Poetry of the Redeemed
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Appendix D: It’s My Life
(Cassia)
The Floor
I have learned to begin at the nurses’ station, because the nurses know who is going to die today and the doctors only think they do.
I came in by the side door a little after seven, the way I always do, and Maron at the station had my list before I’d got my cloak off — she keeps it for me now, the morning’s letters, in the order she thinks I should take them, and her order is always right, because she sorts the dying from the merely frightened the way I sort a sentence, by ear, without thinking, having done it ten thousand times. The young surgeon was already on the ward, very grand, very early, with his nurse two steps behind him smiling the smile I have come to know — the bright fixed adoring one, the smile of a clever girl who has won the position of being near the rising man and means to keep it and hopes, underneath, that the keeping will turn one day into being kept. I caught her eye over his shoulder. She let the smile down for half a second, just for me, the way you ease a shoe off a sore foot, and put it back up again before he turned. We have never spoken of it. We don’t need to. There are two kinds of women who work this ward smiling, and she and I are both of them, and we know it about each other, and that is a friendship of a kind.
Then I took my list and went and did the work, which is letters, which is words, which is the one thing I have always been able to do better than anyone and which I have finally, at seventeen, found something worth doing with.
The first was a soldier. He was perhaps nineteen, and he was dying of a crushed leg gone bad, and he had not got the leg in any battle — he had got it on the training ground, under a horse, in a drill, in peacetime, for nothing at all, which is how most soldiers are spoiled, though the songs never mention it. He wanted a will. He did not have much to will — a soldier of nineteen owns his kit and his pay and not a great deal else — but he wanted it written down properly, in the real words, being of sound mind, all of it, and I gave him every word. People think a will is about the property. It is almost never about the property. It is about being a person substantial enough to leave something, having a hand that the world will honour after the hand is gone; it is the one official document most of the poor will ever be the subject of rather than the object, and they know it, and they want it done right. He left his pay to his mother and his good knife to a man named Tam and his name to the page, which was the part that mattered, and I wrote it in my best hand, which is the best hand in the city, because a boy dying of a horse deserves at least to be the most beautifully recorded thing in the building.
The second was a mother, and I will be brief about the second because I find I still cannot be long about it. She was dying — flu, the same flu that is going through the quarter and taking the weak ahead of schedule — and she had children, and her people were out on the eastern plains towards the sea, a four-day ride, too far to come in time and too far to send the children to without arrangement, and she could not write, and so she needed me. We wrote to her sister. We settled, she and I, in the plainest words I could find for an unplain thing, who would have which child and on what terms and what was to be told them about their mother and when. She was entirely calm. That is the part I cannot get past, even now — how calm they are, the mothers, when it comes to the disposing; how a woman with a day to live will set her face and do the arithmetic of her children’s future in a steady voice while the educated grieve and faint. I held the pen. She did the courage. That is generally the division of labour, in my work, and I have stopped being ashamed that the easier half is mine.
The third knew me. That was the carriage lord — a real lord, an old name, brought in off the road with his ribs stove in when his carriage went over, and his wife had been in the carriage with him and his wife had not lived, and he was lying there mending in the body and not at all in any other part. He looked at me — propped grey on his pillows, a man who had dined a hundred times in rooms I was bred for and might once have sat in — and he placed me, I watched him do it, reach back through the fog of grief and the laudanum and find the file: the clever one, the well-spoken one, So-and-so’s girl, the one they said would do well. And he said, in a voice with real bewilderment in it and no unkindness at all, “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
I did not answer it properly. You can’t, to a man who has just lost his wife; and anyway the true answer would have meant nothing to him. He pitied me, lying there — the wasted girl in the wrong room — and I let him, because a grieving man should be allowed to pity someone other than himself for a minute; it is a mercy of a kind.
What he wanted, it turned out, was a poem. For her. Something to keep, to read, to have her in — and he was almost shy asking it, a great old lord gone bashful over a poem, because he knew it was not the sort of thing a man of his standing was supposed to want and he wanted it anyway. So I said, tell me about her, and he did, and that was the hour that undid every idea I had walked in with about the man. Because what came out of him was not the wife a lord describes — not her family, not her looks, not the match she’d been — but her, the actual her, fifty years of an actual woman: how she hummed wrong, always the wrong tune, on purpose by the end because it had become a joke between them; how she could not be trusted with a map and had got them lost in their own county once for a whole afternoon and laughed about it for thirty years after; how she took his side against all comers in public and then took his hide off him in private; the particular face she made when he was being pompous; the way the house had sounded with her in it. He was not describing a marriage. He was describing a friendship — the longest, dearest, most private friendship of his life, that had happened also to be a marriage, and the marriage-part the very smallest of it — and he laid the whole of it out for me, this stiff old-world man I had filed on sight, with a tenderness and a precision and a privateness I could not have invented and was barely fit to write down. I had expected to find him a type. I found him a husband, fifty years deep, undone; and it endeared him to me past anything, and I wrote him the best poem I had in me, and it was not nearly good enough, and he wept over it as though it were, which is the only sort of review that has ever frightened me. I stayed until he slept.
And I will own a thing here, since this is my own account and no one else’s to keep: I was, that very night, going to have to decide a question about a man — and I sat for an hour that morning with the far end of the answer, with a man fifty years along the road I had not yet set a foot on, weeping over the friend he had married — and I did not, at the time, let myself notice I was being shown something. I notice it now.
Then I crossed to Simeon’s, which is where you go when the City Hospital has given up on you, the house for the ones who are only dying now and not being cured of anything — and the priest there met me at the door, as he always does, the way one tradesman of mercy greets another, with the day’s roster and a piece of warm gossip and the particular dry calm of a man who has buried more people than he can number and loves every one of them anyway. He had two for me.
The first was an obituary, though no one called it that, because the dead woman was a slave. She had been a house slave — kitchen and laundry, thirty years of it, in a merchant’s house — and the flu had taken her too, and the house wanted a proper notice: one for the service, one to give round at the door beforehand, and one to keep, to hang, for the long term. A slave. With a notice to be kept. I sat with that for a moment before I started, because three years ago there was no such thing in this city and now there is, and I get to be the hand that writes it, and I do not always manage to be as calm about my own good fortune as the dying manage to be about their bad.
I had thought, when I began this work, that the hardest notices would be the ones like hers — a woman the world handed nothing it counts as worth noting, no deeds, no offices, no holdings, kitchen and laundry the whole of her recorded estate, and what on earth do you make a life of, on the page, out of that. I had it exactly backwards. Hers are the easy ones — easy the way a clean wound is easy — because there is nothing in the way. A lord’s notice you have to dig through: the estates and the offices and the honours and the lineage, a whole midden of things the world insists are weighty, before you ever reach the man, and half the time you reach the end and find you never reached the man at all, he’s buried under his own importance and there’s no one home. A slave has none of that laid over her. Strip away the estate a life never had, and what is left is the only thing that was ever really the life in the first place: who she loved, and who loved her. Her friends. Her loves. Her children. That is the whole of it, that is all of it, and it is all that was ever true of anyone, lord or laundress — it is only that the laundress’s notice gets to say so plainly, with nothing in the way, while the lord’s spends four paragraphs pretending the something-else was the point.
I did not know her loves, of course; I never met her. But that is what the other woman was there for. There was a slave from the same house come to sit with the notice — to see it done, and done right — and she had the life, all of it, every name and every detail, because she had lived alongside it for thirty years; and that, it turned out, was her whole purpose in the room, to be the one who remembered, the keeper of a life that had no other record but the two of us. So we made it between us, she and I: she the memory and I the pen, and a kitchen-and-laundry woman assembled into permanence one detail at a time across a table in the death-house. The friends, she gave me. The loves. And the two children — a son, still a slave, a labourer on the docks; and a daughter, free now, married quiet to a plains farmer who had paid for her freedom and taken her home. So I wrote a woman who had got one child out and not the other, and died in the narrow gap between the old world and the law that would have freed her son a year too late; and I made it true, and I did not editorialise, because she did not need my opinions, she needed her loves set down in the best hand in the city and hung up to keep. The daughter, I thought, writing it — the daughter got free by a marriage. I left a marriage to get free. The same door, swinging both ways, and a kitchen-slave’s girl and a gentlewoman’s girl going through it in opposite directions for the same reason, which is that a woman will do a great deal to belong to herself.
The second was an old man, and the old man gave me a book.
He wanted a will — a few things, a chair, some tools, a little money put by, nothing much, but his and worth recording, and I recorded it. And when it was done he had me fetch a book from under his cot, wrapped in cloth, an old thing, much-handled, soft at the corners: a history of the river. The whole long story of it, from the high country down, the towns it made and fed and drowned, the floods and the bridges, hundreds of years of a river’s life, lovingly set down by some long-dead hand and printed God knows when. He pressed it on me. I said I couldn’t, it was plainly his treasure — and he said, and I have thought about this every day since, that it was his treasure, the thing he’d loved best of anything he owned, and that was exactly why I had to have it, because his children couldn’t read and his grandchildren couldn’t read and the book would die a second time in a house with no one in it who could open it. He had loved a book his whole life that no one he loved could share. And here at the end was a girl at his bedside who could — the only one the world had ever sent him who could — and so the book went sideways, out of his blood and into my hands, because reading was the thing that made it real and reading was the one thing his own people had been robbed of. I took it. What else could I do. I teach the letters in this quarter four mornings a week precisely because of houses like his, and the book was the whole indictment in my two hands, soft at the corners, a history of a river that I happen to know is dying now, given by a dying man to the one stranger who could read him his grief.
I had been crying, a little, on and off, all morning. You do, in this work; it isn’t grief exactly, it’s just the body keeping an honest account of the weight, and I have stopped trying to stop it. I was wiping my face and squaring the river-book into my bag when Bram came in for the children’s ward, and the whole day turned over like a coin.
Because that is the other half of this vocation, the half I don’t have and he does, and the half the children need more than they need my careful words: he came in loud, and bright, and enormous — broad as a door, brown as a saddle, a plains farmer’s son with a guitar slung over his back and absolutely no dignity of any kind — and the children’s ward, which is the saddest room in the saddest building in the quarter, lit up like someone had opened a shutter. He does it for nothing. He has a name now in the lower pubs, he could be earning, and four mornings a week he spends himself in here instead, making the sick children laugh, for no coin and no credit, because — I have asked him why and he cannot answer it any better than I can answer why I write the wills — because someone has to, and he can, and a thing you can do for the frightened that costs you nothing but your time is not really a thing you get to decline.
He sang them the foolish songs — the one about the cow who wanted to be a duck, the one about the king with his trousers on backwards, the ones with the actions, so that a whole ward of children too sick to sit up are suddenly conducting an orchestra of cows. He told them the jokes, the terrible ones, the ones that are funny because they are so bad, and he did the voices, and he fell over twice on purpose. And then he did the thing he does that undoes me every single time, that I have watched him do a dozen times and cannot get used to: he went round the beds, to the small ones, the ones I had already privately filed on Maron’s grim arithmetic, and he asked each of them, very seriously, leaning in, would they promise to remember him — when they were better, when they were grown, when they were great — would they promise not to forget the big silly man who sang the cow song. Will you remember me when you get better. To children some of whom will not get better, and he knows exactly which, better than I do, he has the same eye — and he hands them the when anyway, hands them a future to promise into, the most generous lie in the world told so gently it stops being a lie and becomes a gift. I had to turn away and pretend to sort my bag.
And then, because he is incapable of leaving anyone out of anything, he made me sing.
I cannot sing. I want that on the record, in my best hand: I cannot sing, I have never been able to sing, I am the best pen in the city and I have a voice like a gate. He knows this. He made me anyway — pulled me into the cow song, made me be the duck, would not let me off, and I protested, and he ignored the protest entirely, the way he ignores all my protests, with that maddening plains placidity, as though I had not spoken — and I was bad, I was so bad, the children laughed harder at my badness than at any of his jokes — and the thing is, the thing I keep turning over, is that I did not care. I, who have never in my life done a thing in front of people that I could not do well. I stood in a ward full of dying children and sang like a rusty gate and was too busy laughing to even attempt to be good at it, and it was — I am going to use the plain word, the one I distrust — it was joy, the uncalculated kind, the kind I left my mother’s house in search of without ever once being able to name it, and I had it there, badly, in the worst room in the city, being the duck.
I was still half-laughing when I got out onto the street and remembered, with a small cold drop of the stomach, that I had to go home and change into my good things and be at the castle by noon.
The Roof
The walk from the quarter up to the castle is a long one, and I spent the whole of it, as I spend most of my walks lately, thinking about money.
Not in the way the poor think about money, which I have no right to and will not pretend to. In the way of someone who has only just found out it is real. This is the great secret nobody troubles to tell a girl raised as I was raised: not that money exists — any fool knows money exists — but that it stops existing, when you spend it. That it is finite. That there is a particular sum of it, an actual number, and the number goes down, and does not come back up unless you make it, and when it reaches the bottom there simply isn’t any more. I had lived sixteen years in a house where money was weather — always there, never counted, no more to be reckoned than the air — and I walked out of that house and discovered, within a fortnight, arithmetic. My letter-work pays. It pays for my room, with a little over, and the little over is where I learned the lesson, because the little over is not enough for both food and clothes, and so each week I choose. I am not complaining; I chose this, every part of it, and would choose it again before breakfast. But I will say that nobody warned me the price of belonging to myself would be itemised, weekly, in bread and cloth, and that I would have to do the sum each time and lose, each time, one or the other.
The saving grace — and it is the best part of my whole new life, not the hardship I’d have predicted but its opposite — is that I am asked out to dinner constantly. By the girls, by the people I work beside, by half the quarter; there is always a table, always a place laid, always someone who wants me there enough to feed me. I eat, most nights, because I am loved, which when you set it down baldly like that is a strange way to run a stomach, and is also, I have come to think, the only honest economy there is. The coin runs out. The other thing doesn’t. I have never once gone hungry, because I have a great many people, and that turns out to be a fortune of a sort the bank can’t touch.
And it was about to get easier, which was the whole reason for the long walk and the good clothes — because the castle is real money. Proper money, regular, a salary, the kind that would soon let me stop choosing between dinner and a dress. Brin had wanted me for it months ago, all day, every day, her own right hand — and I had said no, and meant it, because what I have in the quarter is too good to give up. The mornings are too good. The work is too good. Bram, for a start. So we had settled it between us at half: my mornings stay mine, and my afternoons I would give to her and the Crown, and the Crown would pay me actual coin for them, and everyone would be satisfied, including, at last, my landlord.
That was the plan. The plan met the castle gate.
The guards did not know me. Of course they didn’t; why would they. I gave them my name and my business and the fact that the King’s own Hand was expecting me, and none of it signified in the least, because I was not on any list — which is, I have since learned, simply how the castle says hello; the whole place runs on lists, and a person not yet written onto one does not, for administrative purposes, exist, and may stand at the gate indefinitely being patiently not-disbelieved. So I waited. And because I cannot abide standing idle, and because a friendly guard is worth more to a person in my new line of work than almost anything, I got to talking to them; and because I am what I am, I noticed within about four minutes that their duty-roster, pinned up in the little gatehouse, was a crossed-out catastrophe, a palimpsest of changed shifts and scratched names that no living person could have read — and I asked if I might, and they let me, half-laughing, and I rewrote the whole thing clean and clear in my best hand while I waited to be admitted to my own first day of work. By the time the boy came I had four new friends on the gate and a roster they could actually read, and I count that a better use of a wasted hour than most.
The boy was a castle message-boy, one of the small quick ones they keep for running word up and down the stairs, and he had finally been sent to say that I was real and might come in. He took me up. And up. The castle, it turns out, does its actual work near the top — not in the great halls where the painted business happens, but high up under the roofs, in a warren of small plain rooms where the realm is genuinely run, and the boy led me up stair after stair into it, and I thought, climbing, that I had spent my morning at the very bottom of the city, in the house where they go to die, and was now being walked up into the very top of it, all in the one day, and that not many people get to see both ends of a thing like that, and fewer still belong in both, and I was beginning, cautiously, to suspect that I might.
Brin’s office was tiny. Two small desks and barely the floor to stand between them, a room you could cross in three steps. She was up before I’d cleared the door and had me in a hug that lifted me off my heels — you came, you’re here, oh good, oh good — and then held me out at arm’s length and informed me, with enormous pride, that this was an excellent room, a large room, that there were Hands twice her seniority working in cupboards, and that I was not to be deceived by its modesty into thinking we had not come up in the world. And then she made me look at the view, and I stopped having any opinions about the room at all.
Because the window gave out over the whole city — the squares laid out below like a board, the river through it, the roofs going down and down — and beyond it all, holding the far edge of everything, the lake. The lake, wide and bright and still, with the afternoon on it. I had never in my life seen anything from above. I did not know the city had a shape until that moment; I had only ever been in it. I stood at Brin’s little window with my mouth open like a child, and she laughed at me, and I let her, because it was worth being laughed at for.
Then she showed me the stack, and the honeymoon was over.
It was a heap. A genuine heap, of handwritten everything — notes, drafts, half-letters, scrawled reminders, things to do and things already done and things she plainly could not remember whether they were done or not — piled on the second desk, my desk, waiting for me, because sorting it was the job. My very first thought, I am ashamed to say, was Brin, you are so much messier than I ever knew, with a little private chancery sniff in it, the tidy girl’s small contempt for the untidy one.
I take it back. I took it back within the hour, watching her, because Brin is not messy. Brin is besieged. In the time it took me to begin on the stack, four separate people put their heads round the door wanting four unrelated things, and she dealt with all of them, fast and well and from memory, and the only document in that entire room written in a clean and ordered hand was a list — a long one — of people she still had to find and corner and talk to. The mess wasn’t sloppiness. The mess was the residue of someone doing far too much far too quickly to file any of it, and the clean list was the one thing she’d decided mattered enough to keep straight.
And then, sorting, I worked out what the stack actually was, and I sat back on my stool and laughed out loud.
Because here is what the orator of Velomoray, the girl who burned a kingdom over the freeing of slaves, does with her grand new position at the elbow of the King: she does sums. The whole stack was money. Every glorious moral thing in it came down, underneath, to accounting. If you mean to free the slaves, the cost of it has to be reckoned and found and accounted, which means understanding the productivity of the plains, which means meetings, with factors, about yields. If you mean to free the women out of the brothels, you must sit down with the men who own them and understand, in detail, their financial position, because you cannot unpick a thing you haven’t costed — and the Crown’s position too, what it has, what it can spend, what freedom is actually priced at this quarter. The most blazing cause in the realm, at the working desk, is a budget. Freedom is a line of figures, and someone has to add it up, and that someone, lately, is Brin, drowning in scraps at the top of a castle.
I rolled my eyes at her. Openly. You can have it, I told her, and meant it — I have never wanted to be the one who decides; I left one house full of people angling to matter and I have no wish to angle. Brin can have the meetings and the factors and the weight. She laughed and said she knew, that was rather why she’d wanted me — and then the King put his head round the door.
Only for a moment. He looked in, saw me at the second desk, and smiled, and said he was glad to see another of the debate girls come to help him run the place; that they’d argued him half to death once and he’d decided the safest thing was to put them all to work. And of course, he knew from the hospital because he’d twice joined Bram and I in our tours of the hospital. Then he carried Brin off to whatever meeting wanted her, and the room was suddenly mine and empty — for about the length of a breath, because the moment the Hand and the King were gone three faces came round my door, one after another, like birds arriving on a wire.
They were the others — the assistants, the girls who run the small high rooms while the Hands do the deciding, all roughly my own age, and they had clearly been waiting for Brin to leave before they descended, which I respected. One of them I even knew: a Madrigals girl, a few years ahead of me, whom I’d watched debate when I was small enough to think the seniors were gods. They swept in and took me over. They showed me where the things were — where to make tea, for Brin and for any grand person who came to see her, and (they were firm about this, it was the important part) for myself, because a person who does not make herself tea in this place will perish; where the paper and the ink and the sealing-wax were kept, and how to get more without filling in the form that took a week; who the administrative controller was, a fearsome and entirely kind woman who ruled the under-stairs and must be kept sweet at all costs; and — last and most lovingly shown — the cupboard with the bench in it where a girl could put her head down for twenty minutes when the day had been too long and no one would think the worse of her. It was the warmest welcome I’d had all day, and the only one that had treated me as a person rather than a name not yet on a list, and I liked all three of them at once.
And then, tea made, settled on the edge of my desk, they asked me the question they’d plainly come to ask.
How, they wanted to know, had I ended up as Brin’s assistant.
I didn’t follow. I said something about the work, the letters, that Brin and I were old friends. No, they said — not the job. Brin. How had I come to be assistant to Brin, with a weight on the name I could not read at all. I looked at the three of them, honestly puzzled, and asked the only thing I could think of: was Brin a bad person to work for?
Their faces went still. All three, at once, a sort of unified discretion coming down like a blind. Oh — no. No, we couldn’t say a thing against Brin. Which is, of course, exactly what people say when they are sitting on a great deal, and I said so, and there was a silence, and then the Madrigals girl, choosing her words like stepping-stones, said: “Well. It’s only — it’s Brin. And the King. You know.”
And I laughed, because of course. Of course that was it. Even up here, especially up here, where every other thing in the building is counted and costed and entered in a ledger, they had run the numbers on that too — on the orator and the King, on the way he keeps her near and the way the realm leans when the two of them are in a room — and reached their verdict, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The maths is always strongest at the top. They had it all worked out.
It turned out they had it very worked out. It came spilling now that I’d laughed, the whole of it — and the worst of it was that it was not even the castle’s invention. It was mine. My own people. There was, the Madrigals girl informed me with relish, a book running — a proper one, with stakes and a keeper of the pot — and it had not started up here among the assistants at all; it had leaked down to them, out of my own circle, which is how they’d known to be so very interested in me. My friends were running it. My family, near enough. The whole glorious lot of them had got together and laid money on a single question, and the question was: who goes first. Brin, or me. Which of the two of us would be the first to cross over — marry up and out and into the rest of her life.