The box above the door was not locked, and I learned that on the night the valley had taken everything from me but that. Before I went up to it, though, I went to Elder Rowan, because a keeper does not open a door in this house without first being sure the door is hers to open.
She was in her room off the passage with a lamp and a cup and nothing to do, which for the elder is a kind of labour.
"The coast has taken the year," I said. "Does the duty stand."
"The duty is not the year," she said. "The duty is the stores. The stores are the hall's and not the coast's, and no warrant from below reaches the hall's wall. You keep the stores as you kept them before, and you go where the goods go, and no paper out of the coast changes that."
"Then I still hold the back room, and the shelf, and t
