At home, the last weeks of a season had a smell.
It was the smell of instant coffee made at six in the morning, of printer toner, and of a branch full of people who had stopped saying "good morning" to each other and started saying "how many?" Pak Haris used to walk the floor with the target sheet rolled up in his fist like a baton. Mbak Rini kept a jar of sweets on her counter for customers and had eaten all of them herself by the twenty-fifth.
Lorvane had no instant coffee and no printers. It made no difference whatsoever. On the morning of Day 353 I woke an hour before the bread went in, with my heart already running, and smelled toner.
Nineteen days. Sixty-two short. NINETEEN. A fading god carried me into another world, there is no coffee here and no printer, and my body has still found a way to smell month-end. Get up. Get up and do something. What? Anything. Count something.
The first person through the door at the second bell was not a new depositor. It was Master Coll.
He came in white with flour from his cap to his eyebrows, big and slow and powdery, and the crease of suspicion between his pale eyes was deeper than I had ever seen it, as though the flour had settled further into it overnight. He took a token from Borrik without looking at it, waited his turn without speaking to anyone, and when he reached the counter he leaned past Arno Kell and spoke to me.
"She knows," he said.
Complaint. Complaint! Category: breach of confidentiality. Severity: high. Source: a ten-year-old with honey on his chin, in front of the keeper, on Restday. Escalation path: me. There is nobody above me to escalate to. Why is there nobody above me?
"Master Coll," I said. "I owe you an apology."
"She paid me for her flour this morning," said Master Coll, "in bits. Three hundred and forty of them. She counted them out on my scale, one at a time. Twice." His floury face did not change. "Then she said, For your savings."
Brenna, I thought. Oh, Brenna.
"Your information was disclosed without your consent," I said, "by a third party, in an informal setting. That is no excuse. It should never have happened, and I am very sorry. We apologize for the inconvenience."
There it is. Mohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanannya. Four years of training, a miller is standing in front of me covered in flour and betrayal, and that is the only sentence my mouth can find. Say something else. Anything else. Say something HUMAN.
Master Coll looked at me for a long time. Then, slowly, the crease between his eyes eased a very little, the way dough sighs when you finally stop kneading it.
"Three hundred and forty bits," he said. "Twice." He shook his head, and a small cloud of flour came off it. "Woman's mad." He put two marks on the counter. "Savings. Before she finds out about that too."
Arno Kell wrote the row. Mistress Hale released it. I stood three paces back and tried to understand what had just happened.
He deposited. He came in to complain and he DEPOSITED. Is that allowed? Did I do that? I didn't do anything. At home this was called service recovery, and there was a module on it, Module Six, and I failed the role-play twice because the trainer playing the angry customer kept laughing at my face.
The next morning, at the first bell, before the bar came off the door, I held the first morning briefing in the history of Lorvane.
At home, every branch began its day the same way: the whole staff standing in a circle in the banking hall, fifteen minutes before opening, while the branch manager read out yesterday's numbers and today's sins. Nobody was allowed to sit. Nobody was allowed to hold a coffee. It was the only part of the day in which I was ever completely certain what my face should be doing.
The staff of the Corrinford Trust House stood in a circle in front of the counter. Corvin, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. Arno Kell, exactly on time. Mistress Hale, upright, with the stamp buttoned into her pocket. Borrik, filling a quarter of the circle by himself. Tamsin, against the doorframe, because she would not stand anywhere else, so that the circle had a dent in it. And Fenn, who arrived last, with honey on his chin.
"Good morning, everyone," I said.
Nobody answered. Nobody ANSWERED. At home the whole circle would have said "Pagi, Pak!" in a single exhausted voice. Here: silence. Borrik is waiting to see if this is a fight. Fenn is licking his thumb. Do I say it again? If I say it twice and nobody answers twice, I will have to emigrate.
"Everything a customer tells this house," I said, "stays in this house. How much they have. What it's for. Whom they've named as heir. Whether they have an account at all. It isn't told to their family, or their neighbors, or at the Copper Kettle, or—" I looked at Fenn, "—in a bakery."
Fenn looked at his feet.
"At home this was the law," I said. "We called it bank secrecy. An officer who broke it could lose her post, or worse. Here there's no law about it. So it has to be us."
"And the keeper?" said Corvin.
"The keeper most of all."
"Can I tell people what's in mine?" said Borrik.
"Your own coin is yours to talk about, Borrik."
Borrik nodded, satisfied, and visibly began composing something to say at the Copper Kettle that evening.
"Obviously," said Tamsin, from the doorframe. It was her whole contribution. It was enough.
Arno Kell said nothing at all. I looked at his flat, patient face and understood that Arno had never in his life told anyone anything, and had not known until this moment that it was a rule.
"And Fenn," I said. "You're still my eyes in the town. You can tell me anything the town knows. But you can never tell the town anything this house knows."
Fenn thought about it, frowning.
"So it goes one way," he said.
"It goes one way."
"Like the river," said Fenn, and I could not have put it better myself.
At home, every new employee signed a confidentiality statement on their first day, somewhere between the uniform form and the parking form. I had drawn one up the night before, of course. Each of them signed it or pressed a thumb to it, one after another. Mistress Hale read every word first, as she reads everything, and said, "Adequate."
I did not stamp it.
A promise you only keep because it's written in gold, I thought, folding the sheet into my notebook, isn't a promise. It's a lock. This one I want them to keep with their mouths.
Then Arno took the bar off the door, and the day began.
The Internal Control Unit had one applicant that week, which was one more than Corvin had expected after Strangers only.
He came on Day 355: a tinker from somewhere down the eastern road, with a cart full of pots, a cheerful brown face, and a long coat with what looked like forty pockets, every one of them clinking. He had read the notice by accident, he said, while he was looking for somewhere to tie up his mule. He could read, write and count. He had never been to Corrinford in his life. He had no cousins in it. As far as he knew, he belonged to no one.
Corvin's whole face changed. I had never seen it do that. He leaned forward over the toll clerk's high desk like a heron that has seen a fish.
"Impossible to bribe?" he said.
The tinker smiled at him warmly, reached into one of his forty pockets, and laid a silver mark on the desk between them.
"Depends," he said, "what you're offering."
Corvin looked at the mark for a long moment. Then he took off his spectacles, folded them, and put his face in his hands.
Strangers only. One stranger. ONE. And he has tried to bribe the interviewer, during the interview. At home this goes straight to Compliance. Here, the interviewer is Compliance, and he has put his face in his hands, and I don't know whether I'm allowed to pat his shoulder.
"Thank you very much for your interest," I told the tinker, and gave him back his mark, together with my Service Smile. "We'll be in touch."
"Will you?"
"No," I said.
He laughed, without the least offense, and sold Borrik a frying pan on his way out.
The Reeve, meanwhile, wished to think.
Sergeant Dorran brought the message himself on Day 356, standing at the end of the counter with his dented cap under his arm. The Reeve was grateful for my offer. The Reeve was very interested. The Reeve would put the matter before the council after Restday, and in the meantime, the Reeve wished to think.
"How long does the Reeve usually think?" I asked.
Sergeant Dorran considered this with his long, weathered face. "Took him a season to think about the new well."
A season. A SEASON. I have fifteen days. Fourteen, not counting today, and I am counting today, I am counting every day, I am counting them in my sleep.
"Thank you, Sergeant," I said.
The next night I wrote my closing.
Day 357. Real depositors: 249. Days to the end of the season: 14. Short of 300: 51. ICU applicants: 15. Bribes offered: 1. Frying pans bought by the Head of the Queue: 1.
Corvin read it over my shoulder and added nothing at all, which was how I knew how bad it was.
Wage day came on Day 360, and with it, the turnips.
I did not see it happen. Nobody saw it happen, which was, Sergeant Dorran said afterward, the whole idea. But by the third bell the story had crossed the bridge, come through the market square and in at our door, and by the fourth bell Hettie Brook had told it to the queue three times, each time a little better.
The Reeve's paymaster had set out from the town hall at the second bell, as he did every eight days, with the Watch's pay in a leather bag chained to his wrist. Halfway across the bridge, two men in hoods came out of the crowd, cut the chain, snatched the bag and ran. The paymaster screamed. The Watch gave chase, not very fast.
The bag had been full of turnips.
The real pay had crossed the river a full bell earlier, in Sergeant Dorran's left boot, while he walked very slowly and complained loudly to everyone he passed about his bunions.
"And the turnip seller," Hettie told the queue, with enormous satisfaction, "charged the Watch two bits for the turnips. And she wants her bag back."
Two bits, I thought. Paid in advance, for an asset whose risk was fully disclosed, and the principal has now been lost. That is, technically, the first investment product in the history of Lorvane, and it was sold out of a cart by a woman with dirt under her nails.
The paymaster came in that afternoon. I had never met him before. He was a narrow-shouldered man of about forty, with thinning hair combed very carefully across his scalp, a length of cut chain still dangling from one wrist, and the haunted eyes of someone who has been set upon four times in one season, the last time by men who now own a bag of turnips. His name was Ottley.
"The sergeant says," he said, in a small, strained voice, "that you have a way. So I never have to carry it again."
"I do, Master Ottley," I said.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he burst into tears.
He's crying, I thought, handing him the clean handkerchief I keep in my blazer pocket for exactly this. He's CRYING. Module Six: listen, empathize, offer a solution. I offered a solution. The solution is what he's crying about. There is no step for that. Stand still. Look calm. You are extremely good at looking calm. It may be the only thing you are good at.
The Reeve saw me the following morning.
The council chamber was the room above the wide, worn steps of the town hall, the same steps from which, on our first Restday, Reeve Ashby had read the Debt Edict against the bank to the whole market square. I had not been inside since. It had a long table, a fire, the painted seal of a bridge over a river on the wall, and six councilors, five of whom kept accounts with us. The sixth was the cheesemaker's brother-in-law, and he looked at me with exactly the same eyes.
The Reeve sat at the head of the table, round and rosy, with his fringe of white hair around a pink scalp and his heavy chain of office lying across his stomach. He was turning the town seal over and over in his soft, plump hands. He always did that when he was uneasy. It was turning quite fast.
I had brought a slate.
A slate, I thought, propping it against the water jug. I have a SLATE. At home, a payroll pitch was forty pages, a lunch at a hotel, and a relationship manager who laughed at every one of the HR director's jokes. I have chalk, a Reeve who once read a royal edict against me from the steps under my feet, and six councilors, and one of them has the cheesemaker's eyes.
Breathe. Chalk was good enough for my primary school teachers, and they frightened everyone. Be frightening. Be a primary school teacher.
"The Watch has twenty-four men," I said, and wrote it. "Each is paid one mark a day, every eight days. That is one hundred and ninety-two marks a wage day, or nine crowns and twelve marks, carried across the bridge in a bag by Master Ottley." I wrote that too. "Four attempts this season. One loss, if you count the turnips. The bridge crew are paid the same way."
Two of the councilors laughed. The Reeve did not. The seal turned faster.
"Instead," I said, "the town opens one account with us and puts its wage coin in our vault, once a season, under escort. Each man opens his own account. On wage day, Master Ottley brings us a single list, signed by the Reeve: each man's name, each man's pay. We pay each man into his account from the town's, and the coin never leaves the vault. A man draws what he needs at our counter, when he needs it, with his passbook. The rest stays safe."
"And who carries the bag?" said the cheesemaker's brother-in-law.
"Nobody," I said. "There is no bag. You can't rob a row."
There was a short silence in the council chamber. Outside, a cart rumbled over the bridge.
"The fee," said the Reeve gently. His voice was as soft as I remembered. "There is always a fee, Miss Halim. It's on your board."
"Five bits a year for each account," I said. "The same as for everyone. One hundred and twenty bits a year for the whole Watch, if the town chooses to pay it." I wrote it under the nine crowns. "One robbery that works would cost the town as much as eighty years of fees."
I put the chalk down.
The Reeve looked at the slate for a long time. I do not think he was a clever man. But he was an honest one, and he had once stood on his own steps and apologized to me in front of the whole town for something he had read aloud, which is more than most clever men ever do.
"The town's coin would sit in your vault," he said slowly.
"All of it," said Corvin, from behind me. He had not said a word until then. "Untouched. It's new to us, so it's hot money. We don't lend a bit of it."
The Reeve's rosy face went a shade rosier. "The town's coin," he said, "is not hot."
"Everything new is hot, Reeve," said Corvin. "Until it's been with us long enough to cool."
He said it. He said "hot" to the town council. In the council chamber. In front of the seal. At home the relationship manager would have stood on his foot under the table. Should I stand on his foot? Can I reach his foot? He's behind me. If I step back, I'll tread on Master Ottley—
But the Reeve, after a moment, stopped turning the seal.
"It is reassuring," he said, "to know you won't lend it." He looked down the table. "I propose we try it. One wage day. The next one. The Watch, and the bridge crew as well."
"Day 368," said Master Ottley, very quietly, from his corner, and clutched his broken chain.
The council voted. Five hands went up. The sixth, belonging to the cheesemaker's brother-in-law, stayed firmly down, and its owner looked at me as though he had been proved right about something, he was not yet sure what.
Five to one. FIVE to one. At home, that's a signed deal and a lunch. Here it's a trial, and I have seven days to open thirty-six accounts for men who have never trusted anything in their lives except a boot. Thirty-six in seven days. That's five a day, and then—don't do the arithmetic. Do the arithmetic later. Walk out calmly. Walk.
"We're still forty-one short," Corvin said, on the morning of Day 364.
"I'm aware," I said.
Forty-one. FORTY-ONE. Seven days. At home, this was the week the branch manager started calling us "family". Nobody wanted to be family. Family worked weekends.
The Watch did not want to be family either.
They came in shifts from Day 365, three and four at a time, in their padded coats with the faded red sashes, their dented iron caps under their arms, and their spears. Sergeant Dorran had told them not to bring their spears. A man of the Corrinford Watch does not leave his spear anywhere he has been told to leave it. So they stood in the queue holding a wooden token in one hand and a spear in the other, and by the third bell the hall of the Trust House looked like a very small, very nervous army waiting to surrender.
Borrik had never been happier. He walked up and down the line inspecting spearheads and informing each man in turn that the Head of the Queue outranked a sergeant. It did not. Nobody was brave enough to say so.
"Why," I asked Tamsin quietly, "does my banking hall look like a siege?"
Tamsin considered the queue from her place against the doorframe.
"Spears," she said.
Every new account at the Trust House began with the same question. Corvin had added it after Aubrelle, in his cramped capitals, at the top of every opening form: What is this account for?
"Wages," said the first watchman.
"Wages," said the second.
The third was a young man with a split lip and a sheepish face. He turned his cap round in his hands and considered the question for a long time.
"Beer," he said at last. "Then wages."
Arno Kell wrote it down exactly as given, in square capitals, without the smallest change in his face. BEER. THEN WAGES.
Know your customer, I thought. We certainly do now.
Most of them could not write their names. They pressed their thumbs into the specimen box instead, one after another, until the register looked as though a crowd of very serious purple moths had landed on it. Every thumb was a man with a family, and a bag he would never again have to wait for on a bridge. I liked every single one of them.
By the evening of Day 365, Mistress Hale had released nineteen new accounts with the brass stamp, and she had gone the color of the paper.
She said nothing about it. She would have said nothing about it if she had been on fire. But when she buttoned the stamp back into her pocket, I saw her flex her fingers twice, the way you do when they have gone cold to the bone, and Arno Kell, without being asked, went and put the kettle on.
She's pale. She's PALE. Mistress Hale has gone the color of a blank receipt, and she will never say so, and if she faints, she will faint in a perfectly straight line. Every validation costs mana. I know exactly how that feels: like being emptied by a very polite thief, one cup at a time.
Corvin was watching the same thing I was.
"Sixteen more to open," he said, when she had gone up the hill. "Then on wage day, thirty-five rows of pay on top of those, one for every man. Every one of them a stamp." He tapped his ledger. "Her hands won't do it. Neither will yours. You'd be on the floor again by noon."
"I know."
"Then it'll have to be PENDING. Ink. Thirty-five rows anyone could copy, on the very first day the town trusts us." His beard twitched. "That's no way to start."
"No," I said.
I looked down at the Reeve's list. Master Ottley had brought it over that afternoon, folded in four and carried, for the first time in his career, without a chain. It was a single sheet: thirty-five names, one beneath the other, and beside each a sum. The Reeve's round signature sat at the top. At the bottom, in the same careful hand, was one more line, Sgt. Dorran. In coin, as before. There was not a ruled line on it anywhere.
No borders, I thought. A stamp on an unruled sheet locks everything written above it, blank space included.
I worked that out in my first week. I have used it ever since to protect one notebook. One! I have been sitting on the answer for a year like a hen sitting on a doorknob. Say it. Say it before it goes away.
"Corvin," I said. "What if it's one stamp?"
He looked at me over his spectacles.
"The whole list," I said. "On one sheet. Arno writes it into the back of our ledger, every name and every sum, and signs as maker. Not on a ruled page: on a plain one, with no lines, so nothing stops the gold. Then we lay the Reeve's own letter over it, the way we lay a passbook over the ledger, with their bottom edges together. Mistress Hale counts the total against the town's account and stamps once, across the seam. The gold runs up both sheets at once and locks every line above it. Our half stays in the ledger. The Reeve's half goes home with Master Ottley, as his receipt."
A bulk upload. I am proposing a bulk upload, by lamplight, to a heron. At home, HR sent us a file of three thousand names, somebody clicked once, and three thousand people were paid during lunch. Once, the file was wrong. Three thousand phones. One branch. Me. Don't think about the phones. He isn't saying anything. Why isn't he saying anything?
Corvin was silent for a long time. Then he clicked my pen four times.
"And if the Reeve's list is wrong?"
"Then it's wrong in gold," I said, "with his signature at the top. And nobody will ever have to wonder who made it."
"And the men's passbooks?" said Corvin. "Thirty-five of them."
"Ink," I said. "When a man comes in, Arno copies his pay from the gold page onto that man's own page of the ledger and into his passbook, in ordinary ink, and marks both payroll. It stays ink until he draws. When he does, Arno writes the draw on both, Mistress Hale checks the ink against the gold page, lays the passbook over the ledger, and stamps across the seam on the row he draws on. The balance on that row carries his pay. One stamp on the day he needs it, instead of thirty-five on the day he doesn't."
Corvin's beard twitched. "Ink can be copied. A man with a steady hand turns one mark into eleven."
"Then he brings us eleven," I said, "and we look at the gold. The gold wins. Always."
At home, the first page of every passbook said so, in print so small that nobody ever read it: if there is any difference between this book and the bank's records, the bank's records prevail. I read it once, in my first week, out of boredom, during a power cut. I never imagined it would turn out to be the most useful sentence I ever learned.
"I'll write it on the first page of every passbook," I said. "And on the rate board. In letters big enough that somebody actually reads them."
Corvin looked at me with the expression I had last seen on his face when Master Corley found the clipped mark with his teeth.
"Hm," he said.
"That's Rook's."
"I'm borrowing it," said Corvin Dalle.
Wage day came on Day 368, and for the first time in living memory, nobody carried anything across the bridge.
Master Ottley walked into the Trust House at the second bell with nothing in his hands but a folded sheet of paper. He walked slowly, looking behind him every few steps, as though he could not quite believe that nobody was going to hit him. When he reached the counter and laid the list on the oak, his eyes filled again.
"I left the chain at home," he whispered.
I gave him my second handkerchief. I had brought two.
Arno wrote the list in his square capitals on the one plain page Corvin had cut and sewn into the back of the ledger the night before, thirty-five names and thirty-five sums, and signed it as maker. Mistress Hale counted the total twice against the town's account, without hurrying, while the whole Watch and the bridge crew waited behind her in a long, clanking line. Then she laid the Reeve's letter over Arno's page, so that their bottom edges met, signed, and pressed the brass stamp across the seam.
The gold went up both pages at once, like a lamp being turned up, line by line by line, all the way to the Reeve's round signature at the top.
There was a sound from the queue. It was not quite a cheer. It was the sound thirty-five men make when each of them has been holding his breath for a different reason.
Mistress Hale looked at her fingers. Then she looked at me.
"Adequate," she said.
That, I thought, is the highest praise ever given to a bulk upload in the history of two worlds.
Master Ottley carried the Reeve's half home himself, folded against his chest with the gold side in. It was, he told me, the first receipt of his career that nobody could snatch, and it weighed nothing at all.
Only seven of them drew anything that day. For each of those, Arno copied the pay from the gold page onto the man's own page of the ledger and into his passbook, and wrote the draw beneath it on both. Mistress Hale checked the ink against the gold page, laid the passbook over the ledger, and stamped across the seam on the row he drew on. The rest came to the counter, found their own names in gold, looked at them for a long moment, and went away again, the way a man checks a door he has just locked. The young one with the split lip drew exactly enough for one beer, very solemnly, and then, after some thought, paid half of it back in.
Sergeant Dorran stood at the back of the hall the whole morning, with his spear and his cap, watching.
When the last of his men had gone, I went over to him.
"Your pay is here, Sergeant," I said. "In coin, as the Reeve wrote. Or we could open your account now."
"Not yet." He shifted his long feet. "Want to see how the lads get on first. See if it holds."
I counted his pay into his hand. He put it in his left boot, and walked out over the bridge very slowly, complaining loudly to everyone he passed about his bunions.
Day 368, I wrote that night. Real depositors: 299. Short of 300: 1. Days to the end of the season: 3.
Two hundred and ninety-nine is the cruelest number in banking.
It is not a failure. Nobody could call two hundred and ninety-nine a failure. It is ninety-nine and two-thirds out of a hundred. It is "nearly". It is the number that makes a branch manager say "so close" in a voice that means why not. At home I once closed a month at ninety-nine point six percent, and Pak Haris shook my hand and said luar biasa, which means extraordinary, and then spent the whole of the next morning's briefing talking about the zero point four.
Day 369, I thought, at the second bell. Two hundred and ninety-nine. Three days.
The whole town, it turned out, had heard.
Hettie Brook came in at the third bell with her entire crew behind her, eleven washerwomen, every one of whom already had an account, to tell me that she would bring in her own mother-in-law by force if necessary. The mother-in-law, it emerged, lived three days' walk away and had not spoken to Hettie in eleven years. I thanked her and declined.
Fenn offered to open a second account.
"One person, one count," I said.
"I could be a different person," said Fenn. "I could wear Borrik's hat."
Borrik, who did not own a hat, looked hopeful anyway.
No. No no no. This is how it starts. Every branch scandal I ever heard of began with somebody one short of target and a helpful colleague who said, "What if..." My helpful colleague is ten years old, has honey on his chin, and is offering to commit fraud with a HAT.
"One short, honestly," I said.
Borrik sighed. "Borrik the Second," he said sadly, to nobody in particular. "Would've had a little hat."
Corvin said nothing at all from behind his grille. But when I went back to my place three paces behind the counter, he held out his hand for my pen, clicked it four times, and gave it back without writing anything, which I have learned is Corvin for good.
On Day 370 it rained, and nobody came at all.
The river ran high and brown under the bridge. The market square emptied. The carters stayed at home. Brenna came in once, at noon, wet to the knees, put a honey bun on the counter in front of me, counted the lines on Fenn's doorframe out loud, twice, said "Two hundred and ninety-nine" as though it were my fault, and went home again.
She counted it twice, I thought. In case it had changed in the rain.
That night I wrote 299 in my closing so hard that the pen went through the paper.
On Day 371, the last day of the season, the rain stopped at dawn, and still nobody came.
Well. People came. Ordinary people, with ordinary rows: a carter depositing, a washerwoman drawing, two watchmen who came in only to look at their names on the golden list again, as though it might have gone away in the night. Arno made the rows. Mistress Hale released them. The count did not move. By the seventh bell the sky outside was the color of a bruise, the lamps were lit along the bridge, and Arno Kell was looking at the rope of the closing bell with his flat, patient face, waiting for me to tell him to ring it.
Seventh bell. Seventh bell! Two hundred and ninety-nine. At home I hit my target twice in four years, both times in the last hour of the last day, both times from a customer I had given up on. This is not one of those times. It can't be. Nobody is coming. The street is EMPTY. I have checked it nine times—
It's all right. It's all right. One short, honestly. We'll carry it forward. We always carry it forward. Carry. It. Forward. Breathe.
"Ring it," I said.
Arno put his hand on the rope.
The door opened.
Sergeant Dorran came in out of the dusk, ducking his long head under the lintel, with his dented cap under his arm and his spear over his shoulder. He walked to the bowl by the door, took a wooden token from Borrik, examined the number on it with his usual deep suspicion, and joined the end of a queue that consisted entirely of himself.
Arno took his hand off the rope.
The sergeant leaned his spear against the counter. Then, with great care, he sat down on the customers' bench, pulled off his left boot, and tipped it upside down over the oak.
Eight days' pay fell out of it, in coin, along with a quantity of grit and a small, very flat leaf.
"Lads got paid," said Sergeant Dorran. "All of them. Nobody robbed. Not even the turnips." He pulled his boot back on. "Held."
Arno slid the opening form across the counter. Name. Trade. Specimen. And at the top, in Corvin's capitals: What is this account for?
Sergeant Dorran read the question for a long time, his lips moving under his grey stubble. Then he picked up the pen.
"Wages," he said, writing it in large, careful letters. Then, after a moment: "And my boot."
Arno wrote it into the ledger exactly as given. WAGES. AND MY BOOT.
Mistress Hale counted the coins twice. She laid the new passbook over the ledger, signed, and pressed the brass stamp across the seam, and the gold ran along the edge of both pages and settled into its quiet half-stamp.
Three hundred.
Real ones.
Nobody in the hall said anything at all. Then Fenn, who had been sitting under the counter for the last two bells waiting for exactly this, shot out from beneath it with a nail in his fist, ran to the doorframe, and cut a long, straight line into the wood: the three hundredth, right at the very top, where there was no room left for another.
He stood back and looked at it.
"It's full," he said, astonished.
Then he went to the other side of the doorframe and, very carefully, down at the bottom, began again. One.
Three hundred. Three HUNDRED. On time. On the last day, in the last hour, from a man with his wages in his boot. Do not cry. Do not cry in front of the Watch. Do not cry in front of the man who took Brenna's robbery report. Look at the ledger. Look at the ledger very hard.
Pak Haris, you would have shaken his hand and called him luar biasa. And then you would have asked about next month.
My face did not move. I made very sure of that. But Sergeant Dorran, tucking his new passbook carefully into his coat, looked at me for a long moment with his weathered horse's face, and nodded once, as though he had seen something there after all and approved of it.
"Night, Sekka," he said, and took up his spear, and went.
Day 371. Season closed. Real depositors: 300. Target: 300. Achievement: 100%. On time.
I wrote the last two words very small. I was not sure I was allowed to write them at all.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. He held out his hand for my pen and clicked it four times, slowly. For the first time since he had begun setting targets, he did not write Carried forward.
He wrote: Met. (C.D.)
Then he looked at it as though he did not entirely trust it, and underlined it.
"Next season's target," he said.
I had been dreading this all day. "Four hundred," I said.
"One," said Corvin.
I stared at him. "One what?"
Corvin looked past me, at the notice on the door, at its margins full of other people's handwriting, and at the last line at the bottom, in his own.
Strangers only.
"One stranger," he said.