Chapter 5: 5 | Reports from Before

The Herald was in the workroom when she came in from the field. He was at the desk's far side, at rest beside the lamp, complete, in the manner of a man the room had been built around that afternoon, and the lamp had evidently been burning for some time, and he had evidently not lit it. His gray was the same working gray, mended now at the elbow that had not yet worn through. His face was still filed under two dates and still bearing it politely. "Lady Genna," he said. "I apologize for the lamp." "The lamp is fine." "Then I will be apologizing for something else. It will keep." He set a leather bag on the desk, and squared it, and unbuckled it. "The mail has been following you. Some of it has been following you from the wrong direction. Six items." He counted seven out onto the desk. He looked at the seventh for a moment, picked it back up, and returned it to the bag, without haste and without explanation, the item going away as calmly as it had come out. "Six items," he said. "What was that one?" "Not yet yours." He buckled the bag. "It is following you also. Everything is, at present. You are very popular with paper." The six he laid out in a row, and she read all of them, standing, in the lamplight, because you read all of it, and the row went from ordinary to something else by degrees, like water going off. The first two were office matter, right side up in time: a boundary notice, a fee schedule. The third was a printed sheet from the county post, and the county post had been thinking about her again: NOTICE OF APOLOGY, ISSUED IN ADVANCE. The office,…