At home, the first morning of leave began with an out-of-office reply.
You wrote it the night before, in the politest language the system allowed. Thank you for your email. I am currently on leave, returning on the following date. For urgent matters, please contact my colleague. Then you lay awake until two in the morning composing all the urgent matters your colleague would not know how to handle.
There is no out-of-office reply in Lorvane. On the morning of Day 393 I wrote one anyway, in my notebook, at the counter, before the first bell, because my hand would not let me leave without it.
The keeper is on leave until further notice. For urgent matters, please contact Master Kell, who makes, or Mistress Hale, who releases. For very urgent matters, please contact Borrik, who will be delighted.
Corvin read it over my shoulder.
"Who is that for?" he said.
"Nobody," I said. "It's for me."
Then I stood three paces back and watched the house do the thing I had always done whenever coin left the vault.
Hedda's run would carry one small chest this time: thirty crowns for the Aubrelle shelves, to pay whatever transfers were waiting at the other door. Arno counted them twice under his breath onto the oak, wrote the departure box in his square capitals and signed it as maker. Mistress Hale counted them again, without hurrying, melted red wax over the seam of the lid and pressed the brass stamp into it, so that the chest wore its little house and key. Hedda Brask read every word of the record before she signed, with one short, hard stroke. Then Mistress Hale laid the two copies one over the other, signed, and pressed the brass stamp across the seam.
Nothing happened.
The ink stayed ink. It sat there on the seam, perfectly ordinary and faintly purple, and did not turn gold at all.
Mistress Hale looked at the stamp in her hand. Then she looked at me.
"Thirty crowns," she said. "My letter says ten."
Authority limit! Up to ten crowns a row! Corvin wrote it into both their letters himself, and the brass stamp simply won't take a larger row. Which means—which MEANS— And something in my chest, which had been standing three paces back all morning with its hands folded, lit up like a lamp.
"I'll do it," I said, much too quickly.
I stepped forward. I signed in the officer's box, beneath Mistress Hale's name, and pressed my own stamp across the seam, and the gold ran along both edges, bright and quick.
I was needed. For one row. One ROW. I was so happy. It was the happiest I had been in a week. I nearly said thank you to the chest.
This, I understand, is exactly what leave is supposed to cure. It isn't working. It hasn't even started, and it isn't working.
"That's one end," said Hedda, and put her copy inside her coat.
Brenna came at the first bell with the bundles. There were eleven of them. She had counted them at home, and she counted them again on the cart, out loud, while Hedda's two Guild brothers watched with their mouths slightly open.
"That's for the road," she said, "and that's for the road back, and those two are for if the road back is longer than he says." She jerked her chin at Corvin. "It will be."
She gave me one hard, floury hug, the kind that knocks the breath out of you, and said nothing at all into my hair this time, which said more.
Fenn did not ask how many days. He stood in the doorway with his nail in his fist, the way a sentry stands with a spear, and when I looked at him, he nodded once, very seriously, and touched the nail to the doorframe, where the new count on the other side had already reached sixteen.
Borrik saluted. Nobody had taught him to salute. He did it with his whole arm, like a man swatting a wasp, and announced to the street that the Acting Head of Everything was now on duty.
And at the far end of the bridge, in her green coat, Liesl was waiting with her hands folded in front of her.
"The Corrinford branch of the Adventurers' Guild wishes the Trust House a safe road," she said, in her official voice. Then, in her own, quickly: "Tell me if the Grandmaster's furious. The Guildmaster wants to know which Hm to use."
We crossed the Corrin at the second bell.
The last time, on Day 103, I had not looked back, because I was afraid of what my face might do. This time I did. I turned on the cart and looked back down the length of the bridge at the old customs house with RIVER TOLLS PAYABLE HERE still carved over its door.
The door was open. A carter was going in with his passbook in his hand. Through the gap I could just see Arno at the counter, square and still, and the edge of Mistress Hale's black sleeve beside him, and Fenn on the step, and Borrik filling most of the doorway.
It's open. It's OPEN, and I'm not in it. A carter is going in and nobody is saying good morning to him in my voice. Is Arno saying good morning? Does Arno say good morning? I never checked. Why did I never check? Turn the cart round. Don't turn the cart round. Look at the river. Look at the river like a normal person on leave.
I watched it until the road turned and the willows took it away. My face, as far as I know, did nothing at all. But Tamsin, who was sitting on the tailboard facing backward, as she always does, glanced at me once, and then very politely looked at the river instead.
On the second day out of Corrinford, the fields changed, exactly where they had changed before.
The hedges went ragged. The ditches choked. The mill by the road still stood with its wheel stopped and one paddle hanging loose, and the grey stone carved with a long-legged bird was still half sunk in the nettles. Someone had set a second stone beside it, newer, with the same bird cut deeper, as though the first had not been making the point firmly enough.
"Crane," said Tamsin.
"Crane," agreed the younger of Hedda's two Guild brothers. "Says so on the stone."
"It's a heron," said the elder.
"It's a crane. It's his name."
"Herons are bigger."
"You've never seen a crane."
"I've never seen a baron either, and I'm fairly sure he's not a bird."
They had been arguing like this since the bridge. On the first day they had argued about whether the river was higher than last time, whether Brenna's honey buns were better warm or cold, and whether I was a witch. By evening they had decided that I was still a witch, but a different kind: a counting witch, the elder said, the kind that turns up at your door and knows exactly what you owe.
A counting witch. At home, that was called a collections officer, and the collections officers ate lunch alone, at their own table, by the fire exit. I am not a collections officer. I have never collected anything in my life. Except accounts. And thumbprints. And—oh no.
The young archer had other views. He was a little older than last time, and a little less thin, and he no longer believed I was a princess in disguise. He had promoted me. I was now, he had confided to Tamsin, almost certainly an empress in exile from somewhere in the east, which explained my face, my coat and my habit of writing everything down.
He had also started a second notebook. The first, he told me shyly, was full of Tamsin's sayings from the last journey. The second was for this one. He showed me the first page. It said Crane. and nothing else.
"Good," said Tamsin.
He wrote that down too.
The chain still hung across the road where it crossed the brook. The canvas awning was still there, and the folding table, and the two men in faded livery leaning on either end of the chain. But the small, round-shouldered man with the leather folio was gone. In his place sat a broad, red-faced youth with a cudgel across his knees and a slate in front of him, on which someone else had chalked a number.
"Six bits a wheel," he said, reading it carefully.
"It was four," said Corvin.
"Six now." The youth looked uncomfortable. "His lordship's had expenses."
His lordship has had expenses. His lordship's STEWARD is in a cell. His lordship's coin went to the Brotherhood. And his lordship has raised the toll on the only road through his land, so that the people who live on it can pay for that. At home, we called that passing the cost on to the customer. Don't say it. Don't say anything. Corvin's ears are going red. Corvin, don't you dare—
Corvin counted twelve bits onto the table.
"A receipt, if you please."
The youth looked at the slate. Then at Corvin. Then at the slate again, as though it might help.
"I can't write," he said.
Corvin sighed, took a sheet from his satchel, and wrote the receipt himself in his cramped, ink-stained hand. Received of the Corrinford Trust House, twelve bits, toll on two wheels, Crane's chain, Day 394. Then he held it out, with my tin of stamp ink.
"Your thumb," he said. "Here."
The youth pressed his thumb into the purple ink and then onto the paper, as carefully as Fenn had once pressed his into a passbook. He looked at the oval for a long moment.
"What's it for?" he asked.
"So that one day," said Corvin, "when somebody asks where the tolls on this road went, there's a piece of paper with your thumb on it that says you took twelve bits from us, and not thirteen."
The youth thought about this. Then, slowly, he looked back down the road behind him, toward the big house none of us had ever seen, and something in his broad face changed very slightly, the way a teller's face changes when she starts to wonder about the drawer.
He let the chain fall.
Lotte's village was a mile past the toll, exactly where it had always been. Twenty cottages. A green with geese on it. The mill with the broken wheel. Hedda stopped us for the night at the little alehouse with the smoking chimney, and nobody went home this time, because the girl who had gone home last time was sleeping above a rope store in Aubrelle, waiting for a magistrate.
I walked out before dark, as I had before. The sheet of paper on the mill door had been replaced with a newer, longer one, already curling at the edges in the damp. Names on the left. Numbers on the right. A column of dates.
Some lessons, I thought, you only need to learn once.
So I read it. All of it, from top to bottom, standing in the mud with my hands folded behind my back, the way I had once read the Guild's charter. Tibb Arlow's name was still there, third from the top. So were others I knew now from the Aubrelle ledger, the borrowed names, whose few honest bits were still sitting in our vault. Beside some of the names, somebody had drawn a small mark in the margin. Beside others, nothing at all.
I did not know what the mark meant. I wrote down which names had it, in the back of my notebook, below Lotte's letter.
Then the goose came round the corner of the mill.
It was the same goose. I am absolutely certain of it. It stopped. It looked at me for a long moment with one flat, furious eye. And I watched it remember.
It's the goose, I thought, already walking backward with as much dignity as the mud allowed. The SAME goose. Two hundred and ninety days, and it knows my face. Nobody knows my face! Customers I have served for a year cannot read my face! And this goose— Walk backward. Slowly. Never run from a goose. Module Seven didn't cover geese. Nothing covers geese.
I retreated to the alehouse at speed. The goose escorted me the whole way, at a distance of exactly one pace, like a very small and very hostile guard of honor.
Tamsin, sitting on the alehouse step, watched us arrive.
"Again," she said.
After Crane's land the road went on for twenty-odd days, and I discovered that I did not know how to be on leave.
On the first morning, I counted the mules. There were four. I counted them again at noon, in case. On the second morning, I redrew the shipment record in my notebook three times, each time with slightly better boxes. On the third, I began a new form for heir claims, with a box for the proof of death and another for the officer who had checked it at its source, and I was halfway down the second page when Corvin reached across the cart and took my pen.
"You're on leave," he said.
"I'm drawing a form."
"On leave," said Corvin, "you look at things."
"What things?"
He gestured at the world, which at that moment consisted of a long, flat valley full of sheep, a sky with three clouds in it, and Hedda's back.
I looked at it.
It was a very nice valley. After about as long as it takes to boil an egg, I found that I had begun to estimate the number of sheep, and what each was worth at market, and whether the shepherd had ever considered a term deposit.
Thirty-one sheep. Forty? Is that one moving? What's a sheep worth at market? What are forty sheep worth at— This is what my aunt meant when she buried my phone in the rice. There is no rice here. Corvin is the rice.
Corvin gave my pen back at supper. He had clicked it, I could tell. It was warmer than it should have been.
At the Three Ploughs, the sign over the kitchen hatch still said TAKE A NUMBER. Under it there was now a second sign, in the same paint: a short list of everything the kitchen sold and what it cost, with the price of the ale at the very bottom.
"Board," said the innkeeper proudly, pointing at it with a ladle. "Like the Sekka's. Customers like to see the price before they start shouting."
A rate board, I thought, looking at it. A RATE board. Prices disclosed at the point of sale. And he has put the ale at the bottom, where everyone reads. He's copied us. Is that allowed? Should I be proud? Should I charge him?
At home, this is called a franchise. Nobody has paid me a single bit for it. Should I ask? I should not ask. I'm on leave. Am I still on leave if I suggest one line?
"It's very good," I said. "May I suggest one more line, underneath, for when the stew runs out?"
He looked at me with deep suspicion. Then he went and fetched the paint.
At the inn with the painted fish over the door, Tamsin looked up at the fish for a long moment.
"Still waters it," she said.
The young archer wrote that down.
On the fourteenth day the inns ran out, the road climbed into the long, empty hill country, all bracken and wind, and for four nights we slept beside the cart under the stars.
There were streams up there, fast and clear over brown stones and screened by willows, and I noticed that Corvin now announced himself at every one of them from a great distance. He did it the way the crier in Corrinford announces the Reeve: a loud, formal cough, then my name, then, after a pause, whatever he happened to be carrying. "Sekka. The lamp." "Sekka. The record." "Sekka. A mule."
The Guild brothers found this very funny. Tamsin did not appear to find it anything at all. But on the second night, when he coughed loudly at a stream I was nowhere near, she said, without turning her head, "Wrong," and he went very red in the firelight and talked about mules for an hour.
On the last night in the hills, I sat by the fire with Hedda.
She did not talk much, any more than Tamsin did. But she had the shipment record in her hands, with only its first box filled, and she was reading it by the firelight as though it might have changed since morning.
"Twenty years guarding coin," she said eventually. "Never used to think about what was in the chest. A chest was a chest." She folded the record and put it back inside her coat. "Now I think about who's waiting at the other end."
"Lotte," I said, before I could stop myself.
Hedda looked at me.
"She'll be at the court," I said. "She'll ask me whether the door opens again."
"Will it?"
"Not yet," I said. And then, because it was dark, and the fire was low, and Hedda Brask had stood at both ends of every promise I had ever sent down this road, I said the rest. "Not until I find two people to stand behind it, and someone who belongs to nobody to count them. And I don't know where to find any of them."
Hedda thought about this for a while.
"Aubrelle's big," she said at last. "More people in it than in all of Corrinford's fields. Somebody in it belongs to nobody." She lay back on her bedroll, with nothing behind her but the ground. "Usually more than one."
On the night of Day 416, we camped on the last ridge, and Aubrelle lay below us again, scattered along its river like coins spilled from a purse, with the mint chimney breathing orange smoke on the near side.
Corvin looked at the chimney for a long moment. Then he looked away from it, at the rest of the city, took out his own notebook and wrote something down. When I leaned over to see, it was a list.
Court. Grandmaster. Two officers. One stranger.
He had left room underneath. Quite a lot of room.
The gate of Aubrelle still had the longest queue I had ever seen, and it still had no tokens.
I had known it wouldn't. I had told myself so for twenty-four days. It made no difference. When our cart joined the end of the line behind a wagon of cabbages and a man with a cage of furious hens, and a gate warden in blue walked past waving people forward in an order known only to himself, something in my chest made a small, sad sound, like a customer whose number has just been skipped.
No tokens. No TOKENS. In the capital of the kingdom. The cabbage man was here before the hen man, and the warden has just waved the hen man through first. Forty carters at the Three Ploughs took a number and waited. Forty! I could carve some. I have a knife. Do I have a knife? Why am I checking my pockets for a knife—
"Don't," said Corvin.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're carving kindling in your head," said Corvin. "I can see you doing it."
Hedda counted at the gate, as she had the first time, because inside the walls was the Watch's problem. The wax on the little chest was whole, the house and key as crisp as the morning Mistress Hale had pressed them. Hedda broke the seal with the point of her knife. Corvin counted the thirty crowns out loud onto the tailboard, twice, while a small crowd gathered to watch, and wrote the second box himself.
Arrival. Aubrelle, Day 417. One chest. Seal: whole. Counted: C. Dalle. Thirty crowns.
Hedda signed. I signed. I laid the two copies one over the other and stamped across the seam, and the gold ran along the edge of the second box until both ends of the record shone.
"Two ends," said Hedda, and put her copy inside her coat.
Nobody applauded this time. Abel Thorne was not in the queue. I found that I missed him.
The street of the goldsmiths was narrower than I remembered, and quieter. Half its shops had their shutters down. Halfway along, between a jeweler's and a man who sold scales, stood a narrow old shop with a strongroom inside it and two sheets of Corvin's ruled paper nailed above its door.
The first was mine, from Day 248. A line crossed out at the top: Mohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanannya. And underneath it, in my own handwriting, the truth: We lost 54 crowns, 12 marks of this house's coin, through our own officer. Not one bit of it was yours.
The second, beside it, said that this door opened on run days, when the keeper or her partner came down with the escort, and that between those days your coin was behind two locks.
Ask Wat. He cannot read this, but he knows what it says.
And on the step beneath the two notices, with his back against the shut door, someone was sitting.
He was a young man of about twenty, lanky, all wrists and ankles, folded up on the narrow step as though he had been put away there and forgotten. His face was sunburnt across the nose and cheekbones, the way a face goes when it has walked a long way under an open sky, and his black hair had been hacked short with a knife by someone without a mirror. He wore a patched coat much too thin for the season. On his knees he had a scrap of slate, and he was copying something onto it with a stub of chalk, slowly and carefully, shape by shape.
He was copying my sign.
Not the words. I could see that from the cart. He was copying the shapes of them, the way a child copies a picture: the crossed-out line at the top crossed out on his slate as well, and every letter drawn rather than written, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth.
He looked up when the cart stopped.
His eyes were grey-green, and very tired. They went from the cart to Corvin, to Tamsin with her crossbow, and then to me: to my blazer, my lanyard, my face. They stayed there.
He stood up. He did it too fast, the way people stand when they have been sitting for a very long time and have decided that this is the moment. The slate slid off his knees and broke on the step.
"You're—" he said. His voice was hoarse. "The sign. Is it yours? Does it say—"
He took two steps toward me.
Then his knees simply stopped, and he folded up on the cobbles of the street of the goldsmiths like a coat dropped off a hook.
I was off the cart before I knew I had moved. I knelt beside him. His face was grey under the sunburn and his lips were cracked, and his breathing was shallow but steady.
"Please don't move, sir," I said. "Help is coming."
Module Seven! Medical Emergencies in the Banking Hall! Step one: stay calm. I am calm. I am always calm. My FACE is calm. Step two: call the security guard. Security guard. Security guard!
I looked up at Tamsin.
Tamsin looked down at the young man, at his thin coat and his hollow cheeks and the broken slate on the step, for about as long as it takes to read a short sign.
"Hungry," said Tamsin.
Not ill, I translated. Not drunk. Not a trick. Just a young man who has not eaten for a long time, sitting on the step of the one door in the capital that could not tell him to go away.
Wat had heard the cart and come to open the door. He took one look at the young man on the cobbles and went off down the street toward the wharf at a lumbering run, and came back with Gil Harker, who was shouting about onions until he saw what was lying in the street, and then stopped shouting at once.
They carried him to the wharf between them, Wat at his shoulders and Gil at his feet, to the loft above the rope store. There was already one person up there waiting for a magistrate. Now there were two people up there with nowhere else to go.
That night, in a narrow room at an inn inside the walls, I wrote my closing.
Day 417. Arrived. Chest: 1. Seal: whole. Crowns: 30, counted twice. Signed at both ends. Strangers: 1. Condition: fainted.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. He took my pen, clicked it four times, and added a line underneath.
Unpleasant? Unknown. (C.D.)
"He was trying to read my sign," I said.
"He was trying to copy it," said Corvin. "That isn't the same thing."
"No," I said. "It's better."
Corvin looked at me for a long moment over his cracked spectacles. Then he gave me back my pen and did not argue, which is how I knew that he had seen the slate too.