At home, every job application came with the same attachments.
A cover letter. A curriculum vitae, one page, two at most. A photograph, three centimeters by four, on a red background or a blue one, depending on which bank you were applying to, because every bank had its own opinion. A copy of your identity card. Your transcript. A certificate of good conduct from the police. And at the bottom of the curriculum vitae, under the line for hobbies, where everybody wrote reading whether they read or not, the same five words.
References available upon request.
Nobody ever requested them. Everybody had them anyway. That was the point. It meant that somewhere, somebody would vouch for you.
The young man in Gil Harker's loft, on the morning of Day 418, had none of the above.
He woke a little after the second bell. I knew, because I had been sitting on an upturned crate beside his straw pallet since the first, with my hands folded in my lap, waiting. The loft above the rope store smelled of tar and hemp and onions, in roughly equal parts. Light came in through a gap in the planks and lay across the floor in a long gold stripe. Somewhere below us, Gil was shouting at a barge.
The young man opened his eyes, looked at the rafters, looked at the onions hanging from them in long plaits, and then looked at me.
He did not say anything. He looked at my face for a long time, the way people in this world always do, searching for something to hold on to. Then his grey-green eyes narrowed very slightly, as though he had found something after all and did not like it.
"Good morning," I said. "How are you feeling?"
"Who are you?"
"My name is Sekar Halim," I said. "I keep the Corrinford Trust House. You fainted in front of our door in the street of the goldsmiths yesterday. Master Harker and Wat carried you here."
He took this in. He sat up, slowly, and I watched him notice that someone had taken off his boots and lined them up neatly beside the pallet, and that his patched coat had been folded and laid at his feet. He looked at the boots for a long moment, as though checking that they were still his.
"Your door," he said. "The shut one."
"Yes."
"With the sign."
"Yes."
He looked at my face again. Whatever he was looking for, he didn't find it. That seemed to settle something for him.
He's reading me. Not my face—nobody can read my face—he's reading the fact that there's NOTHING on it, and deciding what that means. What does it mean? What is he deciding? Say something warm. I said good morning. Was that warm? That was the Service Smile voice. That was the wrong voice.
At home, a customer looked at me like this exactly once. He had come in to dispute a charge on his credit card, and he was absolutely certain I was about to sell him insurance.
On the crate beside me were two loaves, still warm, from the baker at the corner of the wharf. I had bought them on my way, from the little purse in my left blazer pocket, without breaking stride. I held one out to him.
He did not take it.
"What for?" he said.
"For eating."
"What do you want for it?"
"Nothing," I said.
That was the wrong answer. I saw it land. His jaw set, and his long, sunburnt hands closed on the edge of the blanket.
"Everybody in this city wants something for it," he said. His voice was still hoarse, but quite steady. "The cook-shop by the gate wanted me to sweep for a week first. The baker on the hill wanted my boots. A man at the horse market said I could have a whole meal if I came round the back of his stable after dark." He looked at the loaf, and then, very deliberately, away from it. "I said no to him. I'll say no to you."
Oh, I thought.
He thinks I'm— he thinks I'm the man at the HORSE market. I'm holding out free bread to a stranger in a loft with nothing on my face, he has made a perfectly reasonable assumption, and now I want to throw the bread out of the window. Don't throw the bread. Don't put it down either, that's worse. Hold the bread.
"I don't want anything," I said. "But if it would make you feel better, you may work for it."
He looked back at me, quickly.
"Doing what?"
"Our door needs sweeping," I said. "Master Harker needs his onions carried. And the man who guards our vault has hands like shovels and hates stairs." I set the loaf down on the crate between us, so that it belonged to nobody. "Eat first. You can't sweep if you fall over."
He looked at the bread for a long time. I watched him decide, without telling anyone, that a man who works for his bread is allowed to eat it before he starts.
Then he picked it up and ate it in about four bites, without looking at me once.
"Ivo," he said, through the last of it.
"I'm sorry?"
"My name." He swallowed. "Ivo."
"From?"
He shrugged. "Nowhere you'd know."
Nowhere I'd know turned out to be a valley in the hills off the western road, three weeks' walk from the capital: one village, one mill, and a town hall with a cracked appraisal orb that only worked in summer.
"How did you come here?" said Corvin.
He had come up the ladder at the third bell, with his satchel and his cracked spectacles, and had been standing among the onions ever since, saying nothing, watching Ivo eat the second loaf. Ivo had not liked being watched. He had eaten it anyway. He seemed to have decided that Corvin was the kind of man who would watch whether you liked it or not, and that there was no point arguing with weather.
"Walked," said Ivo.
"Why?"
"Harvest failed. Two years running. My father's land went for the debt." He said it flatly, the way you report that a road is closed. "Six mouths. One of them had to go. I'm the oldest."
"And in the capital?"
Ivo's mouth went thin.
"Every door wants a name," he said. "The porters on the wharf, you need a member to speak for you. The warehouses want someone who knows you. The clerks' benches want you to read." He looked down at his hands. "I can't read. Nobody knows me. Nobody speaks for me. So the porters said come back with a name, and the warehouses said come back with a name, and the clerks laughed."
References. Available upon request. Except he has none, and nobody requests them, and he has walked from door to door in a city of thousands with nothing to attach. Nothing! Not even a photograph, three by four, red background. Somebody should vouch for him. Who would vouch for him? I would. No. NO. I have known him for one morning.
At home, every advertisement for a new graduate asked for at least two years' experience. Nobody ever explained where the two years were supposed to come from. I see now that it is a universal law. It holds here too.
"Nobody vouches for you," said Corvin slowly. "Nobody at all? No cousin on the wharf? No uncle in a warehouse?"
"I said nobody."
Corvin looked at me. I didn't look back. I knew exactly what he was thinking, because I had been thinking it since the step of the shut door, and I was determined not to think it any louder than I already was.
Must belong to no branch, I thought, in Corvin's cramped capitals. Strangers only.
No. Absolutely not. He fainted on our step YESTERDAY. He can't read. He thinks I'm the man from the horse market. Stop thinking it. Stop thinking it so loudly, Corvin can hear you think—Corvin is looking at me—
"Your slate," I said instead. "On the step. You were copying my sign."
Ivo's face went still.
"It broke," he said.
"Why were you copying it?"
For a moment I thought he wouldn't answer. Then he shrugged, the way a person shrugs when the answer embarrasses him more than the question.
"Every other sign in this city says one thing and goes on saying it," he said. "Yours had a line through it. Somebody wrote something, and crossed it out, and wrote something else underneath." He looked at the floorboards. "I wanted to know what you'd been wrong about."
There was a long silence in the loft. Below us, Gil had stopped shouting at the barge.
He wanted to know what I'd been wrong about. Of everything in the capital of the kingdom. Not the Great Hall. Not the mint. My mistake. He sat on a step for three days trying to read my mistake. My face is doing nothing. Good. Keep it doing nothing. Keep it doing nothing very hard.
"Can you draw it?" said Corvin. "The sign. Now, without the slate."
Ivo looked at him with deep suspicion. Then he held out his hand, and Corvin, after a moment, gave him a sheet of paper from his satchel and a stub of chalk.
Ivo drew it.
He did not write it. He drew it, the way he had on the step: every letter a shape, every shape exactly where it had been, the crossed-out line at the top crossed out at exactly the right angle. When he had finished, he drew the second sign beside it, the one about run days and Wat. Then, without being asked, he drew the sign over the cook-shop by the gate, and the one over the horse market, and the painted board outside the porters' hall, one after another, faster now, as though they had been waiting a long time to be let out.
Corvin took off his spectacles.
"Your Skill," he said.
"Useless," said Ivo at once. "The appraiser at our town hall said so. Recall. I remember what things look like. Pages. Signs. The marks on a sack." He put the chalk down. "Not what they say. Just what they look like. He laughed for a whole minute."
Somebody laughed at my Skill too, I thought. In a Guild Hall, in my first days in this world. I remember exactly how it felt, because nothing about my face showed it.
Corvin opened his satchel. He did not take out the ledger. He took out his own old notebook instead, the one from the mint, and opened it to a page of his own figures: columns of coin weights in his cramped hand, years old. He held it up in front of Ivo for about as long as it takes to say good morning. Then he closed it on his knee.
Not the ledger, I noticed. His own notes. He listened at the briefing! He LISTENED. Corvin listened to something I said in a circle. I want to write it down. I am going to write it down.
"Draw that," he said.
Ivo drew it. Row by row. Every figure in its column, every small mark in the margin, every place where the ink had blotted. It took him a long time. When he had finished, Corvin opened the notebook again and laid the drawing beside it, and looked from one to the other for longer still.
"Two mistakes," said Corvin at last.
Ivo's jaw tightened.
"Both mine," said Corvin. "In the original. I wrote a seven like a one, twice, eleven years ago, and nobody has noticed since. Including me." He put his spectacles back on, very slowly. "You copied my mistakes exactly."
"Is that bad?"
"It remembers shapes," said Corvin quietly. "Not truth." He looked at me. "It would copy a lie as faithfully as anything else."
"I know," I said.
"Then don't," said Corvin.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're carving kindling," said Corvin, and went down the ladder.
Lotte had been in the loft the whole time.
She had been sitting at the far end of it, by the gap in the planks where the light came in, with her writing board on her knees and her back to us, writing something very small and very slowly. She had not turned round when I came up the ladder that first morning. She had not turned round when Ivo woke, or when Corvin came, or when Ivo drew the signs. And I had not gone to her. I had told myself that the young man on the pallet needed me more, and that this was true, and I had very nearly believed it.
On the morning of Day 419, I went to her.
She was smaller than I remembered. Or perhaps she was the same size and had folded herself up. Her dark curls were tied back under the blue kerchief, as they always had been, and her two writing fingers were still inked to the second knuckle. When she heard me, she turned her board face down on her knees and stood up quickly, the way a junior teller stands when the branch manager walks in.
"Miss Halim."
"Lotte."
And the dimple came.
It came in her left cheek, exactly where it always had, the dimple that appeared whether she meant it or not. She did not mean it now. I could see that she didn't. Her eyes were red at the rims and her mouth was perfectly straight, and the dimple sat there in her cheek all the same, cheerful and uninvited, like a sign nobody had remembered to take down.
My face shows nothing it means, I thought. Hers shows things it doesn't. Between the two of us, we have never once managed to look the way we feel.
"Thank you for your letter," I said.
"I'm sorry it was short."
"Inspector Voss told me to keep mine short too," I said. "To the court."
Something moved in her face. "You wrote to the court?"
"Yes."
"What did you say?"
I told her. All three sentences, word for word, because they were hers to hear. She told the truth before anyone asked her to. She kept nothing. She read everything, except the one thing nobody would give her to read.
Lotte looked at the floor for a long time.
"Is the door going to open again?" she said, very quietly. "Here. The people liked it."
Hedda said she'd ask, I thought. Hedda was right.
"Not yet," I said. "Not until there are two people behind it, and someone who belongs to nobody to count them."
Lotte nodded slowly. Then she looked past me, down the length of the loft, to where Ivo sat on his pallet with a new scrap of slate, drawing the sign over the porters' hall again from memory, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth.
"He can't read," she said.
"No."
"He's been drawing letters all night. By the light through the planks. He doesn't know what they say. He just draws them." She hesitated. "I used to write letters for people by the fountain in Corrinford, a bit each, for the ones who couldn't. Three of them asked me afterward to teach them their names, so I did, for nothing." Her inked fingers tightened on the edge of her board. "I've nothing to do until the court. I could teach him his letters."
Behind me, at the top of the ladder, Corvin had stopped.
I did not have to turn round to know what his face was doing. I could hear it. The woman who had written false rows into our ledger in her round, friendly hand was offering to teach a stranger how letters work.
"Corvin," I said, without turning.
There was a long pause.
"She may teach him his letters," said Corvin at last, in the voice of a door being closed very carefully. "Not his numbers."
"Why not my numbers?" said Ivo, from the pallet. He had been listening. Of course he had.
"Because I'll teach you those," said Corvin, "myself."
He went back down the ladder. Lotte looked at me, and I looked at her, and her dimple, for the first time that morning, looked as though it might very slightly mean it.
The first lesson began an hour later, on Lotte's writing board, with Ivo sitting cross-legged in front of it like a boy at a village school, scowling.
It went badly, and then very fast.
Ivo already knew every shape. That was the trouble. He had seen every letter there was a thousand times, on a thousand signs, and he could draw any of them perfectly, upside down if you asked. What he did not have was the sound that went with each one. Lotte would point to a letter and say it, and Ivo would stare at it with ferocious concentration, and I watched the sound go in and lock onto the shape like a key turning in a lock he had carried around for years.
By noon, he had nine letters. By evening he had fourteen, and had begun, under his breath, to sound out the sign over the porters' hall from the picture of it in his head. He got it wrong twice. He scowled at Lotte as though it were her fault. Then he got it right, and stopped scowling, and did not say anything at all for a while.
Fourteen letters, I thought, watching from my crate. FOURTEEN. In one day. At home, this was called a high-potential trainee. They put you on a fast-track program with a lanyard of a different color and a mentor who was always in a meeting. Nobody I ever met learned fourteen of anything in one day. It took me a week to learn the note-counting machine, and I cried twice.
Here, his mentor is a girl waiting for a magistrate, his lanyard is a scrap of slate, and he is learning faster than anyone I have ever seen.
He did not look at me once all day. When he did, at last, in the evening, it was with the same narrow, careful look as that first morning, as though I were a sign he had not finished copying and did not yet trust.
He swept the step first.
He did it at dawn on Day 419, before Wat had the shutters up, with a broom he had borrowed from Gil and had not, I suspected, asked about. He swept the step of the shut door on the street of the goldsmiths where he had sat for three days, and then the street in front of it, and then, because the man who sold scales next door came out to watch, the street in front of the scale shop as well. By the time Wat opened the shutters, the street of the goldsmiths was the cleanest street in Aubrelle, and Ivo was standing in the middle of it with the broom, looking at me as though daring me to say thank you.
I didn't. I have dealt with customers like that before.
"The vault man," he said. "Where are the stairs he hates?"
So for two days, around his lessons, he carried things.
While I was in Aubrelle, the door opened every day. Corvin sat on a stool on my side of the counter and made the rows, and I released them, because no row in this house may be made and released by the same hand, not even the keeper's. Ivo carried water up from the well for the ink and the washing. He carried the empty chest down to the strongroom for Wat, who considered him for a long moment and then, very slowly, let him. He carried Gil's onions, all of them, in their long plaits, from one end of the rope store to the other and back again, because Gil had twice decided they were in the wrong place.
He did not go near the coin. Nobody told him not to. He simply walked round it, every time, the way you walk round a dog you have not been introduced to.
He knows. Nobody told him the rules, and he already knows which things in a bank you don't touch. It took me three weeks of training and a laminated card. I still have the card. It's in Jakarta. In my drawer. Somebody has opened my drawer by now. Somebody has found the card. Oh no, what else is in that drawer—
Old Master Fulk Arden came in on the second morning, with his loupe on its cord and his dandelion hair, to deposit two marks from mending a lady's bracelet. He weighed the coins on his own little scale before he handed them over, and then looked at each one through his loupe from a distance of two inches, before he would let Corvin count them. Ivo stopped in the doorway with a bucket in each hand and watched the old man weigh, and look again, with an expression I had not yet seen on his face.
"Why twice?" he said.
Master Arden turned and looked at him through the loupe, which made one of his eyes enormous.
"Because the first time," he said, "I was only looking. The second time, I was checking." He let the loupe drop on its cord. "Most people never learn the difference, young man. The few who do are very seldom liked."
Ivo looked at him for a long moment. Then he went to fetch more water, and I saw his lips moving.
Corvin, meanwhile, had a habit.
On some evenings, after the shutters were down and Ivo had gone back to the wharf with Gil's lamp, and before Wat turned his key, Corvin took the Aubrelle ledger to the end of the counter, turned it over, and opened it from the back. The back pages of our book here held the whole of the book at home, written as it was written: every row Arno made in Corrinford, every release in Mistress Hale's small, upright hand, appearing in Aubrelle on the same day, with no crystal, no rider, and not a single bit of cost.
He read them the way other men read letters from home.
"Wage day went through," he reported quietly, on the evening of Day 419. "One plain page. Thirty-five names. Ottley didn't cry, or if he did, nobody wrote it down." He turned a page. "Brenna deposited. Twice. The same amount. Mistress Hale has written beside the second: Counted twice. Customer's habit. M.H."
"And the vault?"
He ran his ink-stained finger down to the foot of the day, where the description column ended in one line in a thin, dry, spidery hand.
"Counted without warning, dawn, Day 418," Corvin read. "Correct, to the bit. Mistress Hale said nothing. A.P."
Aldous counted. Again. Without warning, in the dark, in a sedan chair, and he got it right, and he wrote it down for us, twenty-four days away. It's like reading the branch group chat on leave. No. It's worse. The group chat only told you things. This tells you everything, row by row, in Arno's capitals, and you can't do anything about any of it. Is Arno saying good morning? The ledger doesn't say. Why doesn't the ledger SAY?
"Nothing wrong," said Corvin, closing the book. He sounded almost disappointed.
"That's good," I said.
"I know it's good." He tucked the ledger under his arm for Wat. "I just don't trust it yet."
On the evening of Day 420, after the shutters were down, I took the little purse out of my left blazer pocket, the one that held the house's money for the road, and counted two marks onto the counter in front of him.
"For two days," I said. "Carrying for the house."
Ivo looked at the coins. He did not touch them.
"You'll want me to sign something," he said.
"A receipt. So that we both know it was paid."
"I can't read it."
"I'll read it to you."
"No," said Ivo.
He said it the way Tamsin says things: one word, after which the rest of the conversation has already happened.
"I don't sign what I can't read," he said. "Not for anyone. Not for two marks. My father put his thumb on a paper once, because the man who held it read it to him, and he believed what he heard." He pushed the coins back across the oak, one inch. "Keep them. When I can read your receipt, I'll sign it, and then I'll take them."
I looked at him for a long time.
I signed a contract without reading it, I thought. On my last night at Counter 3, over a meterai, in gold ink, because I was tired and the customer was polite. That is how I came here. That is the whole reason I am standing in this room.
And here is someone who would rather go hungry than do what I did. I want to tell him he's right. I want to tell him I'm the cautionary tale. I am not going to tell him anything. I am going to write it down, very calmly, in ordinary ink.
"All right," I said, and wrote the two marks into a row in my own notebook, in ordinary ink, marked PENDING. "They'll wait for you."
He nodded once, as though that was exactly what he had expected.
At the bottom of the ladder, when we walked him back to the wharf, Gil Harker was waiting for us with a lamp and his enormous black moustache, bristling with news.
"Fellow from the Guild Hall was down here at dawn," he roared, in the voice he keeps for barges on the far bank. "Asking whether the lady with the stamp had come in. Good coat. Asked whether you'd eaten." He scratched his sunburnt head. "Third time this season he's asked. Told him you had. Told him you'd fed a stray, besides." He jerked a thumb at Ivo. "Didn't seem to like that as much."
Three times? THREE times in one season? A prospective customer from the Guild Hall, following up three times, asking whether I've eaten? Is that a complaint? Is it a satisfaction survey? At home, we'd have assigned him a relationship manager and a fruit basket. Here I have Gil, who is shouting.
"Thank you, Master Harker," I said. "I'll be glad to see him, if he comes to the counter."
Ivo was looking at me with his narrow grey-green eyes again. I could not tell what he was reading.
That night, at the inn, I wrote my closing.
Day 420. Aubrelle door: open, keeper present. Strangers: 1. Condition: fed. Letters known: 14. Signs drawn from memory: too many to count. Wages owed: 2 marks, PENDING, at the stranger's own request.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. He took my pen, clicked it four times, and added a line.
He owes you two loaves. Remember that. (C.D.)
I looked at it for a long time.
"He doesn't think so," I said. "He worked for them."
"He thinks so," said Corvin. "That's why he worked."
He gave me back my pen. I did not argue. I was not sure, for once, which of us was right.