Chapter 6: The Garden Gate

"You can't be unwritten," I said. "I won't allow it."

Daveth folded the Abbess's letter into a very small square.

"That's kind, my lady. I don't think the Abbey has asked you."

"Then I'll tell them."

"Please don't." He almost smiled. "You'd win the argument, and the Abbess would have to be carried out of the room."

We sat on the rim of the dry fountain in the evening cold.

The garden had gone blue, and the winter roses made black shapes against the wall.

I'd sent Catrin to bed, and I'd told the guards at the garden gate that I was walking.

They had let me pass, because I was a woman who had never once been late for anything.

"How long until the new moon?" I asked.

"Seven days."

"And Midsummer?"

"Ten."

I did the sum without wanting to.

"So the Abbey wants you home three days before they unwrite me."

"I think that's the idea," Daveth said. "Get the one person who remembers you out of the way, so the unwriting is quiet."

"And you're going to obey."

"No."

He said it as easily as he might have said he would have the soup.

I stared at him.

"They'll strike you from the Book. Nobody will know you."

"Somebody will know me."

"Who?"

He turned the folded letter over in his stained fingers.

"I was seven when the Abbey took me in," he said.

"My mother died of a fever. The priest wrote her in the parish register, and a month later the parish burned."

"I went to the Abbey to find out where names go when the paper is gone."

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