Sil was raised in the Brass Orchard among the chime-trees, an hour north of Tallymarket on the Sixth Ring — a grove of brass-barked trees grown, though she did not know it for most of her life, from the first Warden's key-metal, their roots running down into the Sliver's anchor-bolt. Her parents were orchard-folk of the old kind: they kept the tally of the grove's chime the way other families keep a family bible, and they taught her before she could read that when the orchard rings evenly, the Sliver is keyed, and when it rings wrong, it is not.
She was apprenticed young to Old Corwin Ash, the orchard-keeper, who taught her to hear a Sliver's key-frequency in the ringing of brass leaves — to sit beneath the anchor-tree at dusk and learn the difference between a grove that is healthy and one that is only quiet. She was good at it in the way that cannot be taught: she heard things in the chime that Corwin had stopped hearing years before, frequencies at the bottom of the grove's register that he had learned to ignore, and it made him both proud and uneasy, because a listener who hears more than the master is a listener the master cannot finish training.
When she was old enough to walk the roads alone, Sil left — not in anger and not in rebellion, but because Corwin himself told her that a listener who only hears one grove is not listening at all. She walked the rings for years: the farmland Slivers of the outer reaches, the mining towns, the freight-lift yards where the great key-bolts bite the rings together. She learned that every grove on every ring has its own frequency, and that the Engine's keyed metal sings differently at each joint, and she began — without quite deciding to — keeping a record of it in the notches of her staff.
She came back to the Tally Reaches because the road curves that way eventually, and because she had heard, in a freight-lift yard two rings down, a frequency that sounded like home and was wrong. She arrived to find the orchard silent: the wedge driven into the anchor-tree's bark, the leaves hanging without ringing, Corwin barricaded in his tool shed and refusing to come out. She has not slept indoors since.
She rests beneath the chime-trees in Trance, listening to the wounded frequency, learning what the wedge did to the anchor-tree's key-metal — and she has begun to hear, in the lowest register, something that is not the orchard at all. It is counting. She has not told anyone yet. She is trying to decide whether it is the Deep Mist, or the Engine itself, or something older than both — and whether the fact that she can hear it at all is a gift, or the first symptom of what happened to Nib, the fog-child of Hollowmere, who hears the same counting and cannot stop hearing it.
