Roselle

Odell Crane's daughter, seventeen, and the person who actually runs the mill's books.

She overrules her father

Ch. 322, from inside the mill, while he is politely refusing eight students.

ROS: Take them, Da.

a young woman appeared behind him, seventeen or so, sleeves rolled past the elbow, forearms dusted white, holding a ledger against her hip with the particular grip of someone who had been holding it for hours.

ROS: We're four weeks behind and I've been doing the ledgers at midnight since the thaw and I would very much like to sleep at some point this season. ODL: Roselle- ROS: Da. There are eight of them and they've walked here and one of them has just correctly identified our loading platform as a problem from thirty feet away, which is more attention than the last two people you hired paid it in a fortnight.

ROS: You're the mouthy one, are you. COR: Apparently. ROS: Right. You can start with the platform.

The books

Four separate ledgers, inherited from her mother, who inherited them from somebody else.

it required cross-referencing intake weights against outgoing volumes against the standing accounts against a fourth book that appeared to exist purely to record disagreements, and every single figure had to be found in one book, held in the head, and carried into another.

She had been doing it four pages at a time for four years.

Briar spots an error in eight seconds:

BRR: Your carry-forward's wrong. Third column. You've carried the spring total forward twice [...] so everything after the thaw is overstated by about eleven percent.

ROS: Sit down. BRR: I'm meant to be on the loading floor. ROS: You are meant to be sitting down. Sit down.

She takes his foresight in stride:

ROS: That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. BRR: It's genuinely ridiculous. It's also saving us about forty minutes an hour.

And she notices the cost without making a thing of it:

she said nothing for a while and then put a cup of water down beside him without comment.

BRR: I'm fine. ROS: I didn't ask. BRR: You put water there. ROS: I put water there because there's water and you're a person. Keep going or don't, I'm not your instructor.

The sentence nobody had said to her

BRR: You need a conversion table. [...] Written down. On paper. Once. And then you never have to ask him again and neither does anyone who comes after you.

There was a pause.

ROS: ...I've been doing this for four years. BRR: I know. ROS: Four years, and nobody has ever said that sentence to me.