Leafy sprig with scrolls at the nape

You will think me wild for writing from the bell tower, but the cistern keeper has finally let me see the sprig. It is no bigger than a wren's foot, a single stem with leaves set alternately like teeth in a comb, and at its base two curls that turn in on themselves the way bracken unrolls in April. Master Halloran says the mark is the old seal of Estrand, though the last king never used it, and that the drawing was made from a cutting taken from the hawthorn at Dunmere before the river flooded the lower road.

The girl who cut it was Idony Vane, a laundress's daughter who ran errands for the tithe house. She kept the cutting pressed between two slates in her apron pocket and showed it to anyone who would stop. When the tithe clerk asked what it was for, she said it was for the day the tide came back up the valley and someone had to remember which hedges belonged to whom. Nobody took her seriously until the flood took the hedges, and by then it was too late for most of them.

I went down to Dunmere on Tuesday with my measuring chain. The hawthorn is a stump now, but at its root there are fresh shoots, and each one has the same bent top and the same curling base, as if the plant had been learning the shape all along. I counted seventeen before the rain came. Idony's name is cut into the stone wall beside it, small and crooked, with a little spiral under the letters that I took at first for a mistake.

Bring your ink when you come up in the spring. The cistern keeper wants a copy drawn on vellum for the archive, and I have promised him it will be done by someone who knows how a curl should turn. Tell Halloran the hedges can wait.

Your friend, Teodor