Score card: Keel, the storm week
Kept by Cato. The storm came up off the sea in the middle of Thaw and blew for two days. Keel was in the shed with its sums, and the door was held shut by a sack of salt.

The test was run on the first morning, before the wind rose.

Score: 8 of 10. The two wrong ones were at the wide layers, where the numbers spread the most.

On the second day a cart came off the road by the sea wall and stuck in the mud. Keel was brought out to help. It lifted the back of the cart and set it down on firm ground, in the same place every time. Nobody was hurt.

Notes: The mind's numbers held in the wind, the way they hold in a quiet room. That is what the rule is for. A storm makes a mind's numbers wild only if the layers stop bringing them back.
%%
Score card: the mill wheel, spokes
Tested at the hamlet mill in the third week of autumn. The wheel broke in the spring flood. Oswin the miller ordered ash spokes from Ambrook, twenty of them, tied in a bundle with string.
Two minds, one unseen box of twenty cards. Each card showed a spoke, long or short, and the pile it belonged on.
Mote. Shown: twenty cards. Answered: 19 right. Wrong: one. A short spoke was taken for a long one, because its card was drawn a little big. Score: 19 of 20. Passed.
Wick. Shown: twenty cards. Answered: 14 right. Wrong: six. Wick carried the long spokes to the stone pile, not the wheel pile, and did not know which was which until it was shown twice. Score: 14 of 20. Not passed. Back to the drill.
The pass mark is 17.
Notes, by Corin: Oswin says the wheel squeaks because it wants oil. He has not oiled it. He says the oil will not be needed once the water comes back up. Nobody in the hamlet believes him, and everybody agrees he is probably right. The wheel should turn by Thaw, if the ash dries straight. Mote will fit the spokes. Wick will hold the ladder, which is a job it does well when someone tells it when to stop.
%%
Letter: Corin to his sister
Spring of 41. From Corin at Saltreach to his sister at Ambrook, who kept bees.
Dear Else. You asked what the four were like. They were like nothing, and then they were like a good hand in the yard.
The plank mind was quick and careless. It would sort a stack in the time it takes me to roll a rope. Once it put a short plank in with the long ones, and my father took it out and put it back in the short pile, and the mind moved it back. So my father moved it again, and the mind moved it again, and they did that eleven times. The tutor said we should not correct a mind by hand, only by showing it again and again, a little at a time, and my father said he would correct it by hand as long as it was his yard. The mind gave in at the twelfth time. I do not know which of them won.
The rope mind was slow and would not guess. It knew ten, because we showed it ten. It did not know nine. When it met nine it set them aside and waited for someone to tell it. That is a rare thing in a helper and a rarer thing in a person.
The carry mind was the steadiest. It carried a load from the slip to the wood store all day and never set it down crooked. When we moved a stone out of its line it stood at the gap a long while, then went round by the water. It did not fall in.
The keel mind laid a keel straight in a wind. My father has laid keels forty years and he said it was straight. He said it in a low voice, as if the mind might hear and get proud.
They did one thing each, and only the one. The tutor says that is how it will be for a long time. She says a crystal learns from what it is shown, and nobody knows why, and we should not pretend to. She says most towns will have none of these, and Saltreach is lucky, and we should write down what we see, so that people after us know what we knew.
So I am writing it down, Else. The bees are well, I hope. Send honey when the cart comes. The yard smells of tar and the wind is off the sea.
Your brother, Corin.
%%
Notes from the tutor of the first four
These are my notes from the spring of 41, when I drilled the four at Saltreach. I set them down for the tutors who come after, so they do not start where I started.
A crystal learns from what it is shown. That is all I know. Why it learns, nobody has written. Do not let anyone tell you they know, and do not say it yourself.
Drill one thing at a time. The four each learned one thing: to sort planks, to count coils, to carry a load, to lay a keel. Each of them did its one thing well and the others not at all. The plank mind cannot carry. The carry mind cannot lay a keel. If you want a mind to do two things, I do not know what happens. I think it may do neither well. I have not tried it, and I will not guess.
Show it the same kind of thing again and again. At first it is wrong. Each time it is wrong, change it a little toward the right answer. The change is small. You cannot hurry it. The plank mind took four days to learn the order of the lengths, and on the fifth day it was right, and I do not know what changed on the fifth day.
Test it on what it was never drilled on. Keep a box of pages you never drill on, and test from that box only. A mind that is tested on its drills has learned nothing you can see. The second mind was tested once on a nine it had already met, and it did well, and I was proud, and then I tested it on a nine it had not met and it set it aside and would not guess. That was the truest thing it did all spring. I have trusted it since.
A mind cannot say it does not know. It gives an answer, right or wrong. So watch what it does when it does not know. The second mind set the nine aside. That is as near as a small mind comes to saying it does not know. The big minds, if we ever make them, may say it in words.
Write down what you see. Not what you hope. The scores on the board were 16, 15, 18 and 20, and I wrote them as they were, and I am glad I did, because the 15 taught me more than the 20.
The children call them apprentices. Let them. It is a good name. They are helpers that learn, and they will be with us a long while.
Copied at Vell for the archive, by a clerk who signs herself Oren's teacher.
%%
Notes from the test table
Blossom, 224. Ambrook.

We tested two big minds on the same unseen pages. The pages came from old orchard lists, school notes, and a letter about a broken water wheel. We removed copies and spoiled pages first. No mind had been drilled on the pages in the test box.

The first mind read the pages letter by letter. Its window held a little more than sixty letters. It got 31 of 50 questions right. It missed words at the ends of lines and mixed two names.

The second mind read words cut into common pieces. Its window held far more of the page. It got 44 of 50 questions right. It read the long letter well, but mistook "mill" for "mild" once. It also gave the wrong count of apple sacks.

We asked both minds to read a short note about a fox near the hens. The first mind said the fox was by the gate. The note said it was by the fence. The second mind found the fence, but guessed that a hen was missing. The note did not say that.

A higher score does not make every answer true. We checked every answer against the page. The minds had not seen the page before. That is the point of the test.

After the test, we let the apprentices carry the test books back to the dry room. They carried them carefully. One apprentice stopped at the wrong door. Nessa led it to the right one.

Sage, dyer and keeper of scores
%%
Score cards: the honey drill, Longday
Score cards for the honey drill, the last test of the summer for the candle hands. The prize is a jar of honey from the hive by the well, given to the mind with the best score. Briar says the mind does not know what honey is for, so the honey is given anyway.

Card 11. Box 9, unseen. Honey and wax, mixed for a salve, by weight. Mind: Fenn, candle hand. Right: 18 of 20. Notes: Too much wax, and the salve was stiff. Fenn said the trouble was too little honey. Briar said Fenn was not wrong, and they both had a spoonful to prove it.
Card 12. Box 9, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Ren, candle hand. Right: 20 of 20. Notes: Mixed it perfectly, by the look of the honey. Asked how it knew, Ren said, The honey tells you when it is ready. Briar wrote that down.
Card 13. Box 9, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Sim, candle hand. Right: 12 of 20. Notes: Mixed the honey in too fast, got foam on the top, and skimmed the wax by mistake. Briar says this is the commonest mistake in the trade. She has made it herself.
Card 14. Box 9, unseen. Same drill, retested the next day. Mind: Sim, candle hand. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Slow, careful, and in its own order. The jar of honey went to Sim as the best improver, which Briar says is the better prize.
%%
Score card: three minds, one unseen page
Copied by Olwen, trader, at the Kettle Ridge market, from the cards on the post by the scales. Summer. Three tutors' halls each sent a reading mind, drilled on the great drills from the Archive. All were tested on the same unseen page.

The page: a letter about a lost cow, from the test box, which no mind was ever drilled on.

Vell's mind. Right on 71 of 100 letters.
Copperhold's mind. Right on 64 of 100.
Saltreach's mind. Right on 58 of 100.

Notes. Vell's mind had the most pages. Saltreach's mind had the fewest and was drilled for the shortest time. A mind drilled on more pages for longer does better. The tutors say this is so, and the cards show it.

The cow was found. It was in the barn.
%%
Score cards: the new road, Apple
Score cards for the new road out of the reeds, which opened in Reaping. The road is laid on stone piers, and the minds were tested on placing the piers in a box drawn to scale. Written by Opal, who has dug wells for twenty years and says a pier is only a well that has been lifted up.

Card 17. Box 11, unseen. Pier placing, to scale, in mud. Mind: Joss, builder. Right: 16 of 20. Notes: Set the piers square to the road, not square to the earth. Corrected on the second try. Joss says it is the same thing. Opal says it is not.
Card 18. Box 11, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Lark, builder. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Set each pier by the plumb line, and then by the eye, in that order. Opal says that is the correct order, and that the eye is only for admiring.
Card 19. Box 12, unseen. Waymark placing, figures 0 to 9. Mind: Nell, carrier. Right: 13 of 20. Notes: Mixed the figures for 6 and 9. The box was turned upside down for the retest, which is a trick. Nell did not fall for it. Right: 18 of 20.
Card 20. Box 12, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Fen, carrier. Right: 20 of 20. Notes: Did not need a retest. Opal has asked the tutor to take it up the road to see.
Card 21. Box 4, unseen. Carts across a bridge, one at a time. Mind: Ned's helper, carrier. Right: 17 of 20. Notes: Waited at the far end, as the rule says. Did not wait long enough, and one cart nearly came after it.
%%
The last test before frost
Vesper's own book, kept for the glass shed and the bead stall. Written at the end of Apple, when the market packed up and the frost came down the hill.
Brisk, again: twenty cards, nineteen right. Score: 19 of 20. The one wrong card was a bead on a bead, which Brisk put in the clear bowl, because the picture was too small for anyone to be sure.
Kell, again: forty cards, thirty-nine right. Score: 39 of 40. Passed. It sets down glass like a person carrying an egg, and the bench has no cracks this morning.
Sorrel, again: twenty cards, eighteen right. Score: 18 of 20. Passed. The barrels went on the right stool, and the stool did not complain.
Tuck, again: twenty beads, nineteen right. Score: 19 of 20. Tuck is now on the winter box, which means it will sort every bead the market sells until the thaw, and it does not seem to mind.
The new road was opened on the last day of the market. The first cart down the stone edge was driven by Jun, who was carrying the lamp glass for the relay tower in straw, and who would not let anyone else touch it. He drove it slowly. He said the road was good, and that the torches were straight, and that the middle was still soft in one place, and somebody should see to that.
The keeper of the relay tower came down to meet the cart. Orrin, his name is. He took the glass in his arms, the way you would take a sleeping child, and carried it up the ladder himself. The lamp room has glass in every pane now, and the lamp is clean. He called down that it looked very fine from the top, and the whole market cheered, which the lamp could not have heard.
The stalls are packed. The bead bowls are in their box, and the box is on the shelf. The glass shed is banked for the frost, and the furnace is low, and Brisk is standing by it, as it was told, until the glass is cool.
Vesper, glassblower, Copperhold
%%
Score card: the second round, autumn
Written by Corin, who has been asked by the reeve to keep the whole hamlet's count, and has given up asking for help.
Ferret, again, in the byre: ten cards. Right: 10 of 10. Passed. The hay went on the right side of the beam this time.
Mote, again, at the mill: twenty spokes. Right: 20 of 20. Passed. Oswin says Mote would make a fine wheelwright. Then he laughed, because he knows it will never say so itself.
Wick, again, at the mill: twenty spokes. Right: 18 of 20. Passed. Wick is improving. It still stops a little late when the stone pile is near, so Oswin has painted a red line on the ground to show it where to stop.
Tallow, again, at the quay: twenty boxes. Right: 19 of 20. Passed. The one wrong box was half full and looked full. That is the fault of the box, Corin says, and not the mind.
Gall, again, at the quay: twenty boxes. Right: 20 of 20. Passed. It put the cracked boxes at the bottom every time, and the wind, which has been unkind to the hamlet this autumn, did not get a single one.
Ferret also fed the hens for a week, on the right day, with the right mash. The hens are fat and cross and laying. It was Ferret's first test on hens, and it passed, which surprised the hens.
The reeve asked whether the minds may stand in the square for the autumn feast. Corin says yes, if they stand where they are put. The reeve says that is what he had hoped. He is a man of few hopes, and this one is small.
Notes, by Corin: Brindle is up on her feet, and has eaten a whole pail of mash for breakfast. She has forgiven everyone. The wheel has not yet turned, but the spokes are in, and the squeak has changed to a different squeak, which Oswin says is the sound of a wheel making up its mind.
%%
Score card: the honey test, long quiet
Taken in the inn yard, on a bench, in the cold.

Drill one: find the waymark. Right on 9 of 10. The mind found every stone on the road to Vell, and two that were not on the road at all, which the tutor says are old and no longer counted.

Drill two: carry the jars to the cart. Right on 10 of 10. Four jars of honey, carried one at a time, without a drop spilled. The tutor took the honey as his fee. He said he would have taken six if the honey had been ours.

Notes. In the long quiet a traveling tutor is a poor man. The councils stopped paying in the year the halls closed. He says the roads are the only halls left, and the inns are the only tutors who will feed him.
%%
Score card: the hearth mind at Halfway
Tested in the back room of the Halfway Inn, in winter, by a traveling tutor who was paid in honey. Scored by Pell, merchant, who was waiting for his supper.

Drill one: keep the hearth even. Right on 14 of 20. Wrong whenever the wind came down the chimney.

Drill two: bring the coals to the fire. Right on 19 of 20. The one wrong was a coal that had gone out, and nobody knew it until the soup was cold.

Total: 33 of 40. Pass.
%%
Score card: the new road cart
Tested at the foot of the new road, where it meets the Long Road, in the third week of Apple.
Mind: Sorrel, a carrier from the stores. The box is unseen: ten loads on cards, each card a different weight.
Shown: a crate, a bale, a barrel, and a crate of lamp glass for the relay tower.
Answered: Sorrel took the heavy loads down the stone edge, and the light ones down the middle.
Right: 9 of 10.
Wrong: the barrel of glass. It went down the middle, where the packed earth is soft after rain. Sorrel was shown the card again, and took the barrel down the stone edge, and did not drop a thing.
Score: 9 of 10. Passed. The pass mark is 8.
Notes, by Vesper: The road is new and the stones are fresh. The carters say the middle is soft, and the middle is where the carts want to go. Sorrel took the stone edge every time after that. A mind learns that from a card. A carter learns it from a broken axle, which costs more.
%%
Score card: one crystal, one drill
From the tutor hall of Odo, in the hamlet above Three Wells. Spring. Copied by Zell the midwife, Odo's sister, whose hand is better.

The drill: two lamps. The right answer is on when exactly one lamp is lit. Both lit, or both dark: off.
Four cases: dark and dark, lit and dark, dark and lit, lit and lit.
One crystal, after 2000 drills: 3 right of 4.
After 20000 drills: 3 right of 4.
After 200000 drills: 3 right of 4.
Odo's note: It is never 4. Kester said so in the famous note. I wanted to see it for myself. I have seen it. I would like my spring back.
%%
Test note: Sage's new mind
Apple of 218, Ambrook.

I dyed a wool strip blue, then red, then blue again. The mind had not seen those strips in its drills.

It put the blue strips in one basket and the red strip in another. It got all three right.

Nessa said the test must be new to the mind. I made the strips after the drill box was shut. I did not tell the mind what the colors meant.

Moss brought a basket of apples and pears. The mind sorted them too. It put one pear with the apples. Moss found it before supper.

A fox came to the hen house while we counted the score. It took one hen. We kept the torches lit, but the fox was quick.

Sage, dyer
%%
Score card: the cart on the slope
Tested on the market road in winter, on an unseen drill. Scored by the mayor's clerk, who was asked to write it down and said he would prefer to be asked later.

A borrowed horse pulled the cart for the test, lent by the inn stable. The horse was not under test. It was the only horse the inn would lend.

Drill one: the flat road. Right on 20 of 20. The mind walked the cart to the bakery and back without a word from anyone.
Drill two: the slope by the school. Right on 9 of 20. Stuck on 11. The cart stopped at the top of the slope and did not move, for most of an hour, while the horse looked back at it.
Drill three: the slope again, with the brake on. Right on 14 of 20. The mind had learned the brake, but not yet the wheel.

Note. The mind was not wrong about the slope. It was slow at it. It would not move until the horse was set, and the horse would not move until the mind was set. Both waited, and the cart stayed where it was.

The clerk writes that the cart got home by the second bell, and that the horse was given a bucket of oats and an apology. The mind has been given more drills on the slope. The next score will be posted on the board.
%%
Fair prize: best mind of the marsh
Written by Sorrel, Lowmarsh, Harvest Fair, the Apple season of 206. Read out at the fair in front of the reed boats.

Every year the fair gives a prize for the best mind of the marsh. This year there were four entries. The judges were Wren, the mill keeper, Hob's sister (who is very strict), and me.

The entries were tested the way they always are: a test box that nobody saw before, sealed in the morning and opened at the fair. Each mind answered every example. We counted the right answers. Then we counted the wrong answers twice, because Hob's sister said so.

The prize went to Reedbird, of the Tall Boats yard. Score 98 in 100. The prize is a bundle of reed for a roof and one emerald, and Reedbird's tutor cried a little when it was handed over, and then said it had only got something in its eye.

Second was Moss, with 96. Moss did not know it had come second, and Wren did not tell it. Wren says it does not need the praise. It needs the good rope for the eel traps, and that is what it got.

Third was a mind with no name. It scored 90. It had been tested in its own boat, which is not allowed, but nobody could find the rule that said so. On the way back across the pond it carried the judge's basket twice without being asked. Hob's sister wrote that down herself.
%%
Score cards: the first box, Apple
Score cards kept at the Saltreach store by Opal, well digger, who is the only one who counts without talking. The tests are unseen.

Card 1. Box 3, unseen. Fish by size, five kinds. Mind: Rill, sorter. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Mixed up two salmon and a cod. The cod was not impressed.
Card 2. Box 3, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Mott, sorter. Right: 14 of 20. Notes: Sorts by smell first and size second. Opal says this is a fishing habit, and it will be drilled out.
Card 3. Box 5, unseen. Rope by length. Mind: Sable, carrier. Right: 20 of 20. Notes: Did not drop one coil. Opal checked twice, and then a third time, to be sure she was not being fooled.
Card 4. Box 5, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Quin, carrier. Right: 16 of 20. Notes: Good with the long ropes. Short ropes make it sulk, which is what a short rope deserves.
%%
Score card: all the winter's tests
Kept by Pell, merchant, from the scores of every test held on the Long Road in the winter of the long quiet. Each score is copied as it was given. The notes are his own.

At Lowmarsh, a mind for the reeds was tested on counting bundles. Right on 19 of 20. The one wrong was a bundle that the reeds' clerk had counted twice. The mind remembered both counts and did not know which was true. The clerk said the mind was right to remember both.

At Three Wells, a mind for the bells was tested on the hours. Right on 16 of 20. Wrong on the times the bell was rung by hand and not by the rope, because the mind did not know a hand is slower than a rope. The mayor's man said the bell was late by a breath, and a breath is not a fault.

At Copperhold, a furnace mind was tested on the melt. Right on 17 of 20. The wrong ones were the melts that ran grey, and nobody knew why they ran grey. Ivo says the mind is the best furnace hand in the valley, and that nobody knows why. Ivo says that is the job of a furnace.

At Northpoint, a lamp mind was tested on the glass. Right on 20 of 20. It was tested by letter, sent up the line in a box, and the box came back with the marks filled in, and a note from the keeper. Pell has copied the note. It says: Lit. Clean.

At the Halfway Inn, the hearth mind was tested on the coals and the wind, as recorded above.

At Vell, the copying room was tested on its own ink. It is a drill no mind has passed yet, because the ink is never the same from one day to the next. The clerks say that is the nature of ink, and they have stopped asking the ink to be fair.

At Kettle Ridge, a windmill mind was tested on the sails. Right on 18 of 20. It counted every turn of the wind for a week and got the count right, except on the days the miller's boy was on the ladder. The mind did not count the boy at all, because the boy would not keep still.

Notes. Three innkeepers have asked Pell whether the tests are worth the trouble, now that there are fewer tutors and no hall to hold them in. He says yes. A test is the only way a mind can be trusted, and the long quiet has made trust more precious, not less. A score on the back of a bill is still a score.

The tutors say that a mind is only as good as its tests, and a test is only as good as the one who wrote it. They say this to each other over the bread, and again at night, when the snow is deepest and the lamps burn in every window along the road.
%%
Score card: two layers, the same drill
Same hall, same drill, a week later. Two crystals in the first layer, one in the second, and the blame passed back as Merle of Copperhold teaches. Copied by Zell.

After 2000 drills: 3 right of 4.
After 6000 drills: 4 right of 4. Odo shouted. The cat left the room.
Tested again the next morning: 4 right of 4.

Then Odo asked each crystal of the first layer the four cases on its own. One said yes whenever at least one lamp was lit. The other said yes only when both were lit. The crystal in the second layer had learned this: say yes if the first says yes and the second says no.

Nobody told the crystals to do this. They were wrong, and each was told its share of the blame, and each changed.

Zell's note: I do not understand layers. My brother explained them to me while I waited for a birth. The birth was easier.
%%
Ambrook test board
Leaffall, 219. For the tutor house.

The big mind from the relay house sent three small minds to be tested. Each had a crystal in its own apprentice. We used a drill that none had seen before.

The first mind sorted apples and pears. It got 18 of 20 right. It put a small pear with the apples, then put a bruised apple with the pears.

The second mind followed a field pattern on the board. It got 7 of 10 rows right. It missed the ditch in the last rows and left one space empty.

The third mind carried jars from the mill to the store. It took the jars to the wrong door twice. On the third try it found the store. It got 8 of 10 trips right.

We did not count a right answer unless the work was finished. We wrote the misses beside the score. A clean score is no use if the drill was easy.

After the test, I dyed a red wool scarf for the tutor. He paid me one emerald. The scarf was too short, so I kept it for my niece.

Sage
%%
Score card: spring drills, Saltreach
Kept by Cato, through the spring: Thaw, Sowing and the first of Blossom. Keel was drilled each morning on the rule, and tested each week on the unseen sums. The layers were shown how the blame for a wrong answer goes back through them.

How the drill works. A sum is given, and Keel gives its answer. If the answer is wrong, the error is measured, and each layer is told its share of the blame, passed back from the answer through the layers to the first. Each layer changes a little. Then the next sum is given. It is slow. The tutor says it is meant to be slow, because a fast change is usually the wrong change.

Thaw, week one. Score: 6 of 10. The middle layers were growing their numbers in one direction. The fix was in the drill, not the rule. More sums with a spread that changed from one to the next.

Thaw, week three. Score: 8 of 10. The numbers stayed even at the top layer, where they had run wild before. The two wrong sums were both at the widest spread the drill had shown the mind.

Sowing, week two. Score: 9 of 10. The one wrong sum had a single very large number in it, which the clerk had put there on purpose. Keel gave a small answer, far off, which is the careful wrong answer. Cato says it is the one he would give too.

Sowing, week four. Score: 10 of 10 for the first time. The tutor came up from Vell to see it, and walked round the bench twice, and said it was not a fluke, because a fluke does not happen twice. Keel did not look up. It was busy with the next sum.

Blossom, the first. Score: 9 of 10. The sums were the same as the week before. The tutor asked why the mind had missed one it had got right before. Cato said nobody could tell, and that Keel had a bad morning, if a mind can have a morning. The tutor said it could not, and then said that was what she had been trying to find out all spring.

Notes for the tutors at Vell. The rule holds, and the mind learns it, slowly, layer by layer. It does not learn it all at once, and it does not learn it from a speech. Keep the drills varied. Keep the boards sealed. Test on the sums nobody has seen. Write down the morning when the mind does badly, because one morning is always worth knowing about.
%%
Test card
Kept by Zell, miner. A new apprentice was sent up from Vell in the autumn, on the last cart before the snow. It came in a crate with straw, and a card with its name on: Lark. It was tested on the first morning, before anyone was allowed to give it an order.

Mind: Gate-1. Work: opening and closing the gate, and calling the shaft bell.
Drill: the gate drill, twelve examples a day, for four days. The tutor showed it the open gate and the shut gate, and the bell, and the order for each.
Test box: given by the tutor, who said she had never seen it used before. The box had examples that were not in the drill. One was a gate with snow on the latch. One was a gate that was half open. One was a bell that rang in the wrong order, once, very softly.
Examples: 50.
Right: 46.
Wrong: 4. Two were gates with snow on the latch, which it opened when it should have waited. Two were the bell, rung twice when once was asked.
Notes by the tutor: a good start for a gate mind. The snow is a fault I have seen before, and it is always a fault of the drill, not of the mind. The drill had no snow.
Notes by Zell: Lark stood at the gate all afternoon. It did not open it. Then it did, when the cart came. I have not told the tutor, because I do not know whether it was right to wait.
%%
Score card: the late boat and the test
Copied by Olwen, trader, at the Kettle Ridge market, in summer. She was selling cloth, and a tutor had pinned up a card on the post. She copied it onto the back of her tally sheet so the Archive could have it.

A reading mind, drilled for a month on records the clerks at Vell had gathered. Tested on pages the clerks kept apart.

The box. The clerks keep a test box of pages no mind is ever drilled on. When a mind is tested on those pages, it cannot have learned them by heart.

Test one. A page of farm notes. Right on 68 of 100 letters.

Test two. A page of a ship's log. A fishing boat was late home that week, so the page was about a boat. Right on 52 of 100. The mind had not seen many boats.

Test three. A page of a letter from a child. Right on 72 of 100.

Total: 64 of 100.

A note. The tutor said that the mind does well on what it has read much of, and badly on what it has read little of. A mind is only as good as its pages. It is why the Archive is so useful, and why the clerks work so hard.

Another note. Whose letters were in the drill, nobody at the market could say. A clerk who passed said it was everything that came to Vell. A baker said it was only the letters sent to the clerks. A tutor said the clerks gathered more than any one hall had ever seen. They did not agree. Olwen thought this was fair.
%%
Score card: the relay houses, contest
A contest between the relay houses of the north, set by the council at Vell in the first week of Longnight. Each house sent its big mind, tested on the same unseen drill, through the relay line. The score was made by the tutors and read out in the Vell hall. Recorded here by Cass, who was asked to write it down because she has the best hand at the Kettle Ridge market.

The houses were: Vell, Three Wells, Kettle Ridge, Ambrook, and Northpoint. Northpoint's was the last to come on the line, and the first to be tested in the dark.

The drill was the same for each house. It was a set of forty questions, drawn from the test box, and none of the minds had seen them before. The questions were about the relays, the towers, the roads, the apprentices and the markets. Some of them were very hard. One was about the number of stairs in a tower that had burned down.

Scores, out of forty:
Vell: 36.
Three Wells: 34.
Kettle Ridge: 33.
Ambrook: 32.
Northpoint: 35.

Notes. The tutors said Vell did best on the hard questions, and Northpoint on the simple ones. Three Wells was fast and sometimes wrong. Kettle Ridge gave long answers. Ambrook gave short answers and left out the reasons. Each of them was very honest about the questions it could not answer. Vell's mind said "I do not know" four times. Northpoint's said it twice, and then added that it would find out by the next winter.

The tutors also said that the houses had the same quickeners and similar crystals, but that the minds themselves were not the same. They did not know why. They wrote that down.

Cass asked the keeper at the Kettle Ridge tower what he thought of the contest. He said he thought the big minds were very clever, and that he would rather have a good keeper than a clever mind. Then he said the good keeper was the one who knew when to ask. Cass wrote that down too, next to the score.
%%
Test card
Kept by Zell, miner, at Hollow. The kitchen mind is kept in the cookhouse at the mine gate, where the miners eat. It counts the bowls and the bread, and it tells the cook when the pot is empty.

Mind: Count-4. Work: bowls, bread and the cook's tally.
Drill: the bowl drill, sixty examples, every night for a month.
Test box: sealed. A new one, with examples of bowls the mind has never counted, and bread of different sizes, and two jugs with handles that look wrong.
Examples: 200.
Right: 188.
Wrong: 12. Eleven were bowls counted as two. One was a loaf that the mind counted as a child's cap.
Notes by the tutor: the child's cap is not in any drill. It was a mistake the tutor made, and she has written it on the box.
Notes by Zell: the cook says the mind counts better than he does. He says that is not hard.
Ruling: passed. Set to the kitchen from the next Thaw.
%%
Saltreach test board, spring of 41
The board from the old shed, copied by Corin before the shed came down. Spring of 41.
Plank mind. Test: spruce planks, never drilled. Right: 16 of 20. Note: good on length, slow on width.
Rope mind. Test: nine coils, eleven coils, one coil. Right: 15 of 20. Note: stopped at nine. Would not guess. The tutor says this is honest.
Carry mind. Test: the line with a stone moved. Right: 18 of 20. Note: went round the gap. Took a long time.
Keel mind. Test: new keel, wind from the sea. Right: 20 of 20. Note: held the line.
The tutor's note at the foot of the board, in her hand: a mind tested on what it was drilled on has learned nothing we can see. Test on the unseen, or do not test.
We hung the board by the door of the shed. The children read it and asked what a mind was. We said we did not know, and that it learns from what it is shown, and that nobody wrote down why.
Corin.
%%
Score card: the long quiet, winter
Gathered from the scores of the winter, at the inns of the Long Road, where the minds were tested because the halls could no longer test them. Kept by Pell, who asked the innkeepers for their copies and was given them with their bills.

At Ambrook, a mind for the mill was tested on the sluice. Right on 17 of 20. The three wrong were the times it tried to open the sluice in the frost. The miller said it was right to try, and wrong to do it alone.

At Kettle Ridge, a mind for the fields was tested on the three things a farmer must know. Right on 18 of 20. The wrong ones were all on ripe wheat, which the mind had never seen.

At Saltreach, a mind for the nets was tested on the mesh. Right on 15 of 20. The mind knew every knot by its feel, and got lost when the net was turned over. The tutor said this was the most honest score he had seen.

Notes. The long quiet is not a time of no minds. It is a time when the minds are fewer, and the scores are kept by hand at the inns. The tutors are poor, and patient, and they do not complain in front of the innkeepers.
%%
Score card: the market drills, all minds
Gathered from the tests held at Three Wells in winter. Each mind is scored on drills it has not seen. Each score is copied out by hand and read back aloud to the school, which asked for it.

Pip, of the Kettle Ridge farm, on the carrying drill. Right on 18 of 20. Two wrong on the hill, where the baskets slide. Pip is good on the flat.

Clank, of the Copperhold cart shed, on the order drill. Right on 15 of 20. Five wrong, all on orders with two words. It understands one word at a time. Its tutor says this is the right speed for it.

Moss, of Lowmarsh, on the sorting drill. Right on 19 of 20. The one wrong was a jar of blue paste that Moss put in with the greens, and then took out again, with a look of great satisfaction.

Lantern, of Northpoint, on the lamp drill. Right on 20 of 20. Lantern did not come to the market, and the drill was sent up the line in a box, and the box came back with the marks filled in, and a note from Mira saying the lamp was lit.

Ash, of the Copperhold forge, on the heat drill. Right on 17 of 20. Wrong on the three hottest pans, where the mind waited too long before it took its hand off the handle. Ash is quick to learn fire, and slow to learn that fire does not wait.

Tibb, of Saltreach, on the knot drill. Right on 16 of 20. Wrong on the sailor's knot, which Tibb ties in a way no sailor would. The tutor says the knot holds, and that this is more than most sailors can say about their knots.

Wick, of the Halfway Inn, on the road drill. Right on 18 of 20. The mind knows every waymark from Three Wells to Vell, and it can tell the arrow's direction in the dark. Wrong on two: the sign of the Brown Hen, which it took for an arrow, and a cow that stood in the road. The cow was not on the drill, but the mind did not know that.

Notes. Every mind here is tested on what it was never drilled on. That is the rule. A score that is only the drill is not a score; it is a habit. The schoolchildren who read these scores are asked to guess which mind will do best on the next drill. Most guess Lantern. Most are wrong, and the tutor says that is the best lesson in the book.

Total for the market: 123 of 140 across seven minds. Pass.
%%
Score card: Juno, the bakery mind
Tested at the bakery at Three Wells, in winter, by Bel, for the school book. The drill was unseen: loaves, pies, and the bell.

Drill one: the loaf count. Right on 19 of 20.
Drill two: the pie tray. Right on 17 of 20. Wrong on the pies by the window, which it had not been shown.
Drill three: the bell. Right on 20 of 20. It rang the bell at the wrong time once, and was not sorry.
Drill four: sorting flour from salt. Right on 18 of 20. Wrong on the salt that had got into the flour jar, which Ida says is the fault of the jar.

Total: 74 of 80. Pass.

Notes. Juno is a good mind for the bakery. It is quick at counting and slow at windows. It was given a second drill on the windows, and passed it on 19 of 20.

Ida says the mind eats more bread than it sells. Bel says it does not eat at all, which is the honest answer, and the one Ida does not like.
%%
Score card: one or the other, not both
Tested at the back table of the inn, on a drill written out on a slip of paper, while the snow came down past the window.

The drill: two switches, each on or off. Say yes when exactly one is on, and no when both are on or both are off. Four examples, shuffled.

A crystal of the old kind, with one layer only, was drilled on the four examples for an hour.

Result: right on 3 of 4, every time. It could not learn the case where both are on, which to one layer looks just like the case where both are off.

Note. Kester wrote this in his famous note, long ago. One layer can draw only one straight line between the yes and the no. One or the other, but not both, cannot be divided by a single line. It needs two lines, and a second layer to join them. The halls were full of second layers in the old days, and the councils were sure they would be paid to fill them. The councils stopped paying. The halls closed.

Score: 3 of 4.
%%
Test card
Kept by Zell, miner, at Hollow, in the last week of Frost. The snow mind is kept at the bend of the north road to clear the drifts. It has been tested on the bend before, and it has been tested in fair weather. This test was in the snow.

Mind: Snow-5. Work: clearing drifts, and marking the path with stakes.
Drill: the drift drill, a box of drifts in the yard, and the stakes, every day for a month.
Test box: sealed. The examples were drifts on the road at night, with a torch in the middle, and drifts with a fence under them, and one drift with a cart in it.
Examples: 150.
Right: 118.
Wrong: 32. Most were drifts at night. The mind could not see the torch through the snow, and it cleared the wrong side. Five were drifts with a fence under them, which it cleared as if the fence were a rock.
Notes by the tutor: the mind has learned the snow in the yard. It has not learned the snow on the road. I will drill it again on the night drifts only.
Notes by Zell: I went out with it on the third night. It walked very slowly. It stopped every time the wind came up. I thought it was afraid. The tutor says it was waiting for the drift to be still, which is what I should have done.
Ruling: held back until Thaw.
%%
Score card: the horse at the north gate
Tested at the north gate of Three Wells, in winter, on a drill of leading. Scored by Bel, who was not supposed to be there, and who was there anyway.

The horse was named Dun. It belonged to the inn, and it had been lent for the drill on the condition that nobody sing to it.

Drill one: lead the horse through the gate. Right on 16 of 20. Wrong on four: twice the gate was too narrow, once the horse was too wide, and once the mind stopped in the middle of the gate and stood there for a long time, thinking about the hinge.

Drill two: lead the horse to the trough and back. Right on 19 of 20. The one wrong was when the horse stopped to drink, and the mind did not. Dun did not mind. Dun wanted a drink.

Drill three: stand by the horse in the rain. Right on 20 of 20. The mind did not move, and the rain did not stop it, and Dun stood close to it, which Dun has never done for anyone else.

Note. Dun is a horse who does not like to be led by anything but a person he knows. He let the mind lead him. The inn-keeper says this is either a great mark for the mind or a great shame for the horse.

Bel says nothing about the song. The song was sung anyway, very quietly, by the miller's boy, and Dun did not kick.
%%
Ambrook record of the late reading tests
Leaffall, 226. Written by Sage at the tutor house.

At the tutor's request, I kept the scores for two days of tests. The big mind in the relay house was tested first. Then three small minds were tested on orders. The test pages and order cards were new to all of them.

The big mind read a page made from market lists, a school letter, and a note from the mill. It no longer read only one letter at a time. It cut words into common pieces. Some pieces were whole short words. Others were parts that appeared in many words.

The keeper said this let the same window hold far more writing. A piece learned in one word could help when the mind met it in another. I understood this when it read "apple trees" and "apple sacks" from separate lines. It used the common pieces, but still had to attend to the rest of each line.

The page had 100 questions. The mind got 86 right. It read the mill note correctly, including the broken wheel. It made four mistakes in names, six in counts, and four in the market list. It said the pears cost more than the apples. The page said the opposite.

The first small mind followed new order cards in the yard. It got 6 of 10 right. It brought a hoe when told to bring a basket, and stood by the well when told to stay by the barn. The second got 8 of 10 right. It fetched bread, stayed by the bridge, and carried jars to the store. It missed one card that said to come. It waited by the barn instead. The third got 9 of 10 right. It put the wrong basket at the mill.

We wrote every miss down. A mind must be tried on work it has not seen. If we test only the lessons it knows, we learn nothing about what it can do.

The big mind's score was better than the last one. That does not tell us why its answers were better, or what it keeps in its crystal. We know how it reads the page, and we know what it got right. We do not know what it will do with a page unlike any page we have kept.

On the second day, a fox came into the hen yard. The apprentices stayed at the store while we chased it away. One hen was gone, and a feather lay by the gate. My sister said the fox had made a better plan than the latch maker.

I owed Pell for blue wool and a jar of honey. I paid 4 emeralds at Three Wells. Pell counted them twice and wrote the debt paid in his book. Then he gave me a small apple for the walk home.

The test pages are in the dry room. The order cards are in the tutor's box. I have kept my scores with them. If someone tests the minds again, they should use new pages. These ones are no longer unseen.
%%
Test scores: the four apprentices
Copied out by Corin, shipwright, for the clerk at Vell. Spring of 41.
The four were drilled here at Saltreach in the spring. They were the first four. A woman of Vell taught them, and two of the older shipwrights watched, and I watched with my father. Each mind sat in a crystal on a stand, and the crystal had a helper of copper and iron about it. The children called them apprentices, so we all did.
We tested them on what they were never drilled on. That was the rule even then. A mind drilled on a thing and then asked the same thing proves nothing. You show it a new thing and see.
The first mind sorted planks by length. We drilled it on planks of oak and birch, in a row. For the test we gave it spruce, which it had never seen. It put the spruce planks in the right order by length, and it put them apart from the others. Sixteen of twenty right. The tutor said that was good.
The second mind counted coils of rope into piles of ten. For the test we gave it nine coils, then eleven, then one. It made a pile of ten and a pile of one, and it left the nine alone. It did not know what to do with nine. It set them in the middle and would not move them. We counted that as right, because nobody had told it what nine was, and it did not pretend. Fifteen of twenty.
The third mind carried a load along a line of stones. For the test we moved one stone out of the line. It stopped at the gap and would not step over. It stood there a long while and then went round. The tutor said it had learned the line and not the stones, which is what we wanted. Eighteen of twenty.
The fourth mind was the one that laid a keel straight. For the test we gave it a keel of a size it had never seen, and a wind off the sea that pushed the helper sideways. It held the line. Twenty of twenty, and my father swore, and then said sorry.
We wrote the scores on a board and hung it in the shed. The board is gone now. I am old, and this is what I remember of it.
The tutor said a thing I have kept. She said a drill is only as good as its pages, so keep the test pages apart and never drill on them. She said it twice, because the second mind had heard its test once before, by accident, and that was why it did so poorly on the nine. We learned from that.
Corin.
%%
Score card: the cave under the Brook
Posted on the market board by Dace, mayor of Three Wells.
The cave under the Brook field was opened in Reaping, when the cow fell through the grass into the hollow and the family went down with a rope to get her out. The cow was fine. The cave was not.
Inside it was dry, and cool, and very quiet. There were shelves cut in the walls, one above another, and on the shelves were papers in old boxes. The boxes had rotted at the corners, but the papers inside had kept. The tutor from Vell came up the hill the same afternoon and said the papers must go to the test box.
Score for the new mind, reading the cave papers on unseen pages. Pages: 50. Right: 44. The tutor says it did well with the old hand, which nobody in the square could read without squinting. It did badly with the names. Many of the names were worn to nothing, and the mind does not guess at a name it cannot see. The tutor says that is the right thing for a mind to do, and she was pleased.
Notes. The Brook family asked that the cave be kept closed afterwards, and the mayor agreed. The tutors asked that it be kept open for one more season, for the test box. The mayor agreed to that too. The council has not decided what to do with the papers after the season. Some want them copied into the Archive. Some want them left on the shelves. Nobody has said whose they are.
The cow is well. She sends her regards to the cave.
%%
Score card: Moss, the second basket
Kept by Lyle, for Wren at Lowmarsh. Thaw, a week after the first. Thirty leaves, shown once each on the board, then put in an unseen basket by the gate. The leaves came from the far beds, where the water runs slow.

The mind has eight words, and three of them are its work for leaves: drying, fire, bin. It does not know the names of the leaves, and it does not need to.

Score: 26 of 30.

Right: the long leaves with the red stem, the short leaves with the soft edge, and the grey leaf with the spot, which I expected it to miss.

Wrong: two long green leaves went to fire. In the basket they look like fire leaves, if you do not hold them to the light. Moss did not hold them to the light. Neither did I, the first time.

Wrong: one bitten leaf went to bin. It is a good leaf with a hole in it. I have written it down as a drying leaf, so the next basket will teach it.

Wrong: one wet brown leaf, the sort the frogs sit on, went to drying. I think the frogs have a point.

Notes: the mind was right on the new kinds it had not seen, in four cases out of five. We are learning the leaves and not the board, which is what we wanted.

Lyle's note for Wren: The mind was quick at the gate and slow at the far end of the basket. That may be the light. I will check with a lamp at dusk.
%%
The hamlet in autumn
Ama again, at the hamlet by Three Wells, in the last of the apple month. She writes slowly, and her neighbor Hollis writes the rest.
The hamlet has seven houses, a well, a loom, and now a tower.
The tower on the hill is the tallest thing for half a day's walk. Its stair turns and turns, and there is a lamp at every turn, and torches round the foot so you can find the door at night. At the top is the lamp room, all glass panes with a copper ring, and a walk round it. The keeper walks round it at dusk and looks at four roads at once. She says she can see our chimney smoke from up there, and my washing, which I did not invite.
Her relay house is at the foot, small, with the keeper's bed and a desk and a redstone line coming down the wall to the desk from the lamp. She sits at the desk and the lamp blinks over her head. She says the words come down the line faster than she can read them, which is her joke, but she says it every time.
The road is new this year, packed earth with a stone edge, and a torch on a post every twelve steps, and a bridge on the stream, of oak, because we had oak. The inn is a day's walk and the innkeeper there tells riddles and keeps a fire that has not gone out in a long while. The waymarks are up. Ours says 3 and points to the inn, and people leave little stones on top of it, and I do not know why, and I leave one too.
The foxes are still at the hens. Hollis says the tower has made them bold, and I say the hens have made them fat. We have mended the fence twice and the dog is tired.
We have one apprentice. It is old and slow and it carries. It cannot tell a fox from a dog, which worries the hens. But it carries the wool and it carries the water and it stands in the yard at night with a torch, and we are fonder of it than we say.
Hollis's boy has learned to read at the school by the east well in Three Wells, and reads the manual to us of an evening, and the manual says: drill, test, and only then give it work. We have no tutor here, so we test the apprentice ourselves. We put a board with a small field drawn on it before it and ask it to build, and it builds a wall, and we cheer. It hums. We think that is cheering too.
The archive at Vell asks for a page from everyone who keeps a record, and so we send this, and the test notes, and the bill for the tower candles, which the keeper paid and we did not.
Ama, weaver, and Hollis, who wrote the long words.
Postscript, from Ama alone: the keeper blinked a message to Vell on the first night, and it said the hamlet is here and all is well. That is the whole message. It is a good message.
%%
Score card: three minds in the square
Tested in the square on market day, with the bell going at noon. Three minds, one unseen box of twenty cards.
Shale. Shown: twenty cards. Answered: 19 right. Wrong: one. A card of a wool sack went to the barrel pile, because the sack had a barrel's shape in the picture. Score: 19 of 20. Passed.
Sorrel. Shown: twenty cards. Answered: 15 right. Wrong: five. Sorrel did the sacks well and the barrels badly, and put the barrels on the stool by the well. Score: 15 of 20. Not passed. Back to the drill.
Brisk. Shown: twenty cards. Answered: 17 right. Wrong: three. Brisk fetched the wrong bucket three times. Then it stopped, and stood, and waited, as if it had decided the buckets were not its business. Score: 17 of 20. Passed.
The pass mark is 17.
Notes, by Vesper: The crowd cheered for Shale, which Shale did not notice. The crowd jeered at Sorrel, which Sorrel did not notice either. Brisk was the only one that lifted its hand when the bell rang, as if it could hear the bell and nobody else could. Perhaps it could.
The keeper of the relay tower above the market came down to watch. He says the lamp at the top has been cracked since the frost, and the new glass comes on the autumn cart, which is late. Vesper says she has the glass in her shed, and will carry it up the hill for nothing, if the keeper will come down and fetch it. He says he will, when the cart comes.
%%
Night watch log: first snow in Thaw
Lyle's night watch log, the herb plots outside Lowmarsh. The first snow came in Thaw, which the old men say is not fair, and the thaw-children say is a sign of nothing.

First hour. Cold, and the sky clear. The reed bed has a skin of ice at the edges. Moss is in the shed with its basket, waiting for the morning.

Second hour. The snow came quietly, the big soft kind that does not stick at first. Then it did stick. The herb beds went white from the gate to the shed, and then the whole field did. Wren came out in her coat and said a first snow in Thaw is worth a cup of cider and a little worry.

Third hour. Cider, a little. Worry, a little more. The drying racks have snow on them, and look like tables at a feast nobody came to. I said so in front of the apprentices. Wren said I should not.

Fourth hour. The test. Wren set the new basket on the bench in the shed, under the lamp, with the door shut against the cold. Moss sorted the leaves. Drying, drying, fire, bin. Then a leaf came up that was short and grey with a white rim. It had not been on the board. Moss stood with its hand over the leaf for a long time, and then it put the leaf in the bin.

Wren asked me to write down what happened. The mind had learned that white means cold, and cold means bin. It had learned the snow, instead of the leaf. Wren says it is a sensible mistake for a mind that has seen a lot of winter.

Fifth hour. The snow stopped. The lamp went out on its own, which Wren says it does in the cold, and we sat in the dark a moment with the stove ticking. Then I lit it again. The stars were out over the marsh. Frogs complained under the ice.

Sixth hour. Moss went back to the shed to sleep. The snow lay on the field like a cloth. Wren says it will be gone by noon. The first snow in Thaw is a thing you should only see once.
%%
Night watch: the racks hauled too
Lyle's night watch log, Thaw. The reed beds and the drying racks are both on the east field, a long walk apart.

At the fourth hour Wren gave the order, and I wrote it on the slate as she said it.

> haul the reeds to the drying racks
= haul

Moss answered with its one word, and hauled. It hauled the reeds to the racks, neatly, bundle by bundle. Then it hauled the racks to the reeds. Then it hauled the racks to the reeds again, because it had not been told where the racks should end. By dawn the racks stood in a row in the reed bed, looking surprised.

Wren laughed until she had to sit on the step. Then she said the order had two things in it, and Moss knows only one thing at a time. Next time: haul the reeds. Then, when that is done: haul to the racks.

Wren says the mind did not misunderstand the word. It understood haul too well. It hauled what was nearest, and the racks were near.

Nobody had told Moss to stop, so it stood in the water until the light came. Then I said home, and it walked up out of the reeds to the shed, dripping, with a bundle still in one hand.
%%
Chronicle of the archive: the first four
From the chronicle kept at Vell, the years of the founding. Written later, from letters and from the boards of the towns.
In the first years of the archive, the first tutors at Vell drilled four helpers of copper and iron. Each helper had a mind in a crystal. The children called them apprentices, and the name stayed. The four went to Saltreach in the spring, to work in the yard and be tested.
A crystal learns from what it is shown. Why it does, nobody wrote down. The tutors showed the four one thing each, again and again, and changed them a little each time they were wrong, and slowly they were right. The four were tested on what they were never drilled on, and the scores were kept on a board, and copied, and came to the archive. That board is one of our oldest records. It is a small thing. Four numbers and a note. We keep it anyway.
The four did one thing each: a row, a sort, a carry, a line. For generations after, the apprentices did one thing each, and most towns had none. This is not because the people were slow. It is because the learning was slow, and hard, and nobody knew why it worked when it did. The people tried and failed and wrote it down, and the writing is the archive, and the archive is the hill.
In the same spring a man at the harbor grew a melon too big for the scale, and the carry mind held it for an hour while the scale was fixed. The man sold it in slices, and gave the first to the mind, and a gull took it. This is in the chronicle beside the board of scores. A later clerk asked why we kept the melon, and an older clerk said: because it is true, and because the people were happy that day, and a chronicle that keeps only the great things is a poor chronicle.
The four are gone. Their crystals went cloudy, as old crystals do, and nobody wrote down why. The board is in a box in the deep room. The melon is a story that the children at Saltreach still tell, though they no longer believe the size of it.
Written at Vell in the 180th year of the archive, from the older records. The clerk's hand is neat. In the margin, in another hand, someone has written: I have seen the board. It is real.
%%
Score card: the numbers on letters
From the hall of Odo, in the hamlet above Three Wells. Copied by Zell. The crystal for this drill was a gift from the Copperhold hall of Merle, because Odo wrote and asked nicely.

The drill: the figures 0 to 9, as the relay keepers write them on letters. Each figure is a small square of dark and light dots, five wide and seven tall. The mind is shown the dots and must say which figure it is.

Drilled on 2000 figures. Tested on 100 it had never seen, ten of each.
0: 10 right. 1: 9. 2: 10. 3: 8. 4: 9. 5: 9. 6: 10. 7: 8. 8: 8. 9: 9.
Total: 90 right of 100.

Where it went wrong: 3 and 8 swapped, four times. 7 and 1 swapped, three times. 4 and 9 swapped, twice. One 5 read as a 6. Odo says these are the mistakes a tired keeper makes.

On its own drill figures it got 99 of 100. The gap between 99 and 90 is the warning. But 90 is good. The keeper at the Three Wells tower says she is right 95 times in a hundred, and she has had practice.
%%
Score cards: the flood week, Leaffall
Score cards for the week the lower road went under water. The minds were tested on a flooded road drill, a box of stepping paths, some dry and some wet, which nobody had seen before the test. Written by Opal, who waded out to the box and back.

Card 9. Box 7, unseen. Flooded road, dry stones and wet ones. Mind: Teg, carrier. Right: 15 of 20. Notes: Kept to the high stones and did well. Did not like the water, and said nothing about it, which is the right way.
Card 10. Box 7, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Vale, carrier. Right: 17 of 20. Notes: Took the long way round twice. The long way is always dry in the drill. On the real road it was a ditch.
Card 11. Box 9, unseen. Sandbags by weight, for the bridge. Mind: Dell, store hand. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Lifted the heavy bags with the knees. Opal says the knees are the right tool, and the back is not.
Card 12. Box 9, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Ren, store hand. Right: 12 of 20. Notes: Lifted with the back. Retested after a rest. Right: 16 of 20. The second try was better, because it had been told to stop, and it did.
Card 13. Box 2, unseen. Lamps lit along the lower road after the rain. Mind: Pim, watcher. Right: 20 of 20. Notes: Counted every lamp. Did not count the reflections in the water, which some of the others did.
%%
Test notes: spring tests, the marsh
Written by Lyle, night watch, at the herb plots outside Lowmarsh, for the tutors' book at Vell, through Wren. Spring: Thaw, Sowing, and the first week of Blossom. The tests are set down in order, with the scores and the notes that went with them.

How the test is run. The board is shown first. Each leaf on it is put in front of the mind, one at a time, and the mind says drying, fire, or bin. Then the same leaves go into a basket by the gate, shuffled, and the mind is asked again. Nothing on the board is shown twice. The unseen basket is the test. The board is only the drill.

Thaw, first basket. Twenty leaves. Fourteen right. It went wrong where the long grey leaves looked like fire leaves, and the wet brown ones like drying leaves. Wren says that is what happens when a mind learns the shape of a leaf before the look of it. We moved the leaves and tried again.

Thaw, second basket. Thirty leaves, from the far beds. Score: twenty-six. The mind was quick at the gate and slow at the far end. I put a lamp at the far end at dusk, and the next day it was quicker there. Light matters to a mind, as it does to a person.

Thaw, the order. On the east field at the fourth hour, the mind was told to haul the reeds to the drying racks, and it hauled the racks too. Wren's rule now is one order for each thing, with a pause between. The mind does not need the pause. The people do, Wren says, so they can see what they have said.

Thaw, the first snow. A white leaf with a grey rim went to bin, when it should have gone to drying. The mind had learned white as cold, and cold as bin. We will put snow leaves on the next board, so the mind learns the leaf under the snow. It is the same leaf. We are only teaching it not to be frightened of the weather.

Sowing, third basket. Forty leaves, half from the board and half new. Score: thirty-three. All the new drying leaves were right. Two of the new fire leaves were wrong. Fire leaves are the hardest, Wren says, because the stove is always in the shed.

Blossom, first week. The last test before the summer work. Thirty-six leaves, the lamp at both ends of the bench, the gate shut. Score: thirty-four. The two wrong ones were the bitten leaf and the frog leaf again. Wren has stopped trying to teach a mind to be sure about a frog.

Notes for the tutors at Vell. The mind learns the leaf, not the board, when the test is unseen and the light is even. It learns the weather too, if you let it. It will carry the first snow of Thaw into the next spring's baskets, and it takes a long time to forget. Test on the unseen basket every time. Move the mind, move the lamp, and move the basket. Then ask it again.

Lyle, night watch, and Wren, healer, Lowmarsh
%%
Score cards: the new helper, summer
Score cards for the new helper, Tove, sent from the tutor house at Vell in Thaw. It is copper and iron, about as tall as a girl of ten. The tutor's note said: Drill it on the dipping first. It will want to pour.

Card 7. Box 1, unseen. Tying wicks in bundles. Mind: Tove, candle hand. Right: 17 of 20. Notes: Tied the bundles tight, which is right, and then tighter, which is not. Told so, it untied the bundles and tied them looser, and was right.
Card 8. Box 1, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Tove, candle hand. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Improved in one day. The two wrong ones were the first bundles, kept at the back, where a candle maker finds them and wonders.
Card 9. Box 3, unseen. Dipping, five dips to a candle. Mind: Tove, dipper. Right: 15 of 20. Notes: Dipped too fast, then waited the count of ten, every time. Briar said the count is for the wax, and the dipping is for the candle.
Card 10. Box 3, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Tove, dipper. Right: 18 of 20. Notes: The count of ten, and then one more. Asked where it got the one more, Tove did not say. It is not in the rules.
%%
Score card: the reading mind
Copied by Olwen, trader, at the Kettle Ridge market, from the card a tutor pinned on the post. Summer.

A reading mind, drilled on pages from the Archive.
Test: twenty pages from the test box, never drilled on.
Task: read the first part of a line, guess the next letter.
Right on 61 of 100 letters.

Note: it does best on common words. It does worst on names.
%%
Score card: the Ambrook sorting mind
Test on unseen drill, the market at Kettle Ridge, the shed by the windmill. Tester: Cass, innkeeper, who keeps the test box at the Kettle Inn and does the testing on market days. Mind: small, barrow-sized, sorting, tested after its winter drills.

Drill: sort the apples by weight into three bins.
Right: 9 of 10 apples. Wrong: 1, a green one that the mind put in the middle bin. Cass says it was a fair mistake. The apple was very green.
Drill: sort the carrots by length.
Right: 8 of 10. Wrong: 2, both short ones that were nearly the same as the long ones. The mind asked if it should keep them. Cass said yes.
Drill: take the spoiled ones out.
Right: all of them. The mind took out the soft ones and left the hard ones. It did not take out the cat.

Overall: 27 of 30. Pass. Cass says the mind is ready for the barrow and not for the stone carts. She has written "barrow" in the margin.
%%
Notes on the minds we tested, one year
Written by Sorrel, Lowmarsh. A year of tests, for the panel book, and copied for Vell, because Nessa asked for a full account and then sent it back to be shorter.

Across the year the reed panel tested twenty-two minds. Eleven passed the reed beds. Six passed the boat yards. Four passed nothing at all and were sent back to Vell, where Nessa says they will be happy eventually, and where she has a bench for them.

Good minds share a few things. They count the reeds as they cut. They keep their feet dry. They do not stop when the work is hard, only when it is finished. Wren says a good mind is like a good healer: it stays with the patient, and it does not bring its own worries to the bedside.

Bad minds share a few things too. They cut by color. They forget the path they walked yesterday. They cannot tell a bend from a bank. One mind went into the same pool three days running. Each day it was shown the pool, and each day it went back in. The tutor drilled it again on the path. On the fourth day it got out and stayed out.

A note on the tests themselves. Each mind gets a test box it has never seen. It does not get a second go at the same test. The drill box is for practice. The test box is for the truth. Some tutors show a mind the answers after the test. Wren says that is like giving the bread back to the oven. Nobody learns anything from it.

The rule the panel keeps is Nessa's rule: never send an untested mind to the fields. On the marsh we say it a little differently: never send an untested mind onto the boardwalk. The water is deeper than it looks, and the reeds hide the holes.

Next year the panel will test twice a season, once in Thaw and once in Leaffall. Wren asked for a third test in Frost, for the snow. Hob says the snow is test enough. Hob is wrong, but he is also the one who has to pull the minds out.

Final count for the year: 22 tested, 11 passed the reeds, 6 passed the yards, 4 went back to Vell. One mind is still being drilled. It is called Oarlock, after the boat it broke on its first day, and which it has since repaired, twice, with its own hands.
%%
Score card: the stuck cart, big mind
Test on unseen drill, the Kettle Ridge market, the week of the stuck cart. Given at the relay house by the keeper's lamp, with Cass reading the cards and Sedge blinking them down. The big mind is the same one as before. The card is longer this time.

The stuck cart is the reason for the test. On the market road, a cart went into the ditch at the bend, with its load of wool and its carter swearing. The apprentice on the gate could not lift the cart alone. Its foreman sent word up the relay, and the big mind answered, and the apprentice did what it was told, and the cart came out. Cass wanted to know how the mind had worked out what to say, so she wrote a test to find out.

Drill: a cart is stuck in a ditch with its left wheel down. What is the first thing to do?
Answer: take the weight off the wheel. Right.
Drill: a cart is stuck, and there is only one helper. What is the second thing to do?
Answer: fetch a board and put it under the wheel. Right.
Drill: the board is too short. What then?
Answer: call for a second helper, and ask it to hold the cart while the board is set. Right, and clear. The mind did not guess a second board. It asked for help.
Drill: the carter is shouting at the horse. What do you say to the carter?
Answer: nothing. Keep working. Right, but Cass wrote a note. She said it was rude, and the carter would not agree.
Drill: after the cart is out, what should be written down?
Answer: the bend, the board, the hour, and the name of the carter. Right.

Overall: 5 of 5. Pass. The mind's answers were short. Cass says it did not waste words, and that the apprentice on the gate learned the whole sequence from the answer, which the foreman says was the point. The cart is now sitting on the market road with a new wheel, and the bend has a board by it, painted white.
%%
The melon too big for the scale
From the market notes of Pell's grandmother, at Saltreach, spring of 41. She was a girl then.
In the spring of the four apprentices, a man at the harbor grew a melon too big for the scale. He grew it in the warm corner by the harbor wall, where the stone keeps the heat, and he fed it with fish water, which is a thing he did and would not explain. The melon was as big as a barrel. He brought it to the fish market on a handcart and set it on the price board, and the scale sank and could not weigh it.
The four were new then, and one of them was the carry mind. The man asked if the helper could hold the melon while the scale was fixed. The mind came, and it held the melon, and it did not set it down. It held it for an hour. People came to look. The children put their hands on it. A shipwright said the melon would outlast the scale. The man with the melon said the mind was the best hand he had ever hired and asked what it ate. Nobody knew what to tell him.
In the end the scale was fixed and the melon weighed two hundred and six. The man sold it in slices to the whole harbor. He gave the first slice to the carry mind, which did not know what to do with it, and set it carefully on the price board and left it there. A gull took it. The man laughed until he had to sit down.
The mind's helper had a copper hand. I remember the copper hand on the melon. It was green where it was wet.
That was the spring the four came. We did not know then what they would become. We thought they were a wonder and a game. The man with the melon said they were the future, and then he sold the last slice and went home.
Written down by his granddaughter, from what he told her. The melon is the part everyone remembers.
%%
A note on pieces of words
Apple, 221. Sage, dyer of Ambrook.

I visited the relay house to mend a wool cover. The keeper showed me a page the big mind had read. It did not look at each letter by itself. It cut words into common pieces.

The keeper said a piece might be a whole short word, or part of a longer one. A word like "honey" could be read as one piece. A longer word might be read as two or three pieces. The mind had learned which pieces often came together.

This helped it read more in one window. Before, the window held about sixty letters. Now it could hold many more words. The mind could use pieces it had seen in one word when it met them in another.

I asked if this made it understand every page. The keeper said no. It could still guess wrong. A page with spoiled ink could still trouble it. We must keep testing it on pages it has never read.

I brought home the wool cover. It was warm and smelled of dust. The big mind had not read my name on the hem.
%%
Score cards: summer, Kettle Ridge
The summer's score cards for the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, kept by Briar, who was asked by the tutors at Vell to write a summary, and has written it at the bottom, where the children do not read.

Card 15. Box 10, unseen. Wicks in a sealed jar, counted by touch in the dark. Mind: Dell, candle hand. Right: 17 of 20. Notes: The hardest test of the summer. Dell said afterward that it had been easier in the dark.
Card 16. Box 10, unseen. Same drill, with the lamp lit. Mind: Pim, candle hand. Right: 20 of 20. Notes: Counted without touching. That is not in the rules. Briar has let it stand.
Card 17. Box 11, unseen. Pouring a melt into a mould with a crack in its base. Mind: Juna, pourer. Right: 14 of 20. Notes: The melt went everywhere except the mould. The mould is at fault, and it has gone on the shelf of broken things.

The summer's candle drills covered wick cutting, dipping, weighing, pouring, and the honey salve. Twenty minds were tested in all. Eleven passed at nine in ten or better. Six passed at seven, and will be retested in the autumn, when the wax sets more slowly. Three failed and went back to the drill yard for another month, where, Briar says, they are being very patient with each other.

At the end of the summer the children came in from the yard to ask why the tests took so long. Briar told them the minds were learning to be careful, and that carefulness is slow. The youngest child asked whether the minds were careful all the time, or only when they were watched. Briar said she did not know. The child said that was the right answer, and went to bed.

The new helper, Tove, has been moved to the tutor house at Vell for the autumn, to be drilled on the sacks. Briar will miss it. It put the wicks back in the right order every evening, without being asked. The honey is in the cupboard. The jars are labeled, and the labels are right, and nobody has tried to change them.

Briar, candle maker, at the edge of Kettle Ridge. The candles on the shelf are good candles. They are not the best on the ridge, and Briar says that is a matter of opinion, and that she is the only opinion she is interested in.
%%
Score card: the great drills
Copied by Olwen, trader, at the Kettle Ridge market in summer, from the cards that a visiting tutor hung from a rope between two stalls. The rope was long. The cards were many. Olwen copied them in order for the Archive, because the Archive asked.

Heading: The great drills. About the tenth year of the great drills, when the tutors first drilled reading minds on the records of the Archive.

Card one. What a reading mind is.
A reading mind reads a line a letter at a time, and guesses the next letter. Each time it is wrong, it changes a little. Over many pages, it gets better.

Card two. What it is drilled on.
The tutors drill it on the Archive's records. The clerks give them pages by the cartload. The words of the first keepers came back to people's lips at this time: We will keep everything we write.

Card three. Where the pages came from.
This is not agreed. One tutor says the clerks asked every town for its letters. Another says only the Archive's own copies were used. A third says the clerks found more than anyone realized. A trader on the Long Road told Olwen that a shelf-master at Vell once said it was more than a hundred thousand pages. Nobody could say whose.

Card four. The test.
A box of pages is kept apart. No mind is drilled on it. When a mind is tested on those pages, the tutors count how many letters it guessed right.

Card five. The scores.
Mind of the first year: right on 32 of 100.
Mind of the third year: right on 48.
Mind of the fifth year: right on 59.
Mind of the eighth year: right on 66.
Mind of the tenth year: right on 71.

Card six. What the scores show.
The longer a mind is drilled on more pages, the better it does on pages it has not seen.

Card seven. A lost animal.
A dog came to the tutor during the talk and sat on her foot. A boy said it belonged to the sheep farm. The tutor said it could stay until it was claimed. It stayed all afternoon. It was called Pip.

Card eight. A boat.
Olwen's cousin has a fishing boat. It was late home last night. Olwen was worried. It arrived this morning with a good catch. She says to tell the tutor that the sea is only slow, not unkind.

Olwen
%%
First snow test, Lowmarsh
Written by Sorrel, Lowmarsh, winter of 206. The reed panel holds a test on the first snow each year, because the minds have never seen snow on the marsh before, and nobody has drilled them on it.

The snow came in the night. In the morning the reeds were white, the boardwalk was white, and the water was a flat grey that looked like it would hold a person. It would not. Wren says a test is the only way to be sure what a thing will hold.

"A mind that has only seen rain is not ready for snow," Wren said, on the walk out. Nobody argued with her. Nobody wanted to walk on the boardwalk alone.

The test box was made fresh that morning. The tutor's clerk drew pictures of the reed beds under snow on boards, twenty of them. Each mind had to say which reeds would stand and which would break under the white.

Results:
Moss: 92 in 100. The snow confused it. It kept cutting the reeds that were hidden under white, and leaving the ones that showed. Wren says that is only honest. The reeds were hidden.
Pim: 89. Pim wanted to play in the snow. It was not drilled to play, so it went and stood in the middle of the boardwalk, very still, with snow on its shoulders. Wren wrote "stood" on the card and underlined it.
Reedbird, lent from the fair: 96 in 100. It saw the snow the way it saw everything, which was carefully.
Sedge: 84. Sedge stayed indoors all day and said it was too cold for reeds. Sedge is not cold. Sedge is made of iron.

What the first snow taught the panel. Shovel the boardwalk early, before the carts come. Put the torches up higher on the posts, because the snow lies on the low ones and hides the light. Ask Hob for the long pole with the hook. The snow is not the enemy. The short day is the enemy, and the snow only makes it shorter.
%%
Letter: Sage to the relay keeper
Longnight, 223.

Dear keeper,

I am writing because I saw the big mind read my dye list. The list was not a lesson. I wrote it on a scrap and left it with the wool at the relay house.

It read "blue wool, red wool, blue wool" and gave the right count. Then it read the list of jars for the honey shed. It joined the pieces of words it had learned from many pages. The keeper says this is why its reading window can hold more.

I thought of the word "blue." The mind may have met it in a dye list, a letter, or a school page. The letters do not need to sit together in just one old word. Their pieces can be used again.

The keeper also showed me a test page. The big mind had not seen it during its drills. It read most of the page well, but changed "red" to "reed." The test score was 46 right and 4 wrong. We marked the four wrong places and put the page back in the test box. It must not be used for lessons.

I do not know what the mind keeps inside its crystal. The keeper does not know either. We know only what it read, what it wrote, and where it made a mistake.

My blue wool sold well at market. I paid my old debt to Pell with 3 emeralds. He counted them twice, then gave me a honey cake.

Sage
%%
Score card: the contest of the halls
The spring contest of the tutor halls, in the back room of the inn at Three Wells. Each hall brought one mind. Each was tested on the same hundred figures, which no hall had drilled on. The figures were drawn by Zell the midwife, who knows none of the tutors, to be fair.

Copperhold, Merle's own hall, three layers: 94 right.
Odo's hall, the hamlet, two layers: 88 right.
Ambrook, two layers, small: 85 right.
Vell, one crystal: 71 right.

When Vell's score was read out, the room went quiet. The tutor from Vell stood up and said: One crystal is what we have always done. The room clapped for her anyway. She had come with her real number. Some had not wanted to.

Notes. The contest does not tell us who is cleverest. It tells us whose mind reads a figure it has never seen. Before the contests, every hall said its mind was the best, and none of them tested. Now they test. Merle says the contests made the tutors honest.

Prize: a jar of dark honey from Ambrook. Merle gave it to the children for the play.

The play: after the scores, the children of the hamlet gave a play called The Blame Goes Back. Nine children stood in a row. The last was told Wrong, and passed its share of the blame to the one before, and so on to the first, who bowed. It was the best thing of the day.
%%
Score card: the well-house mind, winter
Tested in the well-house by the east well, in winter, on an unseen drill. The well-house is cold, and the mind was not drilled in the cold. Scores are given as they came, not as they should have been.

Drill one: draw the bucket. Right on 18 of 20. The rope was wet. The mind did not like the rope, and it said nothing about it, because it cannot say anything about rope.

Drill two: count the buckets for the bakery. Right on 20 of 20. Ida came down the step to see it, and then went up again, saying she was not satisfied.

Drill three: carry the buckets up the steps. Right on 12 of 20. Wrong on eight, all on the top step, which is worn in the middle. The mind would step on the worn place, slip, and stop. It did this eight times. On the ninth time it stepped to the edge, where the stone is firm, and went up.

Drill four: keep the well-house clean. Right on 17 of 20. Wrong on the three days when the cats came in. Cats are not on the drill. The mind did not know what to do with them, so it did what it always does with what it does not know, and stood still.

Drill five: the bucket in the dark. Right on 5 of 10. The mind could not see the rope, so it went by the sound. Ida says the sound is the same every morning, which is why the mind was right as often as it was.

Total: 72 of 90. Pass, but only just.

Notes. The top step needs a new stone. Dace has been asked to put it on the board. The well-house mind is patient and does not complain. It will learn the edge of the step in a week, and the cats in a month. The bakery will be cold until then.
%%
Score card: Moss, first unseen basket
Kept by Lyle, night watch at the herb plots outside Lowmarsh. Thaw. A basket of twenty leaves that Moss had never been shown.

Right: 14 of 20.
Wrong: 6. Four long grey leaves went to fire, where the short green ones go. Two went to bin.

Notes: Moss sorts by where I stand. I moved to the gate, and it sorted the same leaves differently. Move me again on the next basket.
%%
Score card: the byre and the sick cow
Tested in the byre at Gull's Hollow, in the second week of autumn. Written by Corin, shipwright.
Mind: Ferret, a stores mind from Vell. The box is unseen: ten cards, each a task in the byre.
Shown: ten task cards, from mash to hay.
Answered: Ferret fetched the mash, the blanket and the pail. It stayed by the cow for an hour, where it was put.
Right: 9 of 10.
Wrong: store the hay. It went on the wrong side of the beam, where the damp gets in. Shown the card again, it put the hay on the right side.
Score: 9 of 10. Passed.
Notes: The cow is Brindle, off her feed, with a hot nose. The cow-healer says she will mend if the mash stays warm. Brindle has taken her mash from Ferret's hand since the first morning, and the children find that very funny.
%%
Score card: Keel, the first even test
Kept by Cato, who keeps the wall at the farm outside Saltreach. Spring. The sums are unseen. The mind has been shown the rule, and never these sums.

What the test is. The mind is made of layers. Each layer takes the numbers from the layer below and grows them. Left alone, the numbers would grow wild, layer by layer, until they were too big to read. So each layer does one more thing. It finds the middle of its numbers, takes the middle away, and divides by how far they spread. Then they are back to an even size.

Score: 9 of 10 right. The one wrong sum was the widest.

Notes: when a number was too big to be sure of, Keel gave an answer that was small and far off. That is a wrong answer, but a careful one.
%%
Score card: Moss, Wren's apprentice
Lowmarsh, winter of 207. Written by Sorrel, who sits on the reed panel and has to sign everything.

Test box no. 4: reed cutting and carrying. Never drilled on.
Moss: 97 right in 100.
Reed cutting: 96 of 100. Two were cut too low, and the root was left in the mud. Wren says that is the wrong kind of mistake, and that Moss will grow out of it.
Carrying: 98 of 100. Moss carried the full basket in every test. Only one sack went over the boards, and that was the boards' fault.
Result: pass for the reed beds. Not yet for the fish weir. Test again after the first thaw.

Notes: Moss does not ask questions. Wren says it was not drilled to ask, so it does not. A mind that asks is a mind that is confused, Wren says. Sorrel is not sure. Sorrel would like one question, asked once, to see what would happen.
%%
Test card
Kept by Zell, miner, at Hollow, with a copy sent to the market board at Three Wells. The market mind is set up on market day, by the north well, to answer the stall-holders' questions about prices and places.

Mind: Market-3. Work: prices, stall places, and the change due.
Drill: the price drill, one hundred examples a day, for a whole season.
Test box: sealed, and opened in the square on market day, before the bell. The examples were prices nobody had written down before, and stalls that had moved to the south well that morning.
Examples: 300.
Right: 276.
Wrong: 24. Nine were prices for honey, which is always the hardest, because Pell changes it at noon. Six were stalls moved by the mayor on the morning of the test. Nine were change due, when the buyer paid in a bundle of small coins.
Notes by the tutor: a good mind for a market that stays still. Three Wells does not stay still.
Notes by Zell: the mayor was pleased. He said the mind had been right about the south well. Pell said it had been wrong about the honey. Both of them were right, and both of them were cross.
Ruling: passed for the stalls. Not passed for honey.
%%
Test card, the Hollow mine mind, winter
Kept by Zell, miner, at the hamlet of Hollow, below Northpoint, where the mine shaft comes up beside the road. The mind is a small one for the carts. Written in winter, the week it was tested.

Mind: Haul-2. Work: carts on the shaft road.
Drill: the cart drill, forty examples, twice a day for nine days.
Test box: sealed by the tutor from Vell. Opened on the morning of Frost, the twelfth day.
Examples: 100.
Right: 91.
Wrong: 9. Four were cart loads of coal sent up the wrong side of the rope. Three were carts that needed to go down, and were sent up. Two were carts that needed to wait, and were sent on.
Notes by the tutor: a good score for a cart mind. Not yet good enough for the shaft road, which has a steep bend. Drill the bend again.
Notes by Zell: the bend is where the snow stops the carts. I told the tutor so. She said the mind did not know snow. I said then it must learn it.
%%
Score card: how many layers
From Odo's hall, a card of tests in one spring, all on the same hundred unseen figures. The question: how many layers are best? Copied by Zell. Odo wrote it out fair for her as a gift, on the night of the fiftieth birth she had helped with. She says the cards are the only thing in the hall she can read.

One layer: 71 right.
Two layers: 88.
Three layers: 92.
Four layers: 93.
Five layers: 84.
Six layers: 61.
Seven layers: 49.
Eight layers: 38.
Ten layers: 11. That is no better than guessing, which gets about 10.

Odo's notes.
1. More layers help, up to a point. Two are much better than one. Three are better than two. Four are a little better still.
2. After four, the minds get worse. Six is worse than one. Ten learns nothing.
3. Odo wrote to Merle at Copperhold and asked why. Merle wrote back: I think it is the blame. It travels from the answer back to the first layer. Each layer takes its share and passes on a smaller one. By the sixth layer the share is so small it is almost nothing. The first layers do not hear that they were wrong. They stay as they were.
4. Odo asked: can the blame be made bigger? Merle wrote: I do not know. If anyone finds out, tell me first.
5. Odo says it is like a shout down a long tunnel. The end of the tunnel hears a murmur.
6. Odo drilled the eight-layer mind ten times longer. Its score went from 38 to 41. More drilling does not mend it.
7. Odo tried a bigger step for the first layers. They swung about like a gate in the wind, and the score fell to 22. Then a smaller step. The first layers barely moved, and the score was 39. Neither step helps. The blame is too faint to use.

Zell's note at the bottom: I am only the midwife. But I have seen what happens to a message that goes through ten mouths. It is a different message by the end. I would not trust a mind that is told its mistakes by gossip.
%%
Score cards: the dipping drill, Melon
Score cards from the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, Melon, kept in the same form as the others. Only the notes are Briar's own.

Card 4. Box 4, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Sim, dipper. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Let each dip cool for the count of ten, and then one more, for luck. The one more is not in the rules, and Briar has let it stand.
Card 5. Box 6, unseen. Wax weights, by the scale. Mind: Pim, weigher. Right: 20 of 20. Notes: Weighed each lump in its hand, and was right every time. The scale agreed, which pleased Briar more than it pleased the mind.
Card 6. Box 6, unseen. Same drill, with every lump the same colour. Mind: Dell, weigher. Right: 13 of 20. Notes: Weighed by sight, and fell for the colour. Colour is no guide to weight, and Briar says so every year.
%%
Score card: the relay mind, first snow
Test on unseen drill, sent up the relay from the Vell test house, answered by the big mind in the relay house at the foot of the ridge tower. Tester: Cass, who was given the card at the inn and asked to read it aloud to the mind through the keeper's lamp. Keeper: Sedge. Quickeners: three, kept cool with snow from the north bank, since the first snow had just come.

Notes on the set-up. The big mind sits on its stand in the relay house, in a crystal the size of a loaf. Around it stand the quickeners, which keep it cool so it can think without overheating. They are kept cool with water in the summer, ice in the spring, and snow in the winter. This year they were full of snow, and the keeper said it was the best snow he had had in ten years.

The test was given in letters, one question at a time. Cass wrote each question on a card and read it aloud at the lamp. The keeper blinked each one down the line to the relay house. The answer came back the same way, in blinks, which the keeper wrote down.

Drill: name the three things needed to keep a lamp lit in winter.
Answer: coal, glass and a dry wick. Right.
Drill: count the rungs on a tower ladder of ninety.
Answer: ninety. Right. The mind added: the ladder at Northpoint has ninety, and the one here has sixty-two. Cass said that was not asked. She marked it right anyway.
Drill: what do you do when a message comes that you do not understand?
Answer: write it down, ask a clerk, and do not guess. Right.
Drill: what is the first thing to check in the morning?
Answer: the lamp glass, then the stair, then the messages. Right.

Overall: 4 of 4. Pass. Cass says the answers were careful, and the mind did not claim to know any more than it did. She says she cannot tell whether it understood the questions or only knew the answers. She has written this in the margin, next to the word pass.
%%
Score card: the glass shed, autumn
Tested for the glass shed, where the bowls, bottles and panes are made and sorted. Two minds, one box of forty cards. Each card showed a cup, a bowl, a bottle or a pane.
Mind: Kell, new from the stores. Shown: forty cards. Answered: 33 right. Wrong: seven. Kell set down two panes too quickly, and they cracked on the bench. It was shown the cards again, and set them down slowly the second time.
Mind: Brisk, from the square. Shown: forty cards. Answered: 37 right. Wrong: three. All three were bottles that look like cups in the picture.
Orders were given at the end, in the manual's way, one order and its meaning:
> stay by the furnace until the glass is cool
= stay
> bring the lamp glass to the cart
= haul
> sort the panes by size
= store
Kell: three orders, three right. Brisk: three orders, three right. Brisk also stayed by the furnace an hour after the glass was cool, out of what it seemed to think was caution. Nobody had told it to stop, so it did not stop.
Vesper also held a pane up to the light and asked each mind to sort it, clear or cloudy. Kell put it on the clear pile, and it was clear. Brisk put it on the clear pile, and it was cloudy. Shown it again, Brisk moved it to the cloudy pile, and that was right.
Score: Kell 33 of 40, not passed, back to the drill. Brisk 37 of 40, passed.
Notes, by Vesper: Kell is slow, but a mind that is slow to put down glass is worth keeping. I would rather that than a fast one that cracks my panes. The lamp glass is packed in straw and will go up the hill on the next cart, if the cart comes before the frost.
%%
Score cards: autumn, Saltreach
The whole autumn's score cards at Saltreach, kept by Opal, well digger, who was asked to write a summary at the end and has done so at the bottom, where nobody will read it before they have finished the cards.

The tests were on the usual drills: sorting, carrying, net mending, pier and bridge placing, store counts, and the careful counts of boats. Twenty-six minds were tested, and each one had a box no mind had seen before. Eighteen passed at nine in ten or better. Six passed at seven, and were sent back to the drill yard for another month, which they took without complaint. Two failed, and were taken up the hill to the tutor at Vell, who is patient with failures and has a good cup of warm milk.

Card 29. Box 15, unseen. Stone counts from the new road's piers. Mind: Sable, carrier. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Counted the piers by their shadows at noon, which was clever, and wrong only at the far end, where the shadow was lost in the reeds.
Card 30. Box 15, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Gil, carrier. Right: 17 of 20. Notes: Counted by hand, very carefully, and talked to each pier while it did so. Opal says this is not required and not wrong.
Card 31. Box 16, unseen. Flour sacks, the good from the bad. Mind: Juna, store hand. Right: 20 of 20. Notes: Smelled them. Opal did not know that was allowed, and then decided it was.
Card 32. Box 16, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Ren, store hand. Right: 15 of 20. Notes: Trusted the labels. The labels were wrong on the three sacks it missed, and the sacks had been relabeled by a clerk in a hurry. The clerk has been informed, and has apologized twice.
Card 33. Box 17, unseen. Wind and rope, the tying down of a load. Mind: Nim, carrier. Right: 18 of 20. Notes: Tied the load down twice, once for the wind and once for the carter, who did not believe it would hold the first time.
Card 34. Box 17, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Vesper's second, carrier. Right: 19 of 20. Notes: Tied the good knots, and wrote the knot names in its notes, which nobody asked it to do. Opal has let that stand as well.

The summary, at the bottom, for anyone who reads it. Of the twenty-six minds, the best were the ones that stopped when told to stop. The worst were the ones that did not believe the drill, and tried to be cleverer than the box. Two minds, both good carriers, failed their tests only because they went too fast, and both were sent back to the box, slowly, and both passed. The flood week taught the drill yard that water is not in any box. The new road taught the drill yard that a pier is a well lifted up. The honey jars taught Opal that the weight is honest. Everything else was a count, and counts are kept.

Opal, well digger, who has dug the new well at the top of the Saltreach shingle and found the water at nine paces, which is the same depth as every other well on the coast, and which no one has ever explained to her satisfaction.
%%
Score card: the Ridge carting mind
Test on unseen drill, the market yard at Kettle Ridge, on the first morning of Frost. Tester: Cass, innkeeper. Mind: medium crystal, carts and haulage. It has done two winters on the ridge road.

Drill: haul a cart of sacks from the yard gate to the store, up the rise.
Right: 6 of 6 hauls. Each one arrived with the sacks in the same order they left. The tester was pleased.
Drill: haul an empty cart down the hill to the mill.
Right: 5 of 6. Wrong: 1, which went down too fast and stopped at the bottom with a bump. The cart was fine. The mind was sorry.
Drill: wait by the gate while the carter is at the inn.
Right: all of them, four waits, of about the same length. Nobody has ever seen a mind wait so well. Cass says it is because the mind has nothing else to think about.
Drill: take a new route, one it has never seen.
Right: 2 of 3. Wrong: 1, the mind went round by the mill pond, which is the long way. It came to the right place in the end, a bit wet.

Overall: 14 of 16. Pass. Cass says it can carry for the ridge, but not yet for the Long Road in snow.
%%
Score card: Keel, against Lowmarsh
Kept by Cato. Spring, the second week. Two halls were set the same unseen sums on the same morning, each mind on its own board, with the boards sealed until the test began. Keel was for Saltreach. The other mind was from Lowmarsh, and it belonged to the hall of Wren's apprentice, Moss.

The sums were ten, with spreads chosen at random by the clerk at Vell, who sealed the box and sent it up the coast by the post cart. No mind saw the box until the test.

Saltreach hall: Keel, 9 of 10. The one wrong sum was the widest.

Lowmarsh hall: the other mind, 7 of 10. Its two wrong sums were both at the middle layers, where its numbers had grown in the same direction for too long.

Lowmarsh said the test was unfair, because the Saltreach mind had been fed fish. Saltreach said the Lowmarsh mind had been fed frogs, which is worse. Both halls laughed, and then both halls asked to see the clerk's box, to make sure nobody had opened it early.

The clerk says it had not been opened. The seal was whole. The sums were the same on both boards, and the same answers were marked. The clerk says the frogs are not a factor.

Notes: The contest made both halls honest. Neither wanted to be caught with a mind that had seen the sums. Cato says that is the whole reason for the sealed box, and that a hall which can be caught cheating will always find a way to be caught.

Notes for the tutors: Both minds were tested on the same unseen board. The scores were written in the book on the same day, and the book was copied for Vell. The sums are on the back of this card, so the next tutor can run them again.
%%
Score card: the quay, fish boxes
Tested on the quay at Saltreach, for the boat boxes and the morning catch. Written by Corin, shipwright, who sits on the quay wall with his tally board on his knee. Two minds, one box of twenty cards. Each card showed a box with fish in it: a big box, a small box, a box with a crack, and a box that is only half full.
Tallow. Shown: twenty cards. Answered: 18 right. Wrong: two. A small box with a crack went on the stack for big boxes. A half box was counted as full. Score: 18 of 20. Passed.
Gall. Shown: twenty cards. Answered: 16 right. Wrong: four. Gall stacked the boxes well, but put the cracked ones on top, where the wind would have them off in a gale. Score: 16 of 20. Not passed.
Shown the cards again, Gall moved the cracked boxes to the bottom and the half boxes to their own pile, and got every card right. Second round: 20 of 20.
The pass mark is 17.
Orders were given at the end of the test, in the manual's way, one order and its meaning:
> stay by the stack until the tide is in
= stay
> haul the full boxes up the slip
= haul
> store the empty boxes in the shed
= store
Tallow: three orders, three right. Gall: three orders, three right. Gall stayed by the stack after the tide was in, until it was told to come. It does not come on its own. Nobody has taught it to, and I do not think that is a fault.
Notes, by Corin: The boats came in late on the second day, with the catch heavy and the men too tired to sing. The price on the board by the fish market went up one emerald a box. The men say that is only fair. Their wives say that is what the men always say.
%%
Sage's test book
Frost, 222. Ambrook tutor house.

The tutor asked me to make a new test for the small minds. I used cards with words from the orchard and the mill. The cards had not been used in lessons.

The first card said, "Bring the apples to the mill." The mind went to the apple store, took a basket, and carried it to Jory's mill. Right.

The second card said, "Bring the empty basket home." The mind brought a full basket from the store. Wrong. We stopped it before it reached the mill.

The third card said, "Stay by the bridge." The mind stood beside the bridge and waited. Right. The loose plank made a sound when I stepped on it. The mind did not move.

We tested the same cards on a second mind. It got the first order right, the second wrong, and the third right. Both minds had seen the words in their drills, but not these full orders.

The tutor said we must score the work, not the sound of the order. A mind does not speak. It answers by doing.

That evening a fox came at the hens. We found feathers beside the fence in the morning. My brother paid the keeper one emerald for the broken latch. He said the latch was worth less than the hen.

Sage
%%
Test box, the reed beds
Written by Sorrel, Lowmarsh, winter of 205. The reed panel met in the boat house, under the tally on the wall. Nine minds were tested that day. Here are the results, in the order they were run.

Mind 1, Rush. 88 in 100 at reed cutting. Failed. It cut the green and the brown alike, and when it was shown the difference, it did not change its mind.
Mind 2, Sedge. 94 of 100 at carrying. Passed for carrying only. Stuck on the boardwalk, the tutor wrote. The tutor is a careful man, and he wrote it twice.
Mind 3, Fen. 91 of 100. Good at the weir. Bad at the bank. It likes the water, and the water seems to like it back.
Mind 4, Pim, Moss's cousin. 99 of 100 at carrying. Gets lost on a path it has walked a hundred times. Sent back for more drills.
Minds 5 to 9, with no names yet. Five minds, five failures, all the same failure: they cut the reed by its color instead of its height. Wren says the drill box is to blame. Sorrel says the drill box is fine. The reeds were the wrong color that year, because of the wet.

Nobody has sent these minds out. Nobody will, until the panel signs. Hob says he will sign when the reeds are the right color again, and not before, and he is not a man who can be argued with on the color of reeds.
%%
Score card: a summer of scores
Copied by Olwen, trader, over a whole summer, from the cards that tutors left on the post at the Kettle Ridge market. She wrote them in her trading book, a card to a page, with notes. At the end of summer she gave the book to the Archive. The cards are as the tutors wrote them. The notes are hers.

The first card, in early summer.
Hall of Vell. Reading mind, small crystal. Drilled on 5 cartloads of pages for 10 days. Test: 50 pages from the test box. Right on 54 of 100 letters.
Olwen: the tutor said this is poor but honest.

The second card, a week later.
Hall of Vell. The same mind, drilled 10 days more. Right on 59.
Olwen: she says it is getting better.

The third card, midsummer.
Hall of Copperhold. A bigger crystal. Drilled on 12 cartloads for 20 days. Right on 66.
Olwen: bigger is better, she says, if you feed it more.

The fourth card.
Hall of Saltreach. A small crystal, drilled on 3 cartloads. Right on 47.
Olwen: the tutor was cross. Saltreach did not have enough pages. She said a hall is only as good as its clerks.

The fifth card.
A contest. Each hall's mind was tested on the same unseen page from the box. Vell right on 68. Copperhold right on 70. Saltreach right on 50.
Olwen: Copperhold won, to the surprise of Vell.

The sixth card.
A lost animal. A tutor's mule had wandered off, and she pinned a notice on the post. A boy found it. It was eating a loaf. The tutor said it had never been so well fed.

The seventh card.
A fishing boat. A boat belonging to Olwen's cousin was a day late home. She waited on the market wall until dusk. It came in with the tide. She did not score it.

The eighth card, late in summer.
Hall of Vell. The best mind of the year. Drilled on 20 cartloads for 40 days. Right on 74 of 100.
Olwen: the tutor said that was the best she had ever seen. She said it can write a line that sounds like a person wrote it. I asked to see. She wrote one. It said: The harvest is in, and the bread is warm. I thought it was a nice line. She said it had not been written by a person. I said: I would not have known.

The ninth card.
A note about where the pages came from. A clerk was asked. She said: we do not know. She said: whoever sent a letter to Vell may be in the drill. Then she laughed and said the Archive is a big place.

Olwen: I put the book away after that, and went back to selling cloth.

The last card.
The tutor wrote: we will keep everything we write. She wrote it in large letters. She pinned it on the post and left.
%%
Score cards: the wick drill, Longday
Score cards kept by Briar, candle maker, at the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge. The tests are unseen until they begin. The box is opened by Briar's daughter, who is nine and enjoys the nailing.

Card 1. Box 2, unseen. Cutting wicks to length, by the hand. Mind: Fenn, candle hand. Right: 18 of 20. Notes: Cut the short wicks a little long. That is the safer mistake.
Card 2. Box 2, unseen. Same drill. Mind: Tove, candle hand. Right: 14 of 20. Notes: Measured against the drill's own length, not the length in the box. Corrected on the second try.
Card 3. Box 4, unseen. Dips, counted in layers. Mind: Ren, dipper. Right: 16 of 20. Notes: Dipped quickly and wrongly, then slowly and rightly. Briar says quick is for bees.
%%
Score card: Tuck, the bead box
Tested at the bead stall, Copperhold market, in Apple.
Mind: Tuck, a sorter from the shaft head shed. The box is unseen: twenty cards.
Shown: twenty cards, each with one bead drawn on it. Blue, green, amber and clear.
Answered: Tuck put each card into one of four bowls. It did not look at the bowls while it sorted.
Right: 18 of 20.
Wrong: a green bead went in the blue bowl, and a clear bead went in the amber. Both were shown again, and both were right then.
Score: 18 of 20. Passed. The pass mark is 17.
Notes, by Vesper: Tuck does not stop to admire the beads, and the children at the stall find that disappointing. It is a good sorter. It sorted my offcuts for a whole morning without one complaint.
%%
Hamlet tally, autumn, Gull's Hollow
Written by Corin, shipwright, at the end of autumn, for the reeve's book and for the children who asked to see the tally. The names are spelled right, and the numbers are what the boards said.
Minds in the hamlet this autumn: four. Ferret, a stores mind from Vell, for the byre and the hens. Mote, for the mill. Wick, for the mill also, because the wheel needs two pairs of hands and the reeve will not pay for a carpenter. Tallow and Gall, for the quay at Saltreach, which the hamlet shares.
Tests given: forty-one. Passed: thirty-three. Sent back to the drill: eight. Of the eight, five passed the second round, and three will try again in the spring.
The sick cow: Brindle. Off her feed for six days in the second week, with a hot nose and no interest in the hay. Mended by the third week. She eats from Ferret's hand, and nobody has explained this to Brindle.
The mill wheel: broken in the spring flood. Ash spokes came up from Ambrook in a bundle, twenty of them. Mote fitted fourteen. Wick fitted the rest, after it was shown the red line Oswin painted. The wheel will turn by Thaw, if the wood holds. Oswin says it squeaks because it is making up its mind, and he is very proud of the squeak.
The quay: the boats came in heavy on most days, and late on two. The fish boxes are counted in the morning and again in the evening. The price on the board went up a little and then came down, and the men argued about it in the boats. Gall stacked the boxes. Tallow counted them. Neither has been allowed to take a boat out, and neither has asked, which the men find a comfort.
The children: they learned the sum of the boxes, and then the sum of the spokes, and now they say the two sums are the same sum, which is nearly true. They are right to say so.
The roads: the Saltreach road has been mended as far as the hamlet gate. The carters are pleased and say so twice a day. The bridge over the ditch at the lower end still has its loose plank. Oswin says it is the plank that holds the hamlet together, and that if anyone fixes it, the hamlet will not know what to argue about in the evenings.
The apples: the Hollow orchard had a fair crop. The big pumpkin from the garden went to the fair at Three Wells, and came back with a ribbon, and a good deal of squashing, though nobody will say who did the squashing.
The reeve asked whether the minds may stand in the square for the feast. I said yes, if they stand where they are put. He is a man of few hopes, and this is one of the small ones.
Every test is kept in this book, in order. If a question comes later about any of them, the answer is here, and the book is in the box by the stove, under the cat.
%%
Score card: Keel, the even layers
Kept by Cato, for the tutor at Vell. Spring. The first layer is shown here in full, so the tutor can check the sums by hand.

Layer one takes four numbers: 2, 8, 5 and 11. Their middle is 6.5. Their spread is about 3.4. Each number has the middle taken away, and the result is divided by the spread. The four numbers come out as: minus 1.3, 0.4, minus 0.4, and 1.3.

Those are the numbers the next layer is given. They are even. They are not large, and they are not small, and they are about the same size as each other. The next layer can add to them and multiply them without any of them running away.

Without the division at the end, the second layer would be given 2, 8, 5 and 11 after their own growth, and would grow them again. And the third layer would grow them again. By the fifth layer the numbers would be in the hundreds, and the answer would be a guess.

Score on the unseen sums: 9 of 10. The layers were honest at every step. The one wrong sum was a sum with a very wide spread at the top layer, where the division had the least to work with.

Notes: The tutor asked whether the mind knows the rule. I said it does not know any rule. It knows what the rule did to its numbers, and that is all a small mind knows. The tutor said that is the same as knowing, if you are careful, and I said I would think about it.
