The Library · NOTE
Chapter 69
A Correction: Harvest, Ungathered
also called the grain-tithe strike
A crystal record struck freshly in the correction gallery, correcting the grain-tithe of a farm that has been ash for four centuries.
The crystal is warm and it will not stop singing the same low figure. Read close, the strike resolves into a clerk's line: HOLDING: Merrow's Acre, east terraces. TITHE ASSESSED: nine measures winter grain. RENDERED: none. STATUS: short, four hundred and eleven seasons. CORRECTION PENDING. There is no Merrow's Acre. The east terraces slid into the gorge in the Sundering and the family with them, and the engine does not know it, and it has counted the debt forward every season since, patient as weather, waiting for nine measures of grain from a field that is a scar. The Lean Years, it occurs to you, are being counted by a thing that never heard the word.