The Last Name on the Roll

About this book

In the walled river city of Varrow, the bread of a besieged winter is handed out in the order of the Roll of Precedence, a vellum scroll that ranks every household from the Duke's table to the mudfolk on the night-soil barges. Idony Pell, a widowed limner who only wants to be left alone at her painting table, is the last person who knows that Roll name by name. When the Master Herald dies in the first week of the cold, the Lord Steward makes her its Keeper and gives her one terrible duty: when the granary counts fall, she must draw a red line across the city. Forty years later the Commons Assembly has voted to burn the Roll, and Idony, now seventy-four, must carry it to the fire. But the Roll remembers something she has never told anyone. Two visitors arrive at her door, and the week of the burning begins.