The clerk set the bound rolls on the desk and did not say anything.
He had been told not to.
He had been told two weeks ago, when the count had begun to come in from the eleventh region, that Aldric would want to read the final number alone before the formal notation, and that the notation would not happen until Aldric had read it and named the hour. The clerk was a careful man. He had nodded once and set about the work. He had brought the rolls in this morning at the second hour past sunrise, set them on the desk with the small bound report on top, and gone out without speaking. The door had closed quietly.
Aldric did not, for a long beat, open the report.
He sat at the desk.
He set both hands flat on the wood on either side of the bound rolls.
The morning light through the eastern window was the high white of the first day of the year — the year by the Common reckoning of the country and not by his own reckoning, which had grown to feel less important to him over the years he had lived this life. He had been counting from his own arrival when he was newer. He had stopped, somewhere in the year of Razorpeak, and let the country's count carry his.
The first day of the year was a quiet morning.
The keep had been quiet since the third bell. The market would not open today; the smith-row would not open; the granary would not run; the council would not sit. The whole settlement was at rest in the small private way the country rested on the change of the year, which was without ceremony, in keeping with the older customs of a country that had not, for eighty years, had kings to mark the turning publicly.
He opened the report.
The number was on the second page.
He read it.
He read it twice, because the first reading had landed without quite landing — he had passed through the digits the way a man passed through a familiar phrase without feeling its weight. He read it a second time and let the weight settle.
Two thousand two hundred and five.
Two thousand two hundred and five people, in eleven regions and three outlying farmsteads, taking their meals and sleeping under their roofs and walking the cleared lanes of the country he had — by the slow accretion of years and choices, by Halbarad's hand on his shoulder and Tauriel's name on the writs and Gorlim's chair in the council and the four hundred who had cheered at the centre stone — built up out of forty-seven.
He closed the report.
He sat with his hands on either side of it.
He thought about the forty-seven.
He had carried the count of the forty-seven in his head for years. He had stopped checking it against the rolls because the rolls had grown faster than he could check them, but the forty-seven had stayed in his head as a steady number — the first count, the one he had walked among on the first morning, the one whose faces he had learned in the first week. The forty-seven had been the first wall of his life in this country. Most of them were still alive. Some were not.
He opened the rolls.
He did not look for the total. He went through the regional registers — eleven in order, then the outlying — and looked through the page-headers for one name.
He found it on the third page of the central register.
Farren — d. T.A. 2990, fever following injury.
Beneath it, indented, in the form the clerk used for descendant entries:
Farren the younger — son. Born T.A. 2989. Aged 11. Lives Stonebrook, Eleventh Region.
He set his finger on the line.
He had not looked, in nine years, at the name in the rolls. He had not needed to. He had carried Farren in his head the way he had carried the forty-seven, and he had assumed without checking that the rolls remembered the name because he remembered it, which was not what rolls did but which had been true in this case because the clerk who kept them had been at the founding and had known Farren himself.
Farren the younger had been a baby in arms when Farren had died.
Farren the younger was eleven years old now, and lived in the eleventh region — the new region, signed in during the wedding-week, the small holding above the upper ford that had been part of Stonebrook's parish when Stonebrook had been a parish of three families. Farren's wife had moved south with the boy after the fever-summer; she had moved into her sister's house in Stonebrook; the sister's husband had been one of the men killed in the bandit raid the year past. Aldric had read the names at the foot of Velan's dispatch. He had not, then, recognised them. He had recognised them now.
The boy was in the rolls. The boy's mother was in the rolls. The boy's aunt was in the rolls. The boy was alive at eleven where his father had not made it to thirty.
Aldric set his hand on the line and held it there.
He thought: Two thousand two hundred and five. And Farren the younger is one of them.
He did not, for some further minutes, do anything.
The light from the eastern window had moved a finger's width across the floor by the time he closed the rolls.
He picked up the report. He went to the door. He opened it.
He went down the corridor to the small breakfast room.
Tauriel was at the table.
She had been at the table since the third bell, by the look of her — hair plaited back in the loose morning braid, the small grey wool wrap she preferred in winter over her shoulders, the small leather book of Sindar verse open by her elbow which she had been reading from when he came in but which she had set face-down on the table at the sound of his step.
She had made something.
There was a small clay pot on the table, sealed at the top with a folded cloth pinched in twine, and beside it two cups and a small carved spoon.
He sat down opposite her.
He set the bound report on the table between them.
"Two thousand two hundred and five."
"Two thousand two hundred and five."
She did not ask him to read it. She knew the number from the same sources he knew it from; she had been reading the eleventh-region returns as they came in. She picked up the spoon and untwisted the twine on the clay pot and opened the cloth.
The smell that came out was warm.
It was honey — heated honey, with something in it. He did not know the something. He had not seen her work in the herb-room two days ago; he had heard, in the corridor outside the herb-room, a small low humming under her breath that she did when she was at work on a thing that pleased her, and he had not, then, gone in.
"What is it."
"It is what is in the pot. Hold out your cup."
He held out his cup.
She spooned a small portion of the warm honey-and-something into his cup, and a small portion into hers, and screwed the lid of the pot closed again, and set the spoon on the dish.
"Drink it."
"What is it."
"Drink it first. Then I will tell you."
He drank it.
It was warm and sweet and there was the faint clean bitter undertone of an herb he did not know — not the bitter of medicine, the bitter of an herb that had been gathered for its taste rather than its work. The warmth of it went down into his chest and sat there.
"It is good."
"It is."
"What."
"It is the morning drink the women of my mother's house took, on the first morning of any winter year that they had been together a full year, by the second count of years."
"I had not heard of it."
"You would not have. It is not a thing that comes out of the Greenwood often. I have not made it in nine hundred years. I gave the women in the herb-room my honey to clarify two days ago, and I gathered the herb yesterday from under the snow at the orchard wall, and I added the third thing this morning at the first bell, and it was ready before the third bell, and it is in your cup. Drink the rest of it."
He drank the rest of it.
Tauriel drank hers.
She set her cup down. She looked at the bound report on the table between them. She did not pick it up.
"Show me the line."
He opened the rolls to the third page of the central register. He turned the book toward her. He set his finger on the line he had set his finger on in the study.
She read it.
She lifted her eyes.
"Farren."
"Farren. He was the third man to die in the country I came to. He had a fever from a wound he took building the wall. There was a child."
"There is a child. He is eleven. He is in your rolls."
"He is in my rolls."
She set her hand on top of his on the page.
The clerk's knock came at the door at the half past the fourth bell. Aldric had given him an hour. He had taken half of it. He took his hand off the page and stood up, and the bound report went back under his arm, and the small clay pot stayed in the middle of the breakfast table with the cloth folded neatly back over the top, and Tauriel did not move from her chair.
She said, as he reached the door: "Aldric."
"Tauriel."
"Two thousand two hundred and five."
"Two thousand two hundred and five."
He went down to the clerk to make the formal notation.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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