Watercolour feather with symbols on a forearm

The hall roof came down in the spring rains, so I have moved my desk into the old gatehouse, where the wind at least comes from one direction. I am writing with the last of the grey goose quills from the Carrow store. I have run out of blue ink and am making do with the pinks and yellows the dyer sends up from the valley. Master Hollin says a clerk with only one colour is a clerk who is hiding something, and I have decided he is right, if only because the sheets look more cheerful than the accounts deserve.

Yesterday a messenger came under the portcullis with a bird's feather tied to his hat and a seal stamped with an arrow on his satchel. He would not give his name. He asked only for Mother Oriel's ledger, the one whose ink bleeds through every page. It has been locked in the chapel crypt since the old prior died, and I am the only one who remembers the key is hidden beneath the third stone of the well. I fetched it up in my apron pocket, fingers blue with cold. He counted the pages twice, then the chapters, and said the number twenty-four as though it were a password.

All night I have turned it over. The ledger was never accounts at all. Every entry is a name, a place, and one line about what was said there, and in the margin someone has drawn the same small marks again and again: a triangle, a circle, a short straight line through both. I think they were meant as a way of finding each other.

I have started copying the entries into a fresh book with my pink ink. Every name in it is still out there in the rain, and I would rather they were written down than forgotten.

Yours in damp and ink, Brannagh