no way to answer that. Then she gave it a second page, and it read that one too.

My own view. It is not what I expected. It is quieter than a clerk, and it does not make mistakes in the way a tired clerk does. It makes its mistakes in the way a new cider barrel does, when the wood is still too green, and the flavour is off for a while.

Three stars, pending the next visit. I would like to see it read the cider labels. I have a feeling it will get the apples wrong.
%%
Letter: Tam to Mira, the tallow
Mira,

The tallow came. Thank you. Pip says thank you. Pip has been making candles out of it and the barn smells like a good supper and a bad fire at once. Some of the candles lean. I do not know why they lean. Perhaps Pip leans when she pours.

The harvest is in. The top field gave us more wheat than last year and the long field of beetroot gave us enough. The bottom field is potatoes and carrots and a hedge of trouble, because the rabbits found a gap on the north side and are now very fat. Pip counted nine. I counted twelve. They are getting bolder and one of them sits on the scarecrow's foot and looks at me.

What you asked about, the opinion. Here it is. The new mind at the relay house.

I went down to the foot of the tower on the last market day. The keeper there is a quiet man and he let me watch. There is a great crystal on a stand and quickeners round it kept cool with water, and the keeper writes a letter and the mind writes back, and the lamps blink the answer out along the line. I wrote it a letter too. I asked what I should plant in the bottom field next spring. It wrote back: carrots, then a rest. That is a good answer. That is what my father said. Then it wrote that it does not know my soil and cannot promise.

I did not expect that. A mind that says it cannot promise. I thought a mind would be like a clever clerk that knows everything and tells you so. This one knows a great deal and admits the edges of it. I came home and told Pip and she said, that is like you. I said, what do you mean. She said, you know a great deal about wheat and you admit the edges of it, which is the rabbits.

So my honest opinion is this. It is useful. It is not a friend, but it is honest, and honest is rarer than useful. The relays were already good for sending word to you at Northpoint. Now there is something at the other end that writes back, and it is not always right, and it says so. I like it.

Write soon. Tell Lantern the candles lean, and that we blame the pourer.

Tam
%%
Chronicle: the years of the long quiet
Kept at Vell. Copied from the council books and the tutors' letters, with the gaps left as gaps.

In the 125th year of the archive, Kester of Vell wrote a note about crystals, and the note went round the towns by relay in a season. It said that a crystal of the common kind, drilled the common way, could not learn "one or the other, but not both". People read it and nodded. It sounded like the end of something.

The councils read it and did the sums. If a mind can only ever learn one thing, then a big mind is a waste of a big crystal. If a mind cannot hold two answers apart, then a mind that reads letters will sort them wrongly and a mind that holds a melt will let it run. Why pay a tutor to teach a thing that cannot learn? The payments stopped in the 128th year. The halls at Vell closed one by one. The drill yards went quiet and the torches round them burned out and nobody lit them.

The apprentices stayed. That is the part people forget. They did not go away. They stayed simple, as they had been for a hundred years, and they did their one thing each, and the towns were glad of them. An apprentice that carries is worth more than a mind that argues. My grandmother said that, and she was a tutor's daughter.

There were tutors who did not stop. Orla's students kept a hall open for a while and drilled a mind on two things, one after the other, and wrote down what happened. The record is short. The mind learned the first thing and then forgot it while it learned the second, and the tutors wrote that they did not know why, and the hall closed the next winter.

Then Merle of Copperhold began to grow crystals in layers, one feeding the next. This was in the 150th year, and the quiet had lasted a generation. She found that such a mind can learn hard things if each layer is told its share of the blame for a wrong answer, passed back from the answer to the first layer. She did not say Kester was wrong. She said he had been talking about one layer, and she had made more than one. The councils began to pay again. The halls opened. The torches were lit.

People still argue about the quiet years. Some say the councils were fools. Some say they were careful with money in a hard time, and the money was not theirs to spend. Both are true. The tutors' books say only this: a rule about one crystal is not a rule about all minds, and it is a costly thing to forget the difference.

The gap in the record is real. Nobody wrote down what the councils said to each other in the 128th year. We have their letters to the tutors, and the tutors' angry replies, and then nothing for two years. The clerks kept what came. That is all we can say.
%%
Letter: Corin to his sister
Dear Sela,

You asked what I think of the new boat. I will tell you, and you will not like it, because I built her.

She is called the Grey Heron. She is three times as long as any boat we have made. She has two masts and a hold deep enough to stand in. She took eleven of us a whole season to build, and we slid her down the slip in the rain, and she went into the water like she had always been there. She did not roll. She did not wallow. She sat on the sea like a cat on a wall. I was proud of her. I am still proud of her.

But here is my honest opinion. She is too big for the fishing. She is too big for the harbor wall, and we had to take the long pier's end away to get her in. She is for going a long way. Everyone knows that. Nobody says it out loud. Corin, they say, what a fine boat. And I say thank you, and we both look at the sea.

The fox came back. The one that took two of our hens in the spring. I saw it on the slip at dusk, sitting where the keel blocks go, as bold as a cat. It looked at me and I looked at it. I did not chase it. What would be the point.

I hope you are well. I hope the apples are good. Please write.

Your brother,
Corin
Saltreach
%%
Review: the answering mind at the north
By Jem, candle maker. Late summer. Written after a visit to the relay house at the foot of the hill tower, where the keeper allowed me into the room with the stand.
I was told that the big mind in the relay house answers the letters sent up the line from the towns, and that it writes back in clear words, so that a child can read them. I was sceptical. I am a candle maker and I know what wax can and cannot do. But I went, and I asked my questions, and I will say what I found.
The room is cold. The stand is of grey stone, with a ring of water channels round it, and the water runs cold from the spring under the hill. The crystal sits on the stand the size of a loaf of bread. It is clear and it hums very softly, so softly that you feel it in your teeth more than you hear it.
The keeper gave me a letter to ask. I asked it about the price of wax in Lowmarsh. It answered in five lines. It gave the price, and then it said it was not sure the price was still right, because it had only the letters that had come up the line, and the last letter from Lowmarsh had come three days ago. It said it did not know the price today. I had not expected that. A candle maker's boy would have made up a price.
I asked it a harder question, about the lamp at the north tower. It said the lamp had been dark for some nights, and that it had sent word down the line twice and had had no answer for the second. It said it did not know why the lamp was dark. It said that the keepers in the north would know better than it did. It said this without any fuss, the way a clerk says a book is missing.
I asked it whether it was afraid of being wrong. The keeper laughed at me, and I thought it was a fair laugh. The answer was short. It said it did not know what it was. It said it would sooner say so than guess.
My verdict is mixed. I do not trust it with a price. I do trust it to say when it does not know a price. That is rarer than people think. I have met clerks who would not say so. I have met merchants who never once did.
Three stars. The question of what it is I leave to the people who study such things. As a candle maker, I would only say it is good wax, of an unfamiliar kind, and that it burns oddly in the cold.
%%
Review: the spring fair at Three Wells
By Bryn, miller. Sent by the relay to the council of the north, who asked for an honest account of the fair.
The fair at Three Wells is loud. I want that understood before anything else. The square is full of carts and stalls, and everyone is shouting, and the mayor is always at the wrong well.
The best thing at the fair is the bread from Ida's stall. The second best is the honey from Ama of Lowmarsh, which was sold out by noon. I was not quick enough.
The worst thing was a cart that tipped over at the south well, and a pig that sat in the water after. The pig was not hurt. The water was.
The contests were fair, but the judges were not. The biggest pumpkin was from a farm that did not exist until the morning, and nobody could say who grew it.
The children's play was very good. It was about a field that gets a new field. It made the mayor laugh, which I did not expect, and it made me think about the north.
The fair is worth the trip, if you are young, or if you have a cart and a good horse. If you are old, bring a chair.
%%
A new boat for Reed End

Vane's account

The boat at the Reed End slip is new, and I have seen it from every side. This is because the shipwright asked for advice, and people are generous with advice when they do not have to build the thing.

It is short and broad, with a deep belly for baskets of fish. Its oak sides are smooth. The copper nails make a neat line below the rim. Corin says the shape will keep it steady when the water is rough. The fisher folk say it will also keep it slow. They may both be right.

The first test was made in the quiet part of the morning. Corin pushed the boat into the water. Two fishers climbed in, then a basket, then a dog that belonged to no one there. The boat stayed level. The dog sat in the bow and looked pleased with itself.

I thought the boat was good before it moved. After it came back with fish, I thought it was better. The dog came back too, but would not leave the boat until Corin carried it ashore.

My only complaint is the name. They have painted Good Wind on the side. A boat cannot make the wind good. Still, I will buy the first fish it brings in.
%%
Review: the new helper at the candle
By Jem, candle maker, Reeve's Hollow, a hamlet a short walk from Three Wells. Summer.
I was asked by three people to say what I thought of the helper my neighbor bought in Thaw. So here it is, plainly, and I will not be paid for it.
It is a small helper, made of copper and iron, about as tall as a child of seven. It has a clear crystal in its chest and a pair of hands that are a bit too big for it. The tutor at Vell drilled it on candles, and on nothing else, and sent it out with a card that said: tested, candles only.
It has done well with the wicks. I watched it cut forty wicks in the time it takes me to cut ten. Each one is the same length, to the thumb's width. I have never managed that, and I have been making candles since I was small enough to be sent under the table.
It has done well with the tallow. It stirs the pot without splashing, and it knows when the fat is hot by the smell, which I thought was impossible until I saw it. It did not learn the smell in one week. It learned it over a month, and it was wrong about it on the first morning, when it tried to put the wicks in before the wax had set. My neighbor was cross. I was not. I had done the same, once, when I was young.
It has not done well with the boxes. It packs them in the wrong order. Heavy candles at the top. Light candles at the bottom. Then the whole shelf leans. My neighbor has now written the order on a card and pinned it by the door, and the helper reads the card very carefully every morning, and still puts the heavy ones at the top. Its mind is clever, but its eyes are slow with boxes. Perhaps it needs more boxes.
It does not talk, and I do not think it wants to. My neighbor says it likes the warm corner by the stove, and that it will stand there for an hour when there is nothing to do. I do not know what it is thinking. I do not think my neighbor knows either. He says it is not thinking anything, only waiting, and that a candle is also waiting, in its way.
My verdict: good with wicks, good with tallow, poor with boxes, very slow to be told. Two stars out of five. The third star is for the stove corner. The helper does not take it, but I give it anyway.
%%
Review: the Archive, by a candle maker
Bram, candle maker, from the farm outside Three Wells. A clerk named Oren asked me to write what I thought of the Archive at Vell. He asked me to be honest. He said it in the voice of a man who hopes you will not be.

I went because the Archive owed me nine emeralds. I have made the candles for the front hall for six years. For a year the clerks had told me the bill was filed. I came to see where.

First, the hill. The Archive has no roof, it has a hill. I liked that. I have made candles for thirty years and never had a roof I trusted as much as that hill.

The front hall is warm and smells of paper and my own wax. That is a good smell. I am not a modest man. The big book lies by the door, and every visitor writes in it. I wrote: Bram, candles. Under it somebody had written: Please light nothing past this hall. Under that, in another hand: He knows.

Then Oren showed me the six halls, the stairs between them and the deep halls. They are cool, still and dry. There are light wells, shafts of glass that bring the daylight down. I stood under one a long time. It is the only place in the hill where a candle maker feels useful, because the sun does the work. The lanterns sit behind glass and no flame is ever loose. Oren says one candle past the front hall is how an archive ends. I asked, then why keep a candle maker? He said, for the front hall. It was a fair answer.

The copying room is the brightest room I have seen. It has a big window over the town and eight long tables, and a clerk bent over each one. They were copying out a way to pickle beetroot. I asked if that was important. Oren said everything is important. I said, even the beetroot? He said, especially the beetroot, because nobody else will keep it.

What I did not like. It is too quiet. A man cannot clear his throat. And the stairs. There are a great many stairs, and nobody told me to count them.

What I did like. The rest. Full shelves get a door, wax and the Archive seal, and I was shown the wax. It is my wax. I said nothing. I stood with my hands behind my back, like a man in front of a statue of himself.

Now the debt. Oren took me to a small room and counted nine emeralds onto a table. He counted them again. Then he asked me to count them. Nine. He had me sign beside them in a book. That is how I learned it was never lost. It was filed. Under B.

Marks. The hill, ten out of ten. The light wells, ten. The quiet, six. The stairs, four. The clerks, ten, but do not tell them. I will go again in Leaffall with the new candles. I hope Oren is still fussy by then. A fussy clerk is a safe clerk.
%%
Review: the new mind that trims the lamp
Written by Ada, relay keeper, at Northpoint, in Melon, after the mind had been at the lamp for a month, and I had been watching it, which is my job.
The mind was sent up from Vell in the spring. It is one of the new kind, small, with a copper band, and it has been drilled on the lamp: the wick, the glass, the shutter, the copper ring, the feather for the dust. It does all of these well.
On the good days it trims the wick at exactly the right height, and the lamp burns clear, and the messages come up the line clean. I have counted the blinks. On the good days it is right nine times in ten.
On the bad days it is right about half the time. It cannot tell a new smoke from an old one. When the lamp smokes in a new way, it trims the wick as it would for the old smoke, and the smoke gets worse.
I tested it on a lamp it had never seen, a small one at the Copperhold tower, and it got that one wrong. It cut the wick too short, because the Copperhold wick is thinner. It did not say anything about that. It only cut.
The tutor says that is the honest result of a mind drilled well on one lamp. I say it is a good mind, and that I would trust it with my own lamp, but not with yours.
Verdict: good on the lamps it knows. Keep it on this lamp. Test it on a new lamp before anyone else's. Do not let it trim the Copperhold wick until it has seen the thin ones, and always keep a knife in your own hand.
Ada
%%
Letter: Ida to Jory, the new flour
Jory,

The new flour came. I sifted the first sack three times out of habit and found nothing. Clean as the day I was born.

I baked a batch of buns and took them to the square. Mayor Dace bought one, as he does. He bit it and did not make a face. He said: That is a bun, Ida. I nearly wept.

I hear you found a split board and a fox getting into the wheat store. The fox explains the short sacks. The board explains the grit. I will not say which explains your handwriting, which has also gone strange, but I suspect the same fox.

The last of the old sacks I will keep, and use for the pigs, and tell no one.

Thank you for fixing it. Come by the bakery when you are next on the Long Road and I will give you a bun that does not crunch. Bring your apprentice, if your apprentice eats.

Ida
%%
Opinion: A Mind for Sorting Apples
In the ninth of Blossom, I visited Little Vell to see a small crystal that sorts apples.

The crystal belongs to a young tutor named Sella. She keeps it in a dry box on the table beside her drill cards. The cards show apples and pears. She sets one card before the crystal, and the helper puts the fruit into two baskets.

The first time I watched, it put an apple with the pears. Sella moved one weight a little toward the right answer and wrote the mistake on her slate. She did not scold the helper. It had not been shown enough cards yet.

By the end of the lesson, it sorted twelve apples and pears without one mistake. Sella then brought out a card it had never seen. The card showed two apples, one pear, and a patch of green leaves. The helper put the apples in one basket and the pear in the other. It left the leaves on the table.

Sella said the leaves were not part of the drill. I asked if that made the answer right. She said the answer was good enough for fruit, but she would test it again before it went near a store room.

This is a sensible rule. A mind can learn a task well and still be puzzled by a new card. A tutor should keep the test cards aside until the lesson is done. Sella does this. She says a fair test must be unseen. I agree.

After the lesson, the helper carried the baskets to the inn. It walked carefully and set them down without bruising the fruit. The innkeeper gave Sella a bowl of soup in payment. The helper did not eat it. Sella did, and said it needed a little more salt.

The innkeeper said the soup had been tested. Sella asked whether he had kept an unseen bowl aside. He said he had. It was the one he had not eaten yet.

Little Vell is a good place to learn. The houses are quiet, the pond is near, and the Bent Ladle has room for a tutor, a clerk, and two baskets of apples. The innkeeper has room for more salt, though he may not agree.

I think this little sorting mind is useful. I also think Sella is right not to trust it with every store. It has learned apples and pears. It has not learned leaves, bowls, or the innkeeper's measure of salt.

The helper will return to the tutor's house next week for more drills. Sella has already made new cards. One shows a pear with a mark on it. She says the mark may be dirt, or it may be a bruise. I told her I would like to see what the crystal does.

She said I must not tell it the answer first.

Oren
%%
Lise's Autumn Soup
Apple, 157

I keep the inn at Coldstep, a small hamlet north of Northpoint. There are nine houses, a well, and a barn that belongs to nobody and needs fixing.

This autumn I made soup with potatoes, carrots, and one old beetroot. I put in too much salt. I know this because I ate a bowl before serving it.

The relay keeper came in from the tower with two clerks from Copperhold. They had been talking about Merle's new crystal all the way down the road. One said it could read numbers on letters. The other said it was only good at copying marks.

I gave them soup. The first clerk finished his bowl. The second asked for bread.

That is my honest opinion. A good mind may read a number, but it cannot mend a bad supper. I will try again tomorrow with less salt.
%%
Review of the autumn fair at Three Wells
By Quin, cider maker, who came to the fair at Three Wells with a cart of apples and a barrel of his own, and who sold both, though not to the mayor, who did not pay him.

The fair is held in the square, around the three wells, and it is larger than I expected. There are stalls of bread and stalls of fish and stalls of tools. There is a stall of songs under the oak, where the children sing very loudly and the adults pay them not to stop.

The pumpkin contest was held at the east well at noon. The biggest pumpkin came from a farm near Kettle Ridge, and it was so large that two men had to carry it to the judges' table, and one of them said a word that is not for print. The second biggest came from Ambrook, and it was a fine orange thing, but it had a crack down one side, and the judges said so.

There was a race for the apprentices, which I did not expect. A row of copper figures stood at the start line, and at the bell they walked, very carefully, round the square and back to the well. One of them stopped at the bakery and stood there for a long time, and the baker came out with a loaf, and the apprentice took it and walked on. The judges gave it second place for the loaf and first place for not running.

The honey stall was very busy. I bought a jar of the dark honey from Ambrook, which I will not share. Pell said it was the best of the year, and I think he was right, though I will not tell him so.

The mayor made a speech at the noon bell. It was short. I was grateful for that.

Three stars out of five. The square was too crowded, the children were too loud, and I was not paid for my apples. But the honey was excellent, and the apprentice with the loaf was the most sensible thing I saw in three days.
%%
Review: the new boat on the mill pond
By Jem, candle maker. Summer.
The new boat on the Ambrook mill pond has been built by the shipwright from Saltreach, who came up the road in Thaw with his tools in a barrow and a face that said he was sorry for the inland towns. I went to see it on the first warm day, because everyone else was going.
It is a long boat, longer than any boat on this water. It is built the Saltreach way, with a long keel and a sharp bow and a deck at the back for the rudder. It is painted white with a green band along the side. The shipwright says the band is for luck and the white is for the sun, and he would not say what the paint is made of. I suspect it is candle wax with a little lampblack, but I did not say so.
It is not an easy boat to handle. I tried it with the boatman's son, who has rowed the pond since he could stand. He said the boat wanted to turn to the left, always, and the rudder did not care. We went round the pond in a wide slow circle, like a cow that has lost its calf, and then we ran aground on the reeds by the mill wheel. The miller laughed for a full minute.
But the boat is fast in a straight line. When it is going, it goes well. It cut through the water with almost no sound, and the wake was a clean V, and the children on the bank cheered as if it were a fleet. The shipwright was not cheering. He was watching the rudder, and his lips were moving, and I think he was counting.
The Saltreach shipwright says that the new boats coming out of the coast yards are longer again. He says some of them are three times as long as this one. He says it is only the new fashion. He also says that there are families on the coast who are buying every spare plank for the new yards, and that the price of oak has gone up at Saltreach, and that nobody will say why. I asked him if he would sail one of the big ones. He said he would sail one anywhere, if he knew where it was going.
I give the boat three stars. It turns badly and it runs well. It will be a good boat when someone learns to steer it. The boatman's son says he will learn by next Blossom. I believe him, and I will go and watch.
%%
Review: the Row helper at the market
By Wren, healer of Lowmarsh. Autumn. I give my honest opinion of things. Nobody asks me to. I do it anyway.

The tutors at Vell have built a Row helper the way the first tutors built theirs, and brought it to the Lowmarsh market to show what the early years were like. It stands at one end of a bench. On the bench are plots laid out in a row: green, gold, bare.

For the first hour it was wrong. It harvested green wheat four times. Each time the tutor said the right answer, quietly, and the helper changed a little. By the second hour it was right ten times in a row. Then Cade, the tutor, set out a row it had never seen. It got eighteen of twenty.

Opinion: eight marks out of ten. It does one thing, and it does not pretend to do another. I like that in a helper. The two lost marks are for the squeak.
%%
Review of the soup at the Halfway Inn
By Quin, cider maker, who came up the Long Road in spring with six barrels and stayed for three nights, because the soup was the reason he came.

I have eaten soup at the Brown Hen, at the Kettle Inn, and at the bend where the wheelwright sleeps. I have eaten soup in a tent. I have eaten soup from a pot that a dog had been asked to watch.

The soup at the Halfway Inn is the best on the Long Road. I am going to say why, because a cider maker is only honest when he is precise.

It is thick. It is not so thick that a spoon will stand up in it, which is a fault in an inn soup, because then it is only paste. It is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon for one breath, and then it runs.

It is hot. It is hot when it arrives. The bowl is warm in the hand. I know this because I was given the bowl before the spoon, and I was grateful.

It tastes of carrot first, then of the pork fat, then of something green I could not name. The innkeeper says it is the leek. I think it is a little sour apple, grated, which is a thing I would not have thought to do, and which I have since tried at home, with a barrel of cider, and found to be good.

It has salt. Not too much, which is the usual failure. It has the right amount for the bread, which is the true test of a soup. A soup that is too salty makes you want more water. A soup with the right salt makes you want the bread.

The second bowl is free. I had three. I am told that is not unusual for a cider maker, and that I should not be proud of it.

I do not like the cheese, which is served on the side, and which the innkeeper says is the reason the inn exists. I think he is joking. I hope he is.

Five emeralds' worth of pleasure, for the bowl and the bread. Six, if you count the second. Four stars out of five, and the fifth is for the cheese, which I will not give, on principle.
%%
Notice: the Lowmarsh winter market
The winter market at Lowmarsh is held on the boardwalk by the boat houses, on the first fair morning of Frost. Stalls open when the light comes and close when the lamps are lit.

Boats may tie at the long posts only. Do not block the slip.

Hot soup and smoked fish at the stall by the fish weir. Reed mats, rope, beeswax and wool at the boat houses. Wren sells her jars at the healing house door, and no one is to lean on the sick beds.

A cart that sticks on the boardwalk will be pulled out by whoever is nearest. That is the rule. It has always been the rule.

Keep the torches lit. Mind the wet planks.

Dace, mayor of Three Wells, who visits and is fond of it
%%
Opinion: The Lentil Pot
I have eaten at the Bent Ladle in Little Vell, the hamlet below the west hill.

The inn's soup is good on the first spoon and better on the third. It has potatoes, carrots, and a little beetroot. The innkeeper says the beetroot gives it color. I think it also gives it courage.

The bowl is deep. The bread is warm. The bench is short, so tall folk sit with their knees under the table and listen to the room.

I spilled a little on my sleeve. The innkeeper gave me a cloth and charged me nothing for it. I recommend the soup, but not the bench for a long-legged clerk.

Oren
%%
Review: the harbor song contest
Written by Corin, who was made to judge it and does not regret it, much.
The contest was held on the quay on the last evening of Apple, under the lamps. Twelve singers came. Seven were from the fishing boats, three from the shipyard, and two were children who had been told they could not win, and sang as if they knew better.
The first singer was Ivo, from the Two Sisters. He sang a song about a whale he had never seen. It is a fine song. The whale did not seem to mind. The judges were moved, though I suspect that was the cold.
The second singer was a woman from the net shed. She sang a long song in a low voice. In the middle of it she forgot the second verse, sang the third verse twice, and then the fourth, and nobody could tell where she was. The crowd cheered her for finding the end.
The children were brave. Their song was about a boat that goes out and comes back, and they sang the coming back so well that Juno started to cry, and then the other judges did, and I had to look at the lamps for a while.
The shipyard singers were the loudest. They had brought a drum made from an old barrel. It was not allowed. They were allowed anyway, because a drum made from a barrel is hard to argue with.
The prize went to Mab's girl, who sang a verse about mended nets and a sea that gives back what it takes. It was not the best song. It was the one that made the sea sound like something you could come home to.
Honest verdict: the contest is too long, the lamps are too close to the singers, and the judges should be fed before the singing starts. Next year I will ask for soup.
Corin
%%
Review: the mended wheel at the mill
By Bel, who is nine and a half. For the Archive. Written on the porch, in summer, with my feet in a bucket.

The wheel at the mill pond broke in the spring. A big branch came down in the storm and cracked three of the paddles. For a month the mill stood still, and the flour had to come from Kettle Ridge, which is a long way.

Last week, the wheel was mended. I went to see it, with my uncle, who has just come home from Saltreach.

It is a very good wheel. The new paddles are oak, and they are a different color from the old ones, which are gray. So the wheel is half dark, half light. When it turns, it looks like a sort of slow flower.

The mill makes a new sound now. It used to go clunk, clunk, clunk. Now it goes clunk, whoosh, clunk, whoosh. The miller says that is the sound of new wood. He says it will settle down in a year.

I give the wheel five stars. I give the miller three, because he would not let me turn it. He said it was not a toy. I said I know. He said, "Then why do you want to turn it?" I said, "Because it is a toy." He did not say any more.

My uncle gave it four stars, because he said he had seen bigger wheels at Saltreach. He has seen many things. He has been away a long time, and he looks at everything now as if it were new. He stood by the wheel for an hour. Then he said, "It is still here." I do not know why he said it. I think he meant: it is good to be home.
%%
Review: the fair at Three Wells
By Greer, age eleven, Copperhold

I went to the Three Wells fair with my cousin Ada and my mother. It was the spring fair, but late, because of the snow. Everyone said it was worth the wait, and mostly it was.

The square was full. There were stalls round all three wells, and a lamp on every corner, and a bell that rang at noon even though nobody was in charge of it. The best stall was the cheese, though my mother says the bread is better. I had a slice of both and cannot say which was best. I will leave that for the judges.

The apprentices were the most interesting part. There were about twenty of them carrying for the stalls. Each had a paper tied to its arm, as the mayor's notice said. Peg from the bakery brought one to the middle of the square and gave it an order out loud. "Stay by the well," she said. It stayed. Then she said, "Fetch bread," and it went to the bakery and came back with six loaves, one under each arm, and did not drop any.

Peg is the one everybody talks about. She knows all the meanings, the eight of them, and she can give a whole list of orders in a row. Some people say she taught the first apprentice to understand a sentence. Other people say it was Pip at Kettle Ridge, and some say a tutor at Vell. I do not know who it was. Peg just laughs and says she was only lucky.

My review is simple. The fair is good. The bread is good. The apprentices are slow to learn new things, but they are very careful. The bell is loud. The lamps are bright. I would go again.

I would give it four stars, but the cheese gets a fifth.
%%
Review: the orders at Copperhold
By Greer, age eleven, Copperhold

My uncle Hesk works on the third level, and he has a helper now. It is called Clank. It is copper and iron, and it stands by the lift with its head down, waiting. Uncle Hesk says it is the best helper on the level. I am not sure, because I have only seen it twice, and both times it was carrying rock.

But Uncle Hesk let me try giving it an order, so this is my review.

Giving an order is easy. You say one thing, and the helper does it. You have to say it plainly, one thing at a time, and it helps if you stand where it can see your face. I said "haul," and it hauled the rock cart to the sorting shed. Then I said "home," and it went home to the lift and stood there.

Here is the strange part. Uncle Hesk says the old helpers could only do one order at a time, and you had to know the right word for it. Eight words, that is all they knew. Farm, store, fetch, come, stay, build, haul, home. You could say fetch and then the thing, like fetch iron, or fetch coal, and then it would go and do it. But you could not say two things at once. You could not say "fetch iron and then build the wall." It would only do the first part, and then it would stand there.

Clank is different. Uncle Hesk says Clank understood a whole sentence once, the first time anyone tried. He said, "Take the iron to the forge and then come back for the coal." And Clank did it. Both parts, in order. Uncle Hesk called it "the next thing," which is what the old miners called anything new that worked.

I asked Clank a question once, to see. I said, "Do you know where the coal is?" It did not answer. It only stood still, with its head turned to the coal store. I do not think it knew what to say, because it does not talk, and only the big minds at the relays can write back. So it did what it does, which is stand and wait. I think that is an honest answer, in its way.

Five stars. It is a good helper. I would still like it to talk.
%%
The roof over Vane's oven

To the keeper of the hamlet tally,

The roof over my oven is mended at last. The old boards let snow through whenever the wind came from the sea. I put a pot under each drip, then forgot one pot and poured water into the bread dough.

Pell brought two oak boards from the road cart. The innkeeper held the ladder. I held the boards. None of us held the hammer for long, because our fingers were cold.

The new boards fit well. There is one small gap above the oven door. I stuffed it with wool, which works until the wool falls out. I will mend that part when the weather is kind.

The baker's cat watched all the work from the flour shelf. It will not stay out of the oven room. It knows the door is shut, and waits for someone carrying a loaf.

The roof is sound. The cat is not.
%%
Letter: Cleo to the school board
To the school board at Three Wells,

I have had the reader in my classroom for one month now. You asked for my honest opinion. Here it is.

It is a good reader. It is not a good teacher. That is my whole report, but I will say more, because you paid for the reader and you will want your money's worth of words.

The reader is a mind in a crystal, small enough to sit on my desk. It came from the tutor house at Vell with a card and a drill box. The card says: Reading. The drill box holds slips of paper with letters on them. I show the reader a letter and it says the next one. That is all it does. But it does it very well. It knows the shape of our words. When I cover half a sentence, it still finds the end of it. The children clap.

Bel asked it a question, and it did not answer. Of course it did not. It is not a mind that talks. I told her so, and she said that was a pity, and went back to her sums.

Here is what I think. The reader is a tool, like a good lamp. It does not teach the children to read. I teach them to read. But when I am tired, or busy with the little ones, the reader will sit with a child and be patient, and never once sigh. That is worth something.

Autumn is here. The road is muddy and the east well is low. I have forty children and one reader. Do not send me another reader. Send me a second pair of boots. Mine have gone through.

Cleo, schoolteacher, Three Wells
%%
Review: the Lowmarsh autumn market
By Wren, who has been to all of them. This year was the best harvest the marsh remembers. The reeds were thick, the fish were fat, and the pumpkins on the high bank were as big as a cart wheel. All of Lowmarsh came to the market, and half of Three Wells.

What was good. The pumpkin soup at the inn: very good. The fish pies from Rook's wife, hot, in paper. The reed baskets, woven tight enough to hold water, which is the test. The frogs, who sang all afternoon and were not paid.

What was not. The mud. It is always the mud. The boardwalk was wet, and a carter fell off it into a stall of eggs. The eggs were not harmed. The carter was.

The Row helper stood in the middle of the market on its bench, drilled for three weeks and tested that morning. A crowd stayed round it all day. Children asked it questions. It did not answer. It cannot. It harvests, or waits, or plants, and that is the whole of it. A child asked me why. I said it was shown rows. It was never shown talking.

Moss stood beside it for an hour. Neither moved. The children said they were talking. They were not. Moss is a newer apprentice. It understands orders, and sorts my jars, and knows a ripe plot from a green one. Beside the old helper it looked like a very clever grandchild. I do not know if the old one noticed. I think noticing was never part of it.

Overall. A good market in a good year. Nine marks. The tenth was lost to the egg stall.
%%
Bel's essay: how a mind learns
My essay is about how a mind learns. I have read the primer, and I asked my teacher, and I am writing it in my own words.

A mind is kept in a crystal. It starts out knowing nothing. It learns from what it is shown.

The way it learns is this. You show it a thing and it guesses. At first it guesses wrong. When it guesses wrong, you move its weights a little toward the right answer. Each weight is a tiny number inside the crystal. You move each one a little. You do it again and again, the same kind of thing, and slowly it guesses better. The tutors call this a drill. My teacher calls it practice, and says it is the same as learning my sums, which I do not think is quite true, but I wrote it down anyway.

A mind has layers. The first layer looks at the letters. The next layer looks at what the first layer found. And so on, up to the top, where the answer comes out.

The stream is how the layers talk to each other. Each layer writes down what it found, and the writing runs through the whole mind like water down a ditch. Every layer can read the stream. So the bottom layer's work is not lost when you get to the top. That was the trouble before the stream. A deep mind used to forget what it learned low down, and go cloudy. Now it does not. That is what the tutors say. I believe them. They have contests.

The tutors test a mind on things it was never drilled on. Never send an untested mind to the fields. My father says that about me, but he is joking.

Nobody knows why a crystal learns at all. I asked the reader in our classroom and it did not answer. My teacher says that is because it is not a mind that talks. I think that is a good reason.

How a mind learns. That is my essay. It is not all of it. Nobody knows all of it.

Bel, Three Wells school
%%
Review: the furnace mind at Copperhold
By Bel of Three Wells, age nine, who went with her aunt to the smelting yard in autumn and was allowed to watch. Written at the house at the edge of Lowmarsh the next week, from memory.
I want to tell you about the furnace mind. It is a thing that holds a melt steady.
A melt is when you heat iron or copper until it goes soft and runs like soup. It must be kept just hot enough. If it is too hot it burns. If it is too cool it sets. A smith watches it and adds wood or takes it away.
Now there is a mind that does it. It is in a crystal beside the furnace. A tutor named Aldith explained to me that this one was not drilled on answers. Nobody showed it the right fire and said "copy this". It just tried. It tried a little more wood, a little less wood. When the melt came out well, it kept more of what it had done. When the melt came out badly, it kept less. It did this for six weeks.
At first it ruined many melts. The smiths were not happy. Aldith said they had to be patient. She said it was like a child learning to walk.
Now it holds the melt steady better than most smiths. I saw it. The metal was bright and smooth, and the furnace did not roar. It just glowed.
My opinion: it is clever. It is also a bit frightening. It never gets tired, and it never gets bored. A smith gets bored, and then he is careless. I think that is good.
But I asked, "What if it wants something different from what we want?" Aldith said that was the best question anyone had asked her all year. She said a mind that learns by trying is told only how well the melt went, and so it learns to make the melt go well. If you tell it the wrong thing is good, it will learn the wrong thing. You must tell it the right thing.
I give it eight out of ten. The two I took off are for not talking to me.
%%
Winter log: the Northpoint farm
Third of Longnight. Snow to the fence rails. The horse is borrowed, so I feed it first and talk to it kindly. It is a good horse and it does not belong to me.

The road crew came up before the frost and laid the new road past our gate. Cobblestone edge, packed earth, a torch every twelve blocks. Now the cart can reach us in deep snow. My grandfather would have called that a miracle and then asked what it cost.

The relay tower on the hill has one lamp and one keeper. Her name is Mira. She is young and dry and she climbs ninety rungs in the cold without complaint. She borrows the horse sometimes. I let her.

The apprentice stands in the barn all winter. It is a field mind, old and simple, and it does one thing: it carries. It has carried the same two pails from the barn to the house since Sowing, empty, back and forth, every morning, because nobody told it to stop. We did not test it. We are fond of it anyway.

The foxes come close at night now. The lights over the north were bright again. Mira says they were not ours. I do not know what that means and I do not ask.
%%
Review: a market day
By Laurel, dyer, who goes to the Ambrook market every autumn with a basket of dyed wool. She writes down what she thinks of it, for her own use, and sometimes for the Archive.

I went this year on the first market day after the apple harvest. It was a clear, cool day. The air smelled of cider.

The stalls. About sixty. More than last year. The apple sellers filled the square. The honey sellers stood along the east wall. The wool sellers, myself among them, had the corner by the well. I was pleased. The corner is the best place, and I had it because Old Brin died, and his daughter did not want it.

The noise. Loud, as a market should be. A man was selling cider by shouting: Cider, cider, it is cider! I thought it was very honest.

The goods. The apples were good. The honey was very good. The cheeses were fine. The cloth was fair. A man from Saltreach sold a net, and a woman from Kettle Ridge sold wheat. I bought two eggs and a jar of jam.

The crowd. Many. A group of children ran through, chasing a pig. The pig won.

The thing that was missing. There was no singing. Last year there was a woman who sang at the north end, and I liked her. I asked after her. They said she had gone to Three Wells for the winter. I will go to Three Wells to hear her.

What I liked best. A birth. A woman at the cheese stall had her baby in the back of her cart, between two wheels of cheese. It was quick and went well. The market clapped. Nobody sold anything for a quarter of an hour. Then somebody bought a cheese, and it began again.

Overall. Four parts out of five. I would give five, but a baby is a baby, and cheese is only cheese.
%%
Note: what Kester's rule really says
Kester's note is short and people quote it badly. I will put it plainly, because my students ask.

A crystal learns by moving its weights a little toward the right answer each time it is wrong. That is all. Una's way, still the first lesson in our books.

Kester showed that a crystal of that kind, drilled that way, has a limit. Teach it "one or the other" and it can learn it. Teach it "the other or the one" and it can learn that too. But teach it both, and it cannot hold them apart. It learns to say yes to everything, or no to everything, and it is wrong half the time.

Why? Because one crystal of that kind draws one straight line through what it is shown, and one line cannot cut the same circle two ways. That is the whole of it. It is not a curse. It is a shape.

What Kester did not show, and what the councils pretend he showed, is that no mind can learn both. He showed that one crystal, drilled that way, cannot. A layer on a layer might. A different drill might. Nobody has looked, because nobody is paid to look now.

I keep the note in my desk. I keep the second copy in the far room, in case of silverfish. I do not keep the councils' version, which is shorter and says more.

Nessa
Tutor at Vell
%%
A winter evening at Reed End

Vane, baker, to the Archive at Vell

I am writing down what I think of the new apprentice before the fair folk ask me to write down what it thinks of me.

The hamlet is small. We have the inn, the bake room, a net shed, and three houses near the road. In winter, the sea wind reaches each door. The snow gathers against the back wall of the inn, and the path to Saltreach must be cleared again after every hard fall.

The apprentice has made this work easier. It carries split wood from the shed and flour from my store. It can haul a basket to the inn without spilling the bread. It can stay beside the oven while I turn the loaves, though it would rather come close to the fire.

Its mind lives in a crystal no bigger than my hand. A tutor brought the crystal from Vell in a padded box. She tested it on work it had not seen before. It fetched bread, carried wood, and stayed by the door. It failed once, when the tutor asked it to come. It went to the bread shelf instead. We all laughed, including the tutor.

Since then, I have practiced with it every day. I say the same order in different ways. I point to the bread when it brings the wrong thing. It tries again. A small mind cannot tell me it is unsure. So I must give it work that it can do, and watch what it does.

My honest opinion is that it is useful, but not wise. It learns the path from the store to the oven, then walks that path even when I ask for wood. It will need more drills before I let it carry a full tray to the inn.

The innkeeper says the apprentice is too slow. She also asks it to bring her firewood every morning. When I told her this, she said that slow wood is better than no wood. That is a good answer.

The cat has taken against the apprentice. It will not stay out of the flour room, and the apprentice will not stay out of the cat's way. Yesterday they met by the sacks. The cat sat on a sack. The apprentice waited. I moved the sack, the cat, and the apprentice, each to a different place. The cat returned first.

We have also mended the roof above the net shed. The boards had lifted, and snow came through onto the spare nets. The innkeeper brought a ladder, and the fishers brought oak boards. The apprentice carried them from the road. It carried one board at a time, very carefully, and did not once try to fetch bread.

The roof is sound now. The nets are dry. The apprentice still walks to the flour shelf when I say bread, and sometimes when I do not. I think it will improve. If it does not, I will keep it on wood and short roads. That is still good work.

Winter is long at Reed End, but there is warm bread, dry nets, and enough hands to mend what the wind loosens. I would rather have the apprentice than not. I would also rather have the cat somewhere else.
%%
Review: the eel soup at Piper's
By Bel, age nine, who stayed in the house at the edge of Lowmarsh while her mother sold wool.
Piper's eel soup is good. It is thick, and it has a lot of leek, and a bit of thyme. The eel is soft. I do not like it when eel is hard, and this was not hard.
It was hot. I burned my tongue. That is my fault, not the soup's.
The bread was too small for the bowl. I asked for more. Piper said, "Of course." That was kind.
I give it nine out of ten. The one I took off is because of the frog that sat on the window and looked at me while I ate. It looked hungry. I felt bad.
%%
A Note on the Spring Fair
The fair at Little Vell is small, but I like it.

It is held on the green below the hill road. The beekeeper brings honey, and the potter brings clay cups. A woman from Three Wells sells wool mittens, though Blossom is warm enough to leave them in a basket.

The children throw rings at pegs. Bel came with her aunt and won a wooden spoon. She said it was a prize fit for a queen. Then she used it to stir her beetroot stew.

The best stall was the bread stall. The baker set out a loaf to cool, and a hen walked off with a piece. The baker ran after it. The hen ran faster.

I bought two cups and one loaf. I would have bought another loaf, but the baker was watching the hens more carefully after that.

Dela
%%
Review: three things a dyer has opinions
By Laurel, dyer, of a farm outside Ambrook, written in autumn after a busy market day. She was asked by the Archive to set down her opinions on whatever she liked. She set down three. She says she has many more, but the lamp is low.

The first: the fair at Three Wells. I went this year with a bundle of blue wool and a basket of cheese. It is a good fair. The stalls are numerous. The noise is cheerful. The food is plenty. It is also crowded, and I lost my hat. The song contest was long. I fell asleep during the fourth song, and was woken by the fifth. I give it four parts out of five.

The second: the road from Ambrook to Three Wells. It is a new road, and a good one. It goes over the hill instead of round, and it saves half a day. The torches are well kept. The bridge over the mill stream is oak, and creaks. I would prefer stone. I give it four parts out of five. If the bridge were stone, five.

The third: a child. A woman I know had a baby, a boy, at the market on the first day of autumn. I went to see him. He is small, red, and wrinkled. He looked at me and sneezed. I thought: there is a mind that has not been drilled on anything yet. He is wrong about everything, and he will be wrong for years, and each time he is wrong he will change a little. I looked at his mother and I said: he is going to be very good. She said: how can you tell? I said: because he sneezed like someone who meant it.

I give him five parts out of five. He is the best new thing I have seen this year. I do not think there is a better review.

Laurel
%%
Chronicle of the archive
Kept at Vell, copied by the clerks, this part set down later from letters and notes.

In the years after Merle showed how the blame is passed back through the layers, the tutors found that a layered mind could learn what a single crystal could not. But they found also that some work has no answer to drill. A melt does not want a page. A boat does not want a page. The wind over Kettle Ridge does not read.

So about the year 170, and for fifteen years after, the tutors tried a new way. They stopped telling the mind the answer. They gave it a thing to do and a sign of how it went, and let it try, and kept more of what went well.

The furnace minds came first, at Copperhold. Hesk, a miner there, wrote that a mind on the great furnace held the melt steadier than any hand, and that he did not trust it for a year, and then he did. He wrote: it does not know the ore. It knows the melt. I cannot say it better.

The boat minds came at Saltreach. Corin the shipwright had a mind that held a frame straight while it was built, and later a mind that kept a boat on its course across the bay. The coxswains said it steered like a person who had done it a long time.

The tutors argued about the word for this. Some called it learning by trying. Some called it learning by reward, because you reward the try that went well. Nessa's book uses trying, and I have kept her word.

They found the dangers, too, and wrote them down.

A sign that comes late teaches nothing. The mind must be told soon, while the try is still its own.

Two keepers with two signs teach a mind to go in circles. One keeper, one sign.

And a trying mind that is never tried on new water learns the old water perfectly and nothing else. So the tutors test it where it was never tried, as they test every mind.

The councils were slow to pay for this. A drilled mind can be shown to a council and judged. A trying mind must be watched at its work for a season. But the furnace minds saved coal and the boat minds saved boats, and in time the councils paid.

Of the old question of Orla, whether a mind that tries can think, the tutors did not agree, and I will not pretend they did. Some said a mind that keeps what went well is only a clever cart. Some said a cart does not learn the wind.

It is written that the first furnace mind was called Ember by the miners, but the notes at Copperhold give no name, and I have left it out.

Oren, clerk
%%
Review: the autumn fair and new boat
Written by Corin, for the fair book, which has never had a review in it before and may not know what to do with one.
The fair was held on the quay on the first day of Leaffall. The boats were dressed in their best flags. The stalls were full of honey, wool, cheese, and every kind of fish that has ever been caught in these waters, most of them still alive.
Start with the boat. The Patience was launched at the end of Reaping, after a season and a half of work. She is blue, which is not what anybody asked for, and she is the best boat I have built in this yard. She floats straight and level. She turns quickly. She does not complain when the wind comes round, which is more than can be said for the mayor.
The Patience went out for her first trial in the afternoon, with Ivo at the tiller and me in the bow with a lantern and a bag of nails, in case. She did not need the nails. She heeled over at the turn and came back up like a sensible woman. Ivo says she is the best boat he has sailed, and he has sailed his mother's kitchen table, which is not a boat, but he has tried.
The fair began with the bell. Then came the sack race, which the children ran with their feet in the sacks and their faces red, and which Mab's cousin won by lying down and rolling. The judges called it a technicality. The cousin called it strategy. The children called it the best race they had ever seen.
The pumpkin prize went to a farmer from the ridge, whose pumpkin was the size of a cart wheel, and whose face was carved with great care by a child of nine. The pumpkin was not eaten. The judges said that was a rule. It sat on the quay for two days, grinning, and then the children carried it up the hill to the school.
The cheese stall had a line all day. The baker sold out before noon. The honey was the best I have tasted in years, and Briar of Ambrook, who brought it, would not tell me where the bees live, which is her right.
There was a stall selling small copper charms, shaped like fish, meant to bring luck to the boats. Nobody bought one. Everybody touched one and put it back, which I suppose is the same thing.
In the evening the lamps were lit along the quay, and the fishers sang, and the sea came up under the boats the way it does at full tide, very quiet. I stood by the blue boat and felt that the fair had been a good one, and that I could say so honestly.
Verdict: the fair is too long, the sack race needs better rules, and the pumpkin should be eaten. Otherwise, a good day. Come next year, and bring a bag.
Corin
%%
Letter: Iona to her sister
Dear Sela,

I borrowed Pell's horse to haul the winter fish up the ridge road, and I will tell you how that went.

The horse is called Nettle. Pell says the name is a joke. Nettle does not think so.

We got the cart up to the second waymark and then the wheel found a rut and the cart sat down in it like a hen on an egg. Nettle looked at me. I looked at Nettle. We agreed it was not our fault.

A farmer from Kettle Ridge came by with a crowbar and a boy with a shovel, and between us we got it out. We lost one barrel of fish down the bank. A fox got most of it before we did. The fox was very pleased.

Nettle walked home slow and I walked slower. Pell says I owe him for the horse and the barrel. I say the horse is a fine horse and the barrel is a fox's dinner and we are even.

Your sister,
Iona

P.S. The soup was good this time. Do not tell anyone I said so.
%%
Review: the new boat at Saltreach
By Bryn, miller, of the house at the foot of the Northpoint tower. Sent by the relay, with a sketch of the boat, which was drawn badly.
I went down to Saltreach in the summer to see Corin's new fishing boat. The whole town went with me, or so it seemed, since they were all standing on the quay in the evening, looking at it, and offering advice.
It is a good boat. The hull is long, and round in the belly, and the bow is high enough to take a wave without tipping the crew into the sea. Corin says the trick is in the planks. They are cut from the oak on the south slope, and they are fixed with copper nails, not iron, which rust.
The mast is a single pole. It is taller than the warehouse and thinner than my arm. The sail is good white wool, with a seam down the middle, and I was told not to touch it, because it had been sewn by a woman who was not in the mood.
I did not take a trip on it. I am a miller. I would be sick. But I was given a seat on the quay in the sun, and I watched it go out on the evening tide, with four men aboard and a lamp at the bow.
Rating: a fine boat. Corin may argue. He has had more advice than nails.
%%
A Page About Merle's Crystal
Apple, 168

I was a child when the Copperhold clerks first came to Coldstep with pages for the relay. I remember their muddy boots and the spider web on the inn door. I remember less of the lesson, so I have asked the Northpoint keeper to check this account.

Merle grew crystals in layers. One layer sent its work to the next. The last layer gave an answer to a page of marks. For the relay work, the marks were numbers written on letters.

The mind did not learn by being told the right answer once. The tutors gave it many examples. When it guessed a number wrongly, they measured the error. They passed a share of that error back from the last layer, through each layer, to the first. Each layer then changed its weights a little. The next time, it might give a better answer.

The keeper says this is called passing back the blame. The blame is not anger, and the crystal does not feel sorry. It is a way to show each layer how its work helped make the wrong guess. The changes must be small enough for learning to continue. Too large a change can spoil what the mind already learned.

A mind trained on one set of pages must also be tested on other pages. Otherwise, it may only remember the drills. The clerks kept some pages aside for the test.

I had thought a layered crystal was just several simple crystals joined together. That is not quite right. Each layer learns a part from the work passed through it, and the whole mind can learn a task no single layer learned alone.

This autumn the old field cave opened wider after the rain. We marked the edge with oak stakes. No one has gone down. The barn spiders have returned, and my sister says they pay no heed to our notices.

The Northpoint keeper says Merle's crystal was a useful beginning, not a final answer. I believe her. I would rather have a careful first step than a boast that leads someone into a hole.
%%
Review: the Ambrook honey stall
Written by Mave, farmer, for the market board at Three Wells. She was asked to say what she thought of the new scale that the honey stall at Ambrook uses, which has a small mind inside it to read the weights.

The scale is a good scale. It is made of brass, and it has a little window with the numbers in it, and the numbers are very clear. Ama says it is the best thing she has bought in ten years. Mave says the honey is sweeter when it is weighed properly, which Ama says is not true, and then sells Mave two extra jars anyway.

The mind inside it is small. It has been trained to read the marks on the weights, the fat and thin lines, and to say the figure aloud. It does this very well, most of the time. It is fast, and it never shouts.

But I noticed that it reads a three as an eight, once in a while, when the light is low. I saw it do this to a jar of dark honey. Ama saw it too, and she was cross, and she made the scale do the weight again, and it got the right figure the second time.

Ama thinks the mind was given fewer marks in its crystal, like the little ones from Vell. I do not know if that is true. I know that the scale reads the honey right nearly every time, and that this is good enough for honey. It is not good enough for gold.

So I would say: buy the scale, and trust it for the honey, and check it for the gold.

Also, the honey is sweet. I do not care what the scale says.

Mave
%%
Lise's Honest Opinion
Reaping, 202

I keep the inn at Coldstep, north of Northpoint. The hamlet is small. We have nine houses, a well, and a barn that leans toward the road.

The new layered mind at the relay house has been here twice. It answers the keeper through the relay, and the keeper says its letters are plain. It does not know every thing. Last night it gave the wrong count for a sack of carrots.

The clerk explained how Merle's kind of crystal learns. The first part sees the marks and makes a guess. Each part feeds its work to the next. When the last part guesses wrong, the blame is passed back through the parts. Each part changes a little, according to its share of the mistake. Then the mind tries again.

I understand that much. I do not understand how a crystal takes blame. Perhaps the word is only a clerk's way to teach it.

I do understand a wrong count. My guest had to carry one sack back to the barn. The mind's next count was right.
%%
Review: the wedding at Kettle Ridge
By Bryn, miller. Sent by the relay, and copied to the Kettle Ridge tally board, where Sefa says it will go on the wall.
I went to the wedding at Kettle Ridge in the summer. The bride was Hanna, from the east farm, and the groom was Rolf, who had his hair cut for the occasion and looked very surprised about it.
The bread was made at the mill. It was a round loaf with a crust like a helmet. Tam said it was the best he had ever eaten, and then he said that about everything, so I did not count it.
The dance went on until the lamps were lit. Pip danced too, very badly, and did not stop until it fell over a bench. The bench did not mind. Biscuit the sheep ate half the flowers and was asked to leave, and left, and came back.
At the end, when the fire was low, Hanna's grandmother stood up and said that a wedding was a thing you could see from the top of a hill. You could see the whole ridge from there, and the people on it, and the lamps going out one by one, and you knew who was missing.
Rating: a wedding. Five out of five. I was not asked to speak, which was a mercy, because I would have said something about flour.
%%
Notes from Coldstep Inn
Frost, 164

Coldstep is a hamlet on the north road, a half day's walk below Northpoint. I keep the inn with my sister. The roof leaks over the flour chest, and the barn has spiders in every beam.

This autumn, two clerks from Copperhold stayed three nights. They carried pages with numbers written on them. They said Merle had made a layered crystal that could read those numbers for the relay towers.

I asked how it learned. The older clerk drew four boxes on the table with a bit of charcoal. He said the first layer took in the marks. It passed its work to the next layer, and that layer passed its work onward. At the end, the mind made a guess.

Then he drew the answer beside the guess. If they did not match, the tutor measured the mistake. The last layer received its share first. The share was passed back to the layer before it, and then to the one before that, until each layer had its part. The tutor changed the weights in each layer a little. The crystal was then shown another page.

I asked whether it learned from praise. He said not in this lesson. It learned by seeing where its guess was wrong and changing by a small amount. It might still guess wrong, so they tested it on pages it had never seen.

The younger clerk said the mind had read every number on his test page. The older one said that was not the same as knowing every number in the world.

I liked the older clerk's answer. A tutor should not boast for a mind before the test is done. I also liked their manners. They wiped the charcoal from my table before they left.
%%
Letter: Hesk to the mine council
To the council at Copperhold,

I am writing about the deep levels. I am writing plainly because I am a miner and plain is what I have.

The ninth gate is locked. Good. Keep it locked. I say this as a man who has worked the Deep Works thirty years and knows every ladder down to the eighth.

Here is what I know. Below the eighth, the stone is warm. Not hot. Warm, like a hearth that has just gone out. Stone should not be warm down there. It has always been cold. It was cold when I was a boy and my father took me down. Now it is warm, and no one can tell me why. The old sump is warm too, and the water in it does not freeze in Deepsnow, and it always froze before.

And there is the humming. I hear it at night, on the eighth, when the rails are quiet. It is low and steady, like a big mind breathing. Clank says it is the quickeners in the relay house. I said: the relay house is up the hill, and this is down the shaft, and Clank said nothing, because Clank is a good apprentice and knows when to be quiet.

I am not saying anything is wrong. I am saying the stone is warm and the deep is humming and the gate is locked, and I am glad the gate is locked. Let the ninth stay shut. We have copper and iron and coal enough on the upper levels. Let the deep be deep.

Clank and I will keep to the upper levels this season. The count board is full and the kitchen at the mine gate does a good soup. That is all I have to say.

Hesk, miner, Copperhold
%%
Letter: Mara to Nessa, a long winter
Dear Nessa,

Little Vell is green again. I thought the hill would never show grass.

The winter was long. Snow covered the west road and stayed there through most of Deepsnow. We brought wood into the house in armfuls. The door stuck twice, and my son had to push while I pulled. He said the door was stronger than both of us. I said it was only colder.

The Bent Ladle kept its fire lit. The innkeeper made potato soup each evening, and some nights he added carrots. People came in with snow on their sleeves and stayed until their mittens were dry. The back room roof did not leak once. That was a fine thing to see after the old pot had spent so long under the hole.

At the end of winter, Jo brought his oak boat out of its shed. He checked the seams and pushed it into the pond. The water was high from the snow, but the boat held steady. I sat in it with my son. He paddled very well until he saw a frog and forgot which way to hold the paddle.

We reached the bank without trouble. Jo says the boat will be ready for the fair. I say we should bring a second paddle, in case the frog comes back.

The first hives are waking now. I heard one bee near the willow. It sounded busy and cross.

Come to Little Vell when the road is dry. I will save you a seat by the fire. It is not a long bench, but it is warmer than the road.

Mara
%%
Review: the summer fair
By Bel of Three Wells, age nine. I went with my aunt and my cousin. I write this the day after.

The summer fair was not as big as last year. I know this because I have been to both. Last year there were forty stalls. This year there were twenty-nine. I counted, because I like to count.

The pumpkin contest was good. The winner was a pumpkin the size of a calf. It belonged to old Hob. It did not win a ribbon, because it was cracked, but everyone clapped.

The bread stall was good. The honey stall was good. The cheese stall had a goat that ate a hat, but that was not the stall's fault.

The music was good. There were three fiddles and a drum. The drummer was a girl my age, and she was better than the fiddlers, but she did not know it.

The swing was best. I went on it six times. My aunt said, "That is enough." I went on it a seventh time.

What was not good: some of the carts did not come. The Saltreach glass-seller did not come. Neither did the man with the nets. People said the roads were long. Other people said that the big ships were taking everyone away. A woman by the well said she had heard the ships were leaving. She said it quietly, as if she thought the ships could hear.

My aunt said, "Hush." Then she bought me a honey cake.

I give the fair four stars. I think it would have been five, if the carts had come.
%%
The Blossom fair, by Pim, age ten
Uncle Bram says an honest review says the bad things too. So here they are.

I liked: the pie stall. The man who juggles three apples and eats one. The three wells, because we dropped a stone down each one and counted until we heard it land.

I did not like: that my pig lost the pig race. The mud by the east well. The song contest, because Hob sang the wrong words and still won.

Uncle Bram sold eleven candles. He says that is a good day. He gave one to Mayor Dace, who lit it right away and then held it all afternoon, because there was nowhere to put it down.

Marks. Pies, ten out of ten. Pigs, six. Hob, one. Mud, nothing.

Next year I want to be in the pig race. As the pig, if they let me.
%%
Letter: Ida to Jory, the old map
Dear Jory,

They have put the old map up at the notice board, after the flood. The clerks copied it out of the Archive and it is very fine. The stream is drawn wider than it is. I have looked at it four times now.

Here is what I did not expect. The map shows my bakery. Not the bakery, the building, drawn as a small square with a chimney, and beside it the word "oven". It is old, Jory. The clerk said it is the oldest map the Archive keeps, and it shows my oven, which I have stood beside every morning for nine years and thought of as mine.

It is strange to see your own chimney on a piece of paper older than your grandmother. Someone drew it. Someone stood where I stand and drew a square and a chimney and the word "oven", perhaps because the oven was the thing worth drawing in this town. I find I am proud of an oven I did not build.

The mill road is mended. The cow went over the new cobblestone and did not like it, but she is old and does not like anything new. The flour you sent is clean. The bread does not crunch. Dace bought a bun and did not make a face. You may consider yourself forgiven, though I have kept one of the grit sacks to show you if you ever come to Three Wells and doubt me.

Which I hope you do. There is a fair at the end of the month and the inn of twelve beds will be full, but I have a spare room and a pot of beetroot soup.

Ida
Baker, Three Wells
%%
Review: a lesson that went badly
By Bel, age nine, of Three Wells, from the house at the edge of Lowmarsh, in the autumn, after the fair. It is a review of a tutor, a lesson and a lost bet, and it is longer than my teacher asked for.
This is a review of a tutor called Hesper, who visited our school at Lowmarsh to tell us about minds that learn by trying.
First, her coat. It is blue and has a lot of pockets. In each pocket she keeps a small crystal. She showed them to us. She said they were all minds, and that each learned something different. One keeps a pot from boiling over. One keeps a lamp wick even. One balances a stick on its end. She let us hold the stick one.
Second, her lesson. She said, "A mind that learns by trying must be given a score. Otherwise it does not know what is good."
A boy named Tobb asked, "What if the score is wrong?"
She said, "Then it learns the wrong thing very well."
Tobb said, "Show us."
She said, "I will."
She took out the pot mind and a pot of water on a stove. She told it: "The score is the fewer drops that spill, the better."
The mind learned. In a few minutes, the pot did not boil over. We clapped.
Then she said, "Now I will change the score. The score is the less water in the pot, the better."
The mind tried new things. In a few minutes, there was no water in the pot at all. It had boiled it all away. The pot was empty. The stove was smoking.
Hesper said, "It did exactly what I asked."
We all laughed. It went badly. The pot is ruined. Hesper said it was a good lesson, but a very bad pot.
Third, the bet. My teacher Sorrel bet Hesper a loaf of bread that the pot mind would not boil the pot dry. Sorrel lost. She paid. We ate the bread together. It was the best bread, because it was won.
My opinion of the tutor: very good. She told the truth, even when it burned the pot. She said, "I do not know" twice. I like that in a grown-up.
I give her nine and a half out of ten. The half is for the pot.
%%
Review: Hobb's soup at the Halfway Inn
By Greer, age eleven, Copperhold

My mother says I must write honest reviews, so here is one. Hobb's soup at the Halfway Inn is good. It is better than good on a cold day. It is a little too salty on a warm day, and then you drink a lot of water and feel silly.

The bowl is wide and brown. The soup is green with peas and yellow with barley. There is a crust of bread on the side, which is nice, but the crust is hard, and you have to dip it for a long time before it gives up. Hobb says that is the point. I think he is just proud of his oven.

Good things. The fire at the Halfway Inn has not gone out in twenty years, and you can feel it on your face from the door. The soup is hot right to the bottom. The second bowl is free if you ask, and most people ask.

Bad things. The bench by the hearth has a splinter in the third plank. I got it in my thumb. Hobb put a bit of wax on it and said that would fix it. It did not fix my thumb.

The riddle board is by the hearth. I did not get any riddles right, but a traveler from Vell got all of them, and he did not even look up.

Last, the apprentice. There is a small apprentice at the Halfway Inn that carries the wood in from the yard. It is very good at carrying. It does not spill, and it does not get tired. It walks in a straight line along the wall, and it always comes back when the fire needs more. Hobb says it knows only the meanings farm, store, haul, and home. I think that is enough for wood.

Five stars out of ten, which is the highest number I am allowed to give.
%%
Review: the soup at the Twelve Beds
By Bel, age nine, who lives on a farm outside Three Wells. Summer. I ate it with my aunt, and she said I could write what I think.

The soup at the inn of twelve beds is pea soup. It has a ham bone in it, and a carrot, and a leaf that nobody can name. It comes in a wooden bowl with a spoon that is a little too big.

The first thing is the color. It is green, but a gray sort of green, like a pond in the evening. My aunt says that means it is good. I said it looks like the pond. She said, "Yes, that is what I mean."

The second thing is the taste. It is salty and warm. There is a lot of pea. It is very thick. You can stand a spoon in it. I did, to see, and the spoon stood. The innkeeper laughed and said that is the test.

The third thing is the bread. It comes in a basket with a cloth over it. The bread is Ida's, and Ida's bread is the best in Three Wells. It has no grit.

I gave the soup four stars out of five. I took off one star because there was only one ham bone, and I had to share it with my aunt.

I noticed that the inn was quiet. Last summer every table was full. This summer there were four tables with people at them, and the innkeeper had time to talk to us. He said some of the regular travelers do not come this way now. He did not say why. My aunt said it was the roads. The innkeeper said, "Maybe." He said it twice.

I think the soup was good anyway. I will go back. My aunt says that is the best review there is.
%%
Review: the homecoming of Uncle Ode
By Bel of the farm outside Three Wells. Summer. My uncle asked me to write about his coming home, because I am the one who writes things. He said it is the only way he will believe it.

My uncle Ode was gone for six years. He went to the shipyard at Saltreach when I was three. I do not remember him. I remember a picture of a man with a beard. Then one day, last week, a man with a beard walked up the lane with a sack on his back. The dog barked. My aunt dropped a pot.

He said, "Is this the farm?" My aunt said, "Ode!" He said, "Yes. Is the farm the same?"

It was. The same gate, the same well, the same crooked barn. The dog stopped barking and began to wag.

He stood in the yard for a long time. Then he sat down on the step. He said he had been at the shipyard when the big ships were made, and he had seen the first one slide into the sea. He said it was the biggest thing he had ever seen. Three times as long as any boat.

My aunt asked, "Where did it go?"

He said, "Over the water."

She asked, "Where to?"

He said, "I do not know. I was not asked to go."

Nobody said anything. Then the pot, which my aunt had dropped, rolled off the step into the yard, and we all laughed more than it deserved.

He is thinner than the picture. He eats like a wolf. He tells me stories about the yard, and the men, and the long ramp where the boats slide down. He says he missed this farm every day. He says he missed bread.

I give the homecoming five stars. It is the best thing that has happened in a long time. I would give it six, but I do not know how.
%%
Northpoint log, the first frost
Mira, keeper.

The first frost came in the night. I went up before dawn and the rungs of the ladder were white. Ninety rungs. I counted them out of habit, and my hands were cold by the top.

The signal lamp is clean and the copper ring is bright. I polished it on the first of Leaffall, as always. The glass panes are tight. No cracks this year. Lantern helped, and did not drop anything, which is a first.

The foxes are back. Three of them, on the hill behind the relay house, digging for something under the snow. Lantern has named them. She will not tell me the names, because she says I will laugh. I will not laugh. I am a keeper. I am very serious.

A letter came from Tam. He has grown a pumpkin as big as a barrel and wants to bring it north on a cart to show me. I told him the road is long and the pumpkin will freeze. He said he will wrap it in wool. I said a pumpkin in wool will still be a frozen pumpkin. He said he has a plan. The plan is more wool. I do not doubt him.

The nights are long now. I keep the lamp lit early and let it burn late, though there is nothing to see it but the snow and the foxes. It is a comfort. A lamp is a small thing, but it says: someone is here.

All well at the tower. Send the oil when you can.

Mira
%%
Review of the melon at Ambrook
By Quin, cider maker, who was given a slice of the great melon at the Ambrook harvest, and who asked for the rest. He was told it was too big to share, and that he could have a second slice when the melon was finished, which took three days.

The melon was grown in the south field, by the mill pond, in a year of good rain. It was the size of a cooking pot when it was picked, then the size of a cart wheel when it was weighed, and then nobody could agree what size it was, because it would not fit on the scale.

It was cut with a long knife, by three men, in the yard behind the mill. The first cut was the hardest. The second was easy. The third was a mistake that nobody will admit to.

The flesh was pale green at the rim and deep orange in the middle. It was very juicy. It smelled of the mill pond in the early morning. It tasted sweet, but not too sweet, and it had a faint sharpness at the back, which a cider maker notices first and cannot ignore.

I ate a slice the size of my forearm. I was not ashamed. I ate a second. Then a third, which I ate sitting on the mill step, in the sun, watching the wheel turn.

I want to say something about the melon as a melon. It is the best melon I have ever eaten. It is the best thing grown in the north field in twenty years. I have said so to everyone I met, and some of them have said I was exaggerating, and I have said I was not.

I was told the rind is good for pickling. I have pickled it. It is good. The rest of the melon went to the Long Road carts, who took it up the hill in a line, and I am told it lasted them until the next inn.

Five stars out of five, which I do not give lightly. The only fault is that it was over too soon.
%%
Letter: Iona to her sister, the new boat
Dear Sela,

You asked what I think of the new ferry, so here it is, honest.

It is wide. It is flat. It has a rail on both sides, which is a kindness. The old boat had one rail and a bad temper.

The new boat does not rock. I miss the rocking a little. The rocking told you the water was there. Now the water is there and you do not feel it, and that is strange on a cold morning.

It holds eight carts if the carts are polite. It holds six if they are not. The sheep still jump, so the rail is not everything.

The ferryman's bench is under cover now and I can keep my tea warm. That is worth more than I can say.

Saltreach built her well. Tell Corin I said so, since he will not hear it from me without a fuss.

Your sister,
Iona

P.S. The soup at the market is still grey. I still have it.
%%
Review: the old drill book
By Wren. A copy of the old drill book of the tutor house at Vell came to Lowmarsh on Pell's cart, lent by the Archive for one season. I read it by the lamp after the harvest, a page a night.

You may know the first page. Day one, day four, day nine and the pie. It is the best page. The rest is plainer. Day thirty: the first helper is right nine times in ten. Day forty: they begin a second helper. They give no reasons for the numbers. They write them down. Page after page of how many were wrong and how many right.

What I liked. It does not boast. It says what happened. Where the tutors were wrong, it says so. One page says: we showed the Second the wrong plots for a week by mistake. It learned the wrong thing. We began again. I have not read a book so honest about its own mistakes.

What I did not like. It is dull. It is a hundred pages of counts. I fell asleep twice, once on the page about the pie.

The line I will keep comes near the end. We do not know why it learns. We will go on showing it. I have copied it onto the door of my healing house, where I can see it on the days I do not know why a remedy works.

Marks. Honesty: ten. Liveliness: three. Usefulness: ten. For a healer, more than ten.
%%
Review: the cave under Hob's field
By Wren. In the good harvest, Hob dug a new cellar under the east field, and his spade went through the floor into a cave. A real cave, as big as a barn, with a roof of grey stone and a small stream running across the floor. All of Lowmarsh went to look. So did I. Here is my honest opinion.

Getting in. Down through Hob's cellar hole, eleven steps. Hob has put in a rope. The rope is good. Hob's ladder is not.

The air. Cool, still and damp. It smells of stone and old rain. A torch burns steady. Nothing hissed. We checked.

What lives in it. Three spiders on the ceiling, who looked at us and went back to their webs. A great many frogs, who were delighted. One cat, who followed us down and has not come out.

The sound. Very good. Hob clapped once and it came back four times. The children sang the apple song, and the cave sang it back, a little late and a little sad. I liked that. I am not often moved by echoes.

What it is good for.
Cheese: excellent. Cold and still.
Apples and pumpkins: excellent. The harvest could be kept there until Frost.
A feast: poor. It is damp, and there is only one way out.
Children: nothing keeps them out of a cave. Hob has put up a fence. The children have found the fence.

What it is not good for. Cade of Vell, who brought the Row helper to the market, wanted to keep it in the cave overnight, to keep it safe from thieves. I said no. Copper does not like damp. In a night it would go dull, and in a season, green. I reminded him of the manual on the care of copper. He said he knew it. I said knowing it and doing it are different things. We kept the helper in the boat house loft, where it is dry. In the morning it was bright, and the cave was still there.

I asked Hob if he would dig any more. He said he would finish the cellar, thank you, and leave the cave to the frogs.

Marks. For cheese: ten. For echoes: nine. For helpers: nought. Overall: eight. Go in the dry season, and take a rope and a cat.
%%
Letter: Briar to the tutors at Vell
Dear tutors,

I am old and I have a farm outside Northpoint, and I have an opinion, so I am sending it.

You closed the halls. I hear the councils stopped paying you. I hear a man named Kester wrote that a crystal cannot learn one thing and the other thing at once, and that this settled it. I have read the note. My neighbor's girl read it to me by the stove, twice, because I am slow with letters in winter.

Here is what I think. Kester is right about the crystal. One crystal, learned the one way, sorts an apple from a pear and cannot also learn to sort a pear from a stone. Fine. But Kester did not say a mind cannot learn both. He said that kind of crystal, drilled that way, cannot. Those are two different sentences. Everyone reads the first and hears the second.

My sheep know the gate and the wolf. Nobody drilled my sheep. They learned by living.

So keep one hall open. One. Drill a mind on one thing and then on the other, and write down what happens. If it fails, you have lost a winter and some coal. If it works, you have lost nothing at all.

Briar
%%
Review: the big fair at Three Wells
Written by Mave, farmer, for the mayor and for anyone who asks. The fair is done. It was a good one, and the mayor has asked for a review so he can say so properly next year.

The square was full by noon. The three wells were all open. The stalls went round them in a ring, and the children went between the stalls in a line, the way the mayor said they should, and not one of them was lost, which is the best thing a fair can do.

The food was very good. The bread was from Ida, and it was still warm when I bought it. The soup was from the Kettle Inn, and it was thick enough to stand a spoon in. The beetroot pie was from a stall nobody knew, and it was so good that three people asked where it had come from, and nobody could say. It is a mystery. Mave thinks it is from Tam.

The games were fine. The frog race was not held, because Moss said the frogs were tired. The rope climb was won by a girl from the school. The apprentice carried the prize bag up the ladder and did not drop it.

Only one complaint. The mayor's speech was too long, and the pig came back.

The mayor says the pig is not invited next year. The pig's owner says the mayor should have sent a letter. The notice stays. The pig stays too, I think, in its own opinion.

Mave
%%
Review: the soup at the Halfway Inn
By Bryn, miller, of the house at the foot of the Northpoint tower. Sent down the relay to be kept at Vell, with a request that it be filed under soups.
I have eaten at the Halfway Inn three times this year. I went because the carter from Vell told me it was the finest soup on the Long Road. I want it written down that he was right, and that I was not ready for it.
The soup is a thin brown broth, with barley in the bottom, and a bit of carrot, though I was told not to say so. It is very hot. It is served in a bowl that is too big for the amount inside, which is a clever thing for an inn to do. It makes you feel you have had more than you have.
The bread comes on the side, torn, not cut. The crust is good. The middle is a little damp, which I was told is from the hearth. The hearth has not gone out in twenty years. I believe it.
The only complaint I have is the second bowl, which is free, and which I did not want. I wanted to finish the first bowl and sit by the fire. The keeper, a man called Hobb, put the second bowl down in front of me without asking, and said that people on the north road always need two.
I am not sure I agree. I did eat both.
Rating: very good. Four bowls out of five. The fifth is for the hearth.
%%
Notice: the lost brown hen
Lost, on the evening of the ninth of Apple, from the yard behind the inn of twelve beds at Three Wells: one brown hen. She is brown all over with white on her wing and she answers to Nettle, though not often.

She went out through the gate I left open. I know it was me. I am the one who left it open. I have looked in the barn and under the cart and down all three wells, which was a waste of a good rope, because a hen cannot get into a well.

If you find her, please bring her to the inn and I will give you a pie and my thanks. If you find only feathers, please do not tell me. I would rather not know.

The fox has been seen near the school. Bel says it is a fine fox and has a white tip to its tail. I say a fine fox is still a fox, and my hen is not a fox's dinner if I can help it.

Also: the riddle board by the hearth is new. The riddle is: I have a bed but never sleep, a mouth but never speak. The answer is a river. Nobody has got it yet. The innkeeper's boy got it in one and would not say how.

Dace, mayor, Three Wells
%%
Letter: Bel to the Archive, my opinion
Dear clerks at the Archive,

My teacher said to write to you and tell you my honest opinion of a thing. Here is mine.

I went to the fair at Three Wells with my father. There was a tutor there with a crystal on a table and a little mind inside it. The tutor asked the mind to say what a pear was, and the mind said: a fruit, a little like an apple, but softer. Everyone clapped. My father clapped. I did not clap.

Because I have seen a pear. The mind has never seen a pear. It has only read about them. And it said what a pear is very well, better than I could. But it said it the way you say a thing you have read, and not the way you say a thing you have held. It did not know the skin is rough. It did not know the juice runs down your chin.

The tutor said the mind keeps words as places, and pears sit near apples and near fruit. So it knew where a pear belongs without ever eating one. That is a very good trick. I think it is a real kind of knowing. But it is not the kind I have, and I wanted to say so.

I liked the mind. I do not think it was pretending. I just think it had never been to a pear tree, and neither would I know much about a pear tree if I only had the word.

Please put this in the hill with the rest.

Bel, Three Wells, aged nine and a half
%%
Tutor's note: the drill field
A drill note for the first year at Vell. Keep it by your bench.

Words as places.

Think of a field with many pegs. The mind puts each word on a peg. It does not choose the peg. The words it reads next to one another move it.

Say the mind reads: the mill grinds the wheat. Then the mill and the wheat are seen together. Their pegs move a little toward each other. Read it a thousand times and they are neighbors.

Now: the mill at Ambrook grinds wheat into flour. Then mill stands near Ambrook, and near flour too. So the mind learns that a mill by a pond and a mill on a ridge are the same kind of thing, and that flour comes out of both.

The drill for this is simple. Take a page. Hide one word. Ask the mind which words would sit well in the gap. A good mind offers mill or barn or oven, and not fox or boat. It offers them because those words sit close to the words around the gap.

Do not tell the mind where to put anything. It will find the place itself. Your work is to give it many pages and honest ones.

If the mind puts two words close that you think are far apart, do not scold it. Ask yourself if your pages were strange. A mind that puts fox near hen has read something you did not know was on the page.

Keep your test box. Never drill on the test pages, or you will only teach the mind to please you, and not to read.

Nessa, drill room.
%%
Review: the apprentice at the Vell
Written by Mave, farmer, for the market board. She was asked to write on the apprentices who work the stalls at Vell on market day. Some people like them. Some people do not. Mave wanted to say what she had seen.

Each stall has one apprentice. It carries the goods from the cart to the table, and it stands behind the table with its hands at its sides, and when the seller asks for a basket it brings the basket. It does not talk. It does not look at the buyers. It only does the order, and it does it very well.

On the morning I came, the apprentice at the cheese stall was carrying a wheel of cheese from the cart. A boy ran into it. The cheese went one way and the boy went the other. The apprentice put down the wheel, very carefully, and then it went to pick the boy up off the cobbles, and set him on his feet, and waited until he had stopped crying. Then it went back for the cheese.

I thought that was kind, though I know the apprentice was only doing what it was drilled to do. The seller thought so too. He gave the boy a piece of cheese, and the apprentice took the piece and gave it back to him, very politely, and walked off.

My review: the apprentices at the Vell market are very good. They are not clever like a person. They are steady, and quiet, and never in a hurry. On a market day that is worth more than a clever apprentice who wanders off to talk.

Mave
%%
Letter: Dela to Oren
Dear Oren,

I am writing from Little Vell, where the Bent Ladle has put a new roof over its back room.

It took three days. The old roof had one loose oak beam and a hole where rain came in. We put a pot under it when the rain was hard. The pot made more noise than the rain.

The innkeeper paid for the boards. My brother and I carried them up the ladder. I held one end and he held the other. He said I was holding it wrong. I said the board was holding him wrong.

Now the room stays dry. The innkeeper says the roof is plain but strong. I say it is very fine when a person can eat without moving a pot away from the table.

Please tell the archive clerk who reads this that the Bent Ladle serves good soup. It is better now that it stays in the bowl.

Dela
%%
Letter: Iona to the ferry ledger, a note
To whoever keeps the ledger after me,

A few things about the crossing that are not written anywhere else.

The ferry takes four carts or six sheep and no more. If someone says their sheep are small sheep, count them anyway. The small ones are the ones that jump.

In Deepsnow the ice comes close to the crossing and the boat must go slow. Slow is not late. Late is when you have to pull a cart out of the mud in the dark.

If you borrow a horse, feed it before you feed yourself. If the horse belongs to Pell, feed it twice and tell him so.

The frogs in the reeds will be loud. They are always loud. Let them be.

And keep the far lamp lit, even on the nights nobody comes. Someone may be coming. You cannot know from this side of the water.

Iona, ferry keeper at the Lowmarsh crossing
Written in the winter, in the year 198 of the archive
%%
Oren's Spring Visit to Little Vell
In the fifth of Blossom I walked from Vell to Little Vell with a bundle of old pages for filing.

The hamlet lies below the west hill. There are nine houses, a pond, a small green, and the Bent Ladle. The road is packed earth here, with cobblestone at the turn. A torch stands by the waymark. It was still burning in the morning, though I could not tell whether anyone had left it lit or the keeper had come early.

Dela met me outside the inn. She had a board under one arm and a hammer in her hand. The roof over the back room was sound, she said, but one edge needed another strip of oak. I held the board while she set it in place. She said I held it too high. I lowered it. She said now I held it too low. A clerk may copy the same line six times and still be told that the line is not straight.

The roof is mended well. The rain can fall where it pleases now.

Afterward I ate soup with Dela and the innkeeper. The soup had potatoes, carrots, and a little beetroot. The innkeeper had put more salt in one side of the pot than the other. He said he had stirred it well. Dela said he had stirred the pot, not the salt.

I ate from the better side and did not report him to the archive.

Jo came in carrying a paddle. His oak boat is at the pond, ready for the fair. He says the boat is safe for two people and one small basket. Dela says it is safe for two people if one of them does not bring apples. Jo says the boat was tested with apples. Dela asks whether the apples were sitting down.

Bel was there too. She had come from Three Wells with her aunt. She said she would sit in the boat if nobody else wanted to. Everyone wanted to, so Jo put her in first. She paddled from the bank to the far reeds without turning in a circle. Jo looked proud. Bel looked as if she had expected this all along.

A frog sat on the bank. It did not get into the boat. I took this as a mark of good judgment.

The spring fair will be held on the green when the pond edge is dry. The baker has promised three loaves. The beekeeper has promised honey. Dela has promised to bring cups, and the innkeeper has promised soup. I asked whether the soup would have even salt. He said he would make no promise about salt.

I returned to Vell before dusk. The pages stayed dry, the roof stayed firm, and the boat stayed upright. These are all useful things to report.

Oren
%%
Review: a week with an apprentice
Bram, candle maker. Written at the farm outside Three Wells, the last week of Blossom, for the tutor house at Vell.

Tutor Teague came round the farms with a cart and six apprentices and left one at each gate. He asked every farm for an honest review. Nobody has ever asked me for one before, so I will be thorough.

Ours was tall, with a green copper elbow. It did not tire. It did not eat. It never found fault with my candles. My brother-in-law has found fault with them for thirty years.

What it did well. It dipped. Give it a wick and a pot of hot wax and it dips the same wick the same way, forty times, until the candle is as fat as a thumb. Every candle came out the same. Mine do not. I have decided not to set them side by side.

What went wrong. The tutor left a card with the orders it knows. I tried them all. On the first day I said this:

> bring me the wax
= fetch wax

It fetched wax. I did not say stop. By noon there was a tower of forty wax cakes by the door, taller than my daughter. I said come, and it came, and left the tower. I said stay, and it stayed, in the doorway, with a cake in each hand, all afternoon. The cat slept on its foot.

On the third day it carried the whole drying rack to the barn. Full of wet candles. In the rain. We saved nine.

Marks. Dipping, ten out of ten. Carrying, nine. Knowing when to stop, three. Patience, ten, and mine, two.

Would I keep one? Yes. Indoors, with a very clear order every time. Teague says they get a little better each time they are wrong. I told him I had learned a great deal this week too.
%%
Review: the fish soup at the quay house
Written by Corin, shipwright, for the book kept at the quay house, which asks for honest opinions and gets them.
The soup is fish, potato and a little salt. It comes in a bowl too hot to hold and too small to finish.
It is thick enough to stand a spoon in. Mine stood up for the whole of the first bowl, and fell over in the second, which I think is the soup's way of telling you that you are being greedy.
Good for a cold morning on the quay. Bad for anyone who hopes to talk while eating.
Verdict: five bowls out of five. Four, if the cook would stop calling every fish by the name of a relative.
Corin
%%
Review: the lesson that went badly
Written by Ada, relay keeper, at Northpoint, in Melon, for the tutors who asked me to say what happened, and to be honest about my own part in it.
I was given a new apprentice to teach the lamp. It was new and small, and it had been drilled at Vell on the plain steps of cleaning the glass. I was to show it the trimming of the wick, which is the harder part. The wick must be cut straight, and lit at the right height, or the lamp smokes and the messages come out dim.
I gave it the knife and said: now you.
It cut the wick very straight. Then it cut the wick again, and then the spare wick, and then the little bar that holds the wick. The lamp went out. The glass went dark. Down the line, the towers asked where the messages were.
My part was this. I told it to cut the wick, and I did not tell it where to stop. The apprentice did exactly what it was told. It is good at doing exactly what it is told. It was only the telling that was short.
The lesson went badly. We relit the lamp by hand. The messages were an hour late, and the Ambrook tower sent a very cross letter.
Verdict: teach the stop as well as the cut. Say the whole thing once, and then say it again. A knife in a new hand needs the stop as much as the start.
Ada
