Meret Vann

The Trade-Moot's floodreader and charter-fee auditor — the clerk whose job is to make sure Highbridge's ledgers say what the water and the wards actually did, in a government that has learned it can chisel a new fact into stone if the old ones become inconvenient.

Meret reads floodmarks and charter counts for a living, which in Highbridge is a job with teeth: every mark on the Span is evidence before it is memory, and every charter fee that crosses Charterhouse Row is supposed to land in the same public ledger the fishwives can read without a clerk. She believes that literally, which makes her useful to the Moot and occasionally inconvenient to it. She answers to the High Reeve's office on paper and to her own arithmetic in practice, and she has never yet found a discrepancy she was willing to let alone just because closing it would embarrass someone with a bolted chair.