On the morning of Day 103, a hundred crowns left the vault of the Corrinford Trust House, and Corvin counted every one of them three times.
He did it on the oak counter before dawn, by lamplight, with the door barred and the whole household watching. Hob Marrin's forty, from their shelf of their own. Forty more for a vault in a city I had never seen. Twenty to open the new door with. Then he divided them between two small iron-banded chests, fifty and fifty.
"If we lose one," he said, "we lose half."
"And if we lose both?"
"Then I'll have been wrong twice," said Corvin, "and I'll take it up with Captain Brask."
Captain Brask was standing by the door, and did not seem worried. Hedda Brask was about forty, compact and broad through the shoulders, with a weathered face, grey-blonde hair in a short, hard braid, and an old burn scar across the back of her right hand, shiny as glass. Rook had sent her with three blades: two brothers who argued about everything, and a young archer who had never been further down the road than Crane's toll. She had placed herself, I noticed, so that nothing in the hall was behind her. I would learn that she did this in every room she ever stood in.
Lotte melted red wax over the seam of each lid and pressed the brass stamp into it, so that each chest wore a little house and a key. Then Corvin took the stamp back into his satchel and ruled the record.
Departure. Corrinford, Day 103. Two chests, fifty crowns each. Counted: C. Dalle. Seals: whole. Received for escort:
Below it, he ruled a second box and left it empty, except for one word at its head: Arrival.
Hedda read the whole thing before she signed, with one short, hard stroke. I signed beside her, laid the two copies one over the other, and stamped across the seam. The gold ran along both edges of the first box and stopped, neatly, at the line above the second.
"That's one end," said Corvin.
Hedda looked at the empty box for a moment. "Twenty years guarding coin," she said. "First time anyone's written down what I was given."
Behind my grille, on my stool, sat Mistress Hale.
Aldous had lent her to us for as long as we were gone. She had a fresh stack of forms ruled in Corvin's hand, a pot of ink, and a note in Aldous's spidery writing: Nothing over one crown paid out without my say. A.P. She would write every row in ordinary ink and mark it PENDING, and I would validate them all when I came home. I had done the arithmetic in bed. Then I had stopped doing it, because it was keeping me awake.
Borrik stood at the door. He had given himself a new title for the occasion, Head of Security and Acting Keeper of the Door, and nobody had the heart to take it away from him.
Brenna came at the first bell with a cloth bundle.
"Twelve honey buns," she said, putting it into my hands. "I counted them." She looked at Corvin. "So will he."
"I already have," said Corvin.
She gave me one hard, floury hug, the kind that knocks the breath out of you, and spoke into my hair so that nobody else would hear. "Come back. I've a roof now. It wants more than one person under it."
Fenn wanted to know how many days.
"Fifty, at least," I said.
He counted it on his fingers, ran out, borrowed Borrik's, ran out again, and looked at me with such betrayal that I nearly unpacked the cart.
Liesl was waiting at the far end of the bridge, in her green coat, 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: "Bring Hedda back. She owes me two marks."
We crossed the Corrin at the second bell, with the cart creaking under two very small chests. I did not look back. If I had, my face might have done something, and I did not know what.
On the second day out of Corrinford, the fields changed.
I didn't notice it at first. Then I couldn't stop noticing. The hedges grew ragged. The ditches were choked. A mill stood by the road with its wheel stopped and one paddle hanging loose, and the cottages around it had roofs patched with sacking. By the roadside, half sunk in nettles, stood a grey stone carved with a long-legged bird.
"Crane," said Tamsin. It was the most she had said since the bridge.
A little further on, a chain hung across the road where it crossed a brook. Two men in faded livery leaned on either end of it, and under a canvas awning beside them, at a folding table, sat a small, round-shouldered man with a battered leather folio.
Gerrit Pask rose when he saw us, and bowed.
"Miss Halim. Mister Dalle." His voice was as soft and polite as it had been at my counter. "His lordship's road toll, I'm afraid. Four bits a wheel."
Hedda's scarred hand moved, very slightly, toward her belt. Corvin put a hand on the cart rail and counted out eight bits.
"A receipt, Master Pask, if you please."
"Of course." Pask wrote one in a small, neat hand and gave it to him with a little bow. Then his pale eyes went past Corvin to the cart: to the two small chests, and the red wax on their lids, and the little brass house pressed into each. He didn't look greedy. He looked like a man reading a column he meant to remember.
"Not yet, you told me, miss," he said softly. "And now?"
"Soon, Master Pask."
"Soon." He didn't write it down. He didn't need to. The men in livery let the chain fall, and we rolled over it into the baron's land.
Lotte's village was a mile past the toll: twenty cottages, a green with geese on it, and the mill with the broken wheel. Hedda agreed to stop there for the night at a small alehouse with a smoking chimney, and Lotte went home.
I walked out before dark to stretch my legs, which had forgotten what they were for after two days on a cart. On the mill door, someone had nailed a long sheet of paper, curling in the damp. Names on the left. Numbers on the right. A column of dates.
I know this list, I thought. Every bank in the world keeps this list. No bank in the world nails it to a door.
I had read three names, none of them familiar, when a goose came round the corner of the mill, took one look at my face, and decided it had seen enough. I retreated with dignity and at speed.
Lotte came back at dawn with her kerchief freshly tied and her dimple exactly where it always was. Her purse, I noticed, was empty. She had carried her season's money home herself this time, instead of trusting it to a carter's boots.
"Is your mother well?" I asked.
"Well enough," said Lotte, and climbed up onto the cart beside the chests, and asked the young archer whether he had ever seen the sea.
I took it for homesickness, and said nothing. I know what it is to leave home.
After Crane's land, the road went on for twenty-odd more days, and Tamsin knew every mile of it.
"Ford," she would say, nodding ahead. "Bad." Or: "Hill. Worse." Or, at an inn with a painted fish over the door: "Waters the ale." She was right every time. The young archer began writing her sayings down.
Every evening, Hedda and I walked once round the two chests with a lamp and looked at the wax, and Corvin wrote one line in my notebook: Chests: 2. Seals: whole. It was the shortest closing I had ever kept, and the one I checked most often.
By the fifth day, everyone in the party was filthy except my clothes. Lumeth's blessing pressed my blazer every morning, mended my hem, and brushed the road dust off my skirt, while the Guild brothers grew beards and the mules grew opinions. The brothers decided I was a witch. The young archer decided I was a princess in disguise. Hedda decided it was none of their business, and told them so.
At an inn called the Three Ploughs, forty carters shouted for stew at the same time and the innkeeper's daughter burst into tears. Before I had quite decided to do anything, I had broken a stick of kindling into forty pieces, numbered them with Lotte's ink, and handed them out down the length of the room. By the time we left the next morning, the innkeeper had painted a sign over his kitchen hatch: TAKE A NUMBER.
One of the carters was from Corrinford. He explained to the whole room that this was how they did it at the Sekka.
Correction number one hundred and thirty-one, I thought. The first one outside Corrinford.
On the twelfth day, the inns ran out. The road climbed into long, empty hill country, all bracken and wind, and for four nights we slept beside the cart under the stars.
By the third of those nights, I had not washed properly in six days, and I had come to a decision. The blessing pressed my blazer. It did nothing whatsoever about the person inside it.
There was a stream below the camp, fast and clear over brown stones, screened by a line of willows. I told Tamsin where I was going. She nodded, picked up her crossbow, and sat down on the bank facing the camp.
I took one of Jory's bowls with me. We were carrying a whole crate of them for the new door.
Back home, you don't climb into water to wash. You stand beside it and pour it over yourself with a gayung, a dipper, one scoop at a time, the way my mother did, and her mother, and everyone on our street. I had missed it more than I had missed rice. A bank's opening gift, it turned out, made a very reasonable gayung.
The first scoop was so cold that my soul left my body and watched from a willow. By the third, I had given up on pouring altogether and was sitting in the stream up to my chin, which was colder, but at least only happened once.
That was when Corvin came along the bank.
He came from upstream, the one direction Tamsin wasn't facing, where he had been checking the mules' hobbles. He had a lamp in one hand and the shipment record in the other, and he was reading it as he walked.
"Sekka, the evening count—"
He looked up.
He stopped. Then, with great precision, he turned to face a willow.
From the far side of the trees, much too late, Tamsin said, "Bathing."
Corvin addressed the willow. "Chests: two," he said. "Seals: whole. The wax on both is unbroken. Captain Brask has walked round them with me."
"Thank you, Mister Dalle," I said. Only my head was above the water. My face, I am certain, was perfectly calm. "Please note it in the record."
I am in a river, I thought. I am in a river, in another world, holding a bank's opening gift, conducting the evening review with the former auditor of the royal mint. Pak Haris had a form for everything. There is no form for this.
"Noted," Corvin told the willow. "Will you sign it now, or—"
"Later, Mister Dalle."
"Later. Yes. Of course." He began to leave, still facing the willow, moving sideways along the bank like a crab. I had not known a heron could do that.
At the fire afterwards, he cleaned his spectacles for a very long time. He signed the record without looking up once, and for two days he spoke to me almost entirely about mules. I assumed he was embarrassed about the procedure. We had, after all, held the evening count with the keeper in a river, which was surely not how they did things at the mint.
Lotte laughed into her blanket for most of an hour. On my way past Tamsin, she said, without turning her head, "Said so."
"You said so afterwards."
"Hm," said Tamsin, who had apparently been spending time with Rook Varga.
On the night of Day 126, we camped on the last ridge, and Aubrelle lay below us.
I had never seen so many lights in this world. They filled the whole valley, scattered along the curves of a wide river like coins spilled from a purse, and the city wall wrapped round them in a pale ring. On the near side, one chimney stood taller than all the rest, breathing smoke that glowed orange from underneath.
"The mint," said Corvin.
He was sitting by the dying fire. Everyone else was asleep, or pretending to be. The Guild brothers had passed a wineskin round after supper, and it had come to Corvin twice. Both times he had held it for a long moment, and both times he had passed it on.
I sat down on the other side of the fire and didn't say anything. At the counter, I had learned that the most useful thing you can give some customers is a silence long enough to put their words in.
"Twelve years," said Corvin at last. "I weighed what came out of that chimney. Every new issue." He turned his cracked spectacles over in his ink-stained fingers. "Two years ago, the new marks started coming out light. A whisker of silver. The kind of whisker you'd never feel in your hand, multiplied by every mark in the kingdom."
I knew the rest. He had told it to me once before, over a new-issue mark and his little brass scale: forty pages to the Treasury, every coin, every weight, every date, and a month later, dismissed for inaccurate counting. But he had told it then like a ledger. Tonight he was telling it like a man looking at a chimney.
"And you wrote it down."
"I wrote it down." He touched the darker square on the left breast of his coat, where a badge had once been. "They didn't dismiss me for being wrong, Sekka. They dismissed me for writing it down."
The chimney breathed. Somewhere below us, very faintly, a bell rang the hour across the whole city at once.
"Inspector Voss read it," I said. "I heard him tell you so, in the town hall."
He was quiet for so long that I thought he wouldn't answer.
"Eight months late," he said. "In the wrong archive." He turned the spectacles over once more. "Forty pages don't walk into the wrong archive by themselves, Sekka. The one man in that city who would have done something about it, and somebody made sure it reached him when there was nothing left to do. That's the worst of it."
There was more. I could hear it in the way he stopped, the way a customer stops halfway through a complaint when they reach the part that is really about them. I didn't ask.
Not every row has to be read on the first night, I thought.
So I took my pen out of my breast pocket and held it out across the fire. He looked at it. Then he took it, and clicked it four times, slowly, and handed it back.
"Count the chests at the gate," he said. "Before anyone else touches them."
"Yes."
I stayed until the fire was ash. He didn't sleep, as far as I know. But in the morning the wineskin was still full, and he was the first one up to check the wax.
The gate of Aubrelle was the largest door I had ever seen, and it had the longest queue.
Carts stood nose to tail down the road as far back as the last milestone: grain carts, wine carts, a wagon of squealing pigs, a lady's coach with its curtains drawn, everyone shouting at everyone else, while a handful of gate wardens in blue walked up and down the line, waving people forward in no order I could detect.
There were no queue tokens. I noticed this with real physical pain.
When our turn finally came, Hedda climbed down from the cart and planted herself by the tailboard.
"Guild escort ends at the gate," she said. "Inside the walls, it's the Watch's city and the Watch's problem. So we count here."
So we counted there, in the shadow of the gatehouse, on the back of a cart, with half the queue craning to watch.
Lotte held each chest steady while Hedda and I looked at the wax. It was whole, both lids, the little house and key as crisp as the morning they were pressed. Hedda broke the seals with the point of her knife. Corvin counted.
He counted out loud, crown by crown, onto the tailboard, in two long gold lines. A gate warden stopped to watch. Then a pig farmer. Then the lady's coachman, and two boys who climbed onto a wine barrel for a better view. When Corvin reached fifty, he started on the second chest. When he reached a hundred, he started again from the beginning, because he had said he would count at the gate, and to Corvin, once is not a count.
"One hundred crowns," he said.
He wrote the second box himself, in his cramped, ink-stained hand.
Arrival. Aubrelle, Day 127. Two chests. Seals: whole. Counted: C. Dalle. One hundred crowns. Delivered by:
Hedda signed. I signed. I laid the copies one over the other and stamped across the seam, and the gold ran along the edges of the second box, under the first, until both ends of the record shone.
Hedda looked at it for a long time.
"Twenty years," she said. "First time anyone could prove I did my job." She folded her copy very carefully and put it inside her coat, against her chest, the way Brenna keeps her passbook.
The pig farmer applauded. Nobody else did, but he didn't seem to mind.
That was when the man in grey came out of the gatehouse.
He was about forty-five, plump and pink and careful, with thin fair hair combed flat and a little set of brass weights hanging from his belt. He wore a grey wool coat of very good cloth, and on its left breast, exactly where Corvin's coat had its darker square, was a bright new badge.
He had been walking toward the pig farmer's cart with his weights. He stopped when he saw Corvin.
"Dalle," he said.
"Assayer," said Corvin.
"We heard you'd drowned yourself in some river town."
"Nearly," said Corvin. "It was shallower than I expected."
The man's pale eyes went to the two gold lines on the tailboard, and then to the record in Corvin's hand, with its two shining boxes. "And what is it you're counting for now?"
"A bank," said Corvin.
"A what?"
"The Corrinford Trust House," I said. "We'll be opening a door in Aubrelle very shortly. You'd be most welcome to open an account."
The man looked at me, and at my face, and found, as everyone does, nothing there at all to hold on to. Then he looked back at Corvin, and smiled with his small pink mouth.
"The Treasury will be so pleased to hear you're back," he said, and went on to the pig farmer.
Corvin buttoned his coat over the darker square.
Then, after a moment, very deliberately, he unbuttoned it again.
That night, in a narrow room at an inn inside the walls, I wrote my closing.
Day 127. Chests: 2. Seals: whole. Crowns: 100, counted twice. Signed at both ends.
I looked at it for a while. Then I added one more line.
Auditors returned: 1.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. For once, he didn't ask for my pen.