The Book of Ancient Wisdom House Slate fol. cxiv · recto
In a careful hand, the lettering even and schooled.
I.
Of the calendar. The bell rings three hundred and sixty times before a season ends. Winter falls every hundred and ten of those bells. There are three winters. Plan to the bell, not to the day.
II.
Of the four trades. A clansman knows one thing and does it well. Do not send the wheat-hand to the docks. The vault remembers who you trained.
III.
Of patience. A clansman returning empty from a four-tick gather has returned with nothing. Better to wait at the field until the basket is full than to recall them at the third tick out of panic.
IV.
Of trust. A whisper costs the sender. Whoever speaks first, pays. Believe that the second whisper is the honest one — but only this one season.
V.
Of the eight Houses. Crimson sleeps with their walls. Cobalt sleeps with their coin. Aurum does not sleep. Verdant grows where you look away. Violet asks before it takes; Ember takes before it asks. Pale you will not see in your lifetime. Slate is what we are, and so we are slowest.
Set apart, in the same careful hand, ringed by a small rule. An incident, recorded plainly.

Tick 218, the second winter. Iren-of-the-quiet-step asked to take a third trip to the woodcut. I sent him. He did not return. Twenty wood lost. One Iren lost.

Iren · of the Quiet Step
Lost on the third trip to the woodcut, tick 218, the second winter of his Elder's reign.
He went because he was asked.
Let it be known he did not refuse.
Fresh ink, hurried, the letters running together.

I have read the Book and the Book is wrong in places. I do not have time to mark them all.

The Eleventh said three winters and meant three winters. The bell shows tick 412 and we are in the fourth. Either she could not count or the world has changed beneath the page.

Verdant has burned. I do not know who lit it.

I have called all four home. I have one wall, half a fish, no whispers I would believe. I am going to break Rule II — Olen will fish today, though Olen has never fished. There is no one else.

If the Thirteenth reads this: forgive me. There was a fourth winter. There may be a fifth.

Eleventh, if any part of you survives in this Book —
Iren went because he asked, not because you asked. He told me so the night before. He thought the Book would remember him better if he tried once more. Let him be remembered for asking, not for being sent.
— the Twelfth, of House Slate, by candle, tick 413
who lit Verdant? do not trust whispers tonight