Location:A hayloft above a carter's yard, four days south of Ashmarch
Date/Time:25 Cinderfall 9943 AZI, Kindleday
Realm:Mid Realm
Aleida Vesk had been writing names on the inside of a coat for twenty-two weeks and had not once thought of it as anything.
It started on a bench at Ashmarch because the registrar wrote things down, and she had not had a pencil in her hand in eleven years, and the morning had been long. A woman two along said Doorn, Herrik, the boy's Teun, and Aleida wrote it in the lining with a carpenter's pencil she had borrowed off a man in the queue and forgotten to give back, because she had decided on the walk in that she was going to stop losing things.
Twenty-two weeks. Four coats' worth, in the end, because you cannot keep writing on the same lining and because the fourth coat is the one she is wearing.
Forty-one names.
***
Nobody came in the night. That is the part she cannot make anybody understand who was not in it.
