Epilogue: Coda | Morning Count (Nought)

Oh, the girl. Sure. Alinour, the record says. Of Lankshyre. Though I don't think Lankshyre wants her back any more than we wanted her here. She was ours for, what, three seasons? Four? Long enough to become a line item. Short enough that nobody learned her name until she was already gone, and by then it was the kind of name you learn because the paperwork requires it, not because anyone asked. She stole. That's the short of it. Not big things. Bread, mostly. A pie, once, from Kemmer's stall, which is the one everyone saw because she made a production of it, ran the whole square with the thing over her head like a battle standard, two of ours chasing her through the turnips. Harmon still won't talk about the turnips. She also took apples, candles, a bootlace, a hen that she returned the next morning with an egg inside it, which I suppose she considered a profit. She never took coin. I noted that at the time. A thief who won't take coin is either very stupid or running a different kind of arithmetic, and she was not stupid. We caught her. I want to be clear on that. We caught her regularly. She was not difficult to catch. She was small and loud and she ran in patterns you could learn if you watched, which we did, because there was nothing else happening most days that was half as interesting. The trouble was holding her. The cell held her once, overnight, and in the morning the door was locked and the bar was down and she was sitting on the bench outside eating an apple she had taken from the watch-room on the way out. Harmon checked the lock. The lock was fine. The bar was fine.…