The goose got through to me on the morning of Day 191, while I was tying my hair.
I was standing at Brenna's back door with the ribbon in my teeth, looking out at nothing in particular, when one of the Widow Marsh's hens came round the corner of the yard and gave me a look of pure, flat contempt. And all at once I was standing by a stopped mill in the dusk with my legs stiff from the cart, reading a curling sheet of paper nailed to a door. Names on the left. Numbers on the right. A column of dates.
Tibb Arlow. Third name down. I had read it just before the goose came round the corner.
I stood there with the ribbon in my teeth until Brenna asked whether I'd been turned to stone.
I walked to the Trust House faster than I have ever walked anywhere, and I opened the book to the back pages before I'd even taken off my lanyard, and I read the Aubrelle names again with that list in my head. Not all of them were on it. I had only read three names on that door, and only Tibb Arlow was among these. But I didn't need to have read the rest. From down the road, every one of them said. Two days down the road, the road ran through Crane's land, and on Crane's land there was a mill door, and on the mill door there was a list.
They were the people on the list. The people who owed.
I sat down on my stool.
And then, slowly, something warm spread through my chest, the way it had on the morning of the Festival.
They're saving, I thought. The people on the debt list are opening savings accounts. A few bits each, by thumbprint, with Lotte. That's what a bank is for. That's the whole point. That's why Brenna's floor matters, and my mother's biscuit tin, and every single queue token.
They're climbing out.
I almost said it out loud. I didn't, because Corvin was at his grille and he would have asked me what I was talking about, and I would have had to explain about the goose.
Then, because I am who I am, and because four years of training do not switch off just because you are happy, the other thought came.
At home, we had a phrase for a particular kind of new account. Pinjam KTP. Borrowing someone's identity card. You found a farmer, or a laborer, or a grandmother in a village, and you paid them a few hundred thousand rupiah, and they lent you their card for an afternoon, and suddenly they had a bank account they would never use, and a loan they would never see, and sometimes a motorbike on credit that somebody else was riding. We had a whole training module on it. Every year, with a test at the end.
I could still recite the warning signs. Many new accounts at once. All from the same place. All with tiny first deposits. All brought in by the same person.
I looked at the Aubrelle pages again.
Many new accounts. From the same place. With tiny first deposits.
My hands were very still on the counter.
Ask, I told myself. That's what the module says. Don't assume. Ask.
So that evening, after closing, I wrote a question to Aubrelle. There was only one way to do it. I wrote it as a row in our own ledger, with no money in it at all, in the description column, in my own hand.
To L.W., Aubrelle. The new accounts from down the road. Did each holder come to your window in person, and press their own thumb? S.H.
I didn't stamp it. It wasn't the kind of thing you stamp. I sat with the book open and watched the back pages, the way you watch a phone after sending a message you are not sure you should have sent.
It was nearly the eighth bell when the answer came. Round, steady, one careful letter at a time.
Every one, Sekka. I saw all their faces. They came up on the estate carts with the produce, and stood in the queue like everyone else, and pressed their own thumbs. They were so proud. L.W.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.
They came themselves, I thought. Every one. She saw their faces.
On the estate carts, said some small, tired voice at the back of my mind, very quietly. Whose estate?
Of course on the estate carts, I told it. How else would farmers get to the capital? They'd come up with the produce. Everyone down that road works for the estate. That's what an estate is.
I closed the book, and went home, and slept well for the first time in a week.
Over the next five days, the people from down the road began to save in earnest.
Not a few bits now. Crowns. Tibb Arlow, deposit: 4 crowns, 15 marks. Alder Moss, deposit: 3 crowns, 18 marks. Meg Holloway, deposit: 4 crowns, 10 marks. Each row in Lotte's round, steady hand, each signed in the officer's box and sealed with the little brass house and key, each well under the limit of five crowns that Corvin had set on the day of her appointment. And three or four days after each one, a withdrawal from the same account, of almost exactly the same size, under the limit again.
Every evening, Lotte's closing agreed with the book to the bit. Every evening, under her name, in her own hand, she wrote and Wat.
Harvest, I thought, reading the rows at night with my chin on my hand. It's the end of the harvest down there. They've sold their grain and they're putting the coin somewhere safe for a few days, until they need it. That's exactly what Brenna did with her first crowns. Put it in, take it out, put it in again. Learning to trust it.
There was one more thing on every one of those rows, and I saw it every night. In the depositor's box, where a holder signs or presses a thumb, the same small, neat hand had written G. Pask, for the holder. It was there on every withdrawal too.
Of course, I thought. Nobody walks two days each way to bank four crowns, so the steward brings the families' coin up with the produce and signs for them. At home, a village head came in every month with a whole village's savings in one envelope, and we all thought it was lovely.
Corvin read the same rows with a pencil.
On the evening of Day 196, he laid his scrap of paper on the counter beside the book. On it, in two columns, he had written every deposit from down the road since the Restday, and every withdrawal.
"Thirty-one crowns in," he said. "Twenty-six out. From people on Ostrel Crane's land." He tapped the first column. "In a season when the mill on Crane's land has a broken wheel and nobody has mended it."
"It's harvest," I said.
"Whose harvest?" said Corvin. "They don't own the fields, Sekka. They work them. The harvest belongs to the estate."
I didn't have an answer to that. I had one anyway.
"Then perhaps the estate's paying them," I said. "Perhaps the steward's finally doing something right. You said yourself his rows were the oddest in the book because they were honest."
"I said they were odd." Corvin took his spectacles off. "Every one of these rows is validated. Every one is under five crowns. Every closing agrees with the book. Every new account was opened by its own holder, in person, with their own thumb. Lotte says so, and I believe her."
"Then what's wrong?"
"Nothing," said Corvin. "That's what's wrong."
I stared at him.
At home, I thought, the only person who ever said things like that was the auditor from head office. We used to hide the good biscuits when he came.
"Twelve years at the mint," he said, quietly. "The books that frightened me were never the messy ones. Messy books are honest. People are messy." He laid his hand flat on the Aubrelle pages. "This is the tidiest book I have ever read."
He's tired, I thought. We're both tired. He's been reading the Aubrelle book every night since we got home, the way I have, and it's three weeks away and he can't touch it, and it's making him see shadows.
And underneath that, quieter, a thought I didn't want: And we're four short. Two, now. And if he's right, it'll be fewer.
I didn't say that one. I am not proud that I thought it. I am writing it down because I promised myself, afterwards, that I would write all of it down, including the parts I wished I hadn't thought.
"Lotte came here with nothing but a writing board," I said instead. "She cried at Wenna's row. She told me she'd keep it."
"I know," said Corvin. "I like her as well." He put his spectacles back on. "The season's report is due at the Office, and the first run goes down with Hedda the morning after Restday. I'll take the report with the coin." He folded his scrap of paper and put it in his satchel. "And while I'm there, I'll count the vault."
"You don't trust her."
"I trust her," said Corvin. "I trust you. I count you every night." He looked at me over the cracked lens, and his voice was gentler than I had ever heard it. "Counting isn't the opposite of trust, Sekka. It's what lets trust stay standing when somebody leans on it."
I had no answer to that either. So I nodded, and turned back to the book, and read the rows from down the road again, one by one, and every single one of them looked perfectly fine.
The hundred and ninety-ninth depositor was a washerwoman's daughter, fifteen years old, with her mother's red forearms and a single mark she had earned helping on the river steps. Hettie brought her in by the elbow at the third bell on Day 197, and stood behind her the whole time with her arms folded, glaring at anyone who looked as if they might hurry the girl.
I wrote her name myself. I had not let anyone else write a Corrinford name since the day I came home. The girl pressed her thumb in the box, and watched the gold run along the edge of her new passbook, and went pink to the ears.
"A hundred and ninety-nine," said Fenn from the doorway, who had been keeping count all week on a slate, in little straight lines, five to a bundle, and announcing every new account to the street like a town crier. By a hundred and ninety-nine the slate was full, and he had moved on to the doorframe he was standing in.
A hundred and ninety-nine lines on the doorframe of a licensed house, I thought. At home, we'd have called it a dashboard and put it on a slide.
The two hundredth came in the afternoon. Not through my door.
I was in the middle of a cooper's row when I heard Corvin, at his grille, go very still. He didn't say anything. He simply turned the ledger round on the oak, so that I could see the back pages, where one more line was writing itself, in a round, steady hand three weeks away.
Day 197. New account. Alys Arlow, of Crane's land, from down the road. By thumbprint. Opening deposit: 6 bits. Heir: Tibb Arlow, her husband.
Two hundred.
Fenn saw my face, or rather saw Corvin's, and worked it out, and ran out of the door shrieking the number down Bakers' Lane before either of us could stop him.
By the seventh bell, the whole town knew.
Brenna baked a cake. It was the size of a cartwheel and very nearly the weight of one, and she had pricked the number into the top of it with a skewer, two hundred little holes, one for each name, and then she had made Fenn count them twice. Jory brought a bowl he had carved for the occasion, with a house and a key and the number burned into the base. Hettie's washerwomen came in a body and sang something about the river that I did not entirely understand and suspect was not entirely polite. Borrik stood guard over the cake. When Fenn reached for the edge of it, Borrik said, "Halt. Who goes there," in a voice that made a washerwoman drop her cup. Fenn said, "Depositor," and held up his passbook, and Borrik examined it carefully, upside down, and let him through. Liesl came from the Guild Hall in her plain brown dress, which meant she had come as herself, and hugged me, and then stepped back looking embarrassed, as though she had done something against regulations.
Aldous sent down a cask of wine in his sedan chair, with Mistress Hale walking ahead of it like a general. The note pinned to the cask said, in his spidery hand: Two hundred. As promised. I remember everything anyone tells me. A.P.
Mistress Hale accepted a single slice of cake, ate it standing, very straight, and pronounced it adequate. Brenna has not forgiven her to this day.
Corvin didn't drink any of it. He stood at the edge of it all with his satchel over his shoulder, and smiled when people spoke to him, and watched me.
I stood in the middle of the bakery with a slice of Brenna's cake on a plate in my hand, in the warm light from the oven, with people I loved all round me, and I waited.
I waited for the feeling. The warm, tight, astonishing feeling I had had on the morning of the Festival, when Fenn put twenty-three bits on my counter and I smiled before I knew I was going to. The feeling of a number turning, all at once, into faces.
It didn't come.
I smiled at everyone. It was a good Service Smile. Nobody noticed the difference except, I think, Corvin, and possibly Brenna, who notices everything that happens in her bakery.
It's because I'm tired, I told myself. It's because I've done fifteen a day for three weeks and haven't slept. It's because I didn't see her face. Alys Arlow. I've never seen her face. That's all. The Festival was different because Fenn was standing in front of me.
That's all it is.
I ate my cake, and it was very good, and I couldn't taste it.
Corvin left at dawn on Day 199, the morning after Restday.
Hedda Brask was waiting at the bridge with three Guild blades and a cart, and on the cart were two small iron-banded chests with red wax on their lids, and in Corvin's satchel was the season's report for the Royal Office of Fair Coin, forty-four pages this time. I didn't ask why forty-four. I think by then he simply couldn't help it.
Tamsin was staying with me. She hadn't asked. She had simply looked at Hedda's three blades, then at me, then at the PENDING pile, and sat down on the customers' bench with her crossbow across her knees, and that had been the end of the discussion.
I walked with Corvin to the middle of the bridge. The Corrin went by underneath us, wide and brown and slow, the way it always does, as though nothing in the world could possibly be urgent.
"Every night," he said, "read the rows. Not the totals."
"I do read the rows."
"You read them the way you read faces." He settled his satchel on his shoulder. "Looking for the good in them. That's why people trust you. Read them the way I would, for six weeks. Looking for the bad." He paused. "The totals are what somebody wants you to see."
"And you?"
"I'll count." He held out his hand for my pen. I gave it to him, and he clicked it four times, slowly, looking down at the water, and gave it back. "And when I've counted, I'll write it in the book. You'll see it the moment I do."
Then he went down off the far end of the bridge, stooped and thin against the morning, like a heron walking very carefully into deep water, and climbed up beside Hedda, and the cart rolled away up the Aubrelle road.
I went back to my grille. I validated fifteen rows. I wrote eleven more in ink. I smiled at everyone.
That night, I read the rows the way he would.
It was much harder than I had expected. I tried tapping each row with a pencil, the way he does, in case that was the secret. I don't own a pencil, so I used one of Brenna's skewers. It was not the secret. I kept catching myself doing it my way, the way I had always done it, reading a deposit and seeing a farmer's wife coming up from the country with her harvest coin in a cloth, a little afraid of the city, a little proud. Every time, I had to stop and make myself see only what was on the page. A name. A sum. A date. A thumbprint. A brass house and key.
The rows from down the road were still perfect. There was a new deposit for Meg Holloway, four crowns and twelve marks. A withdrawal from Alder Moss, three crowns and nineteen. Each one tidy. Each one under the limit. Each one sealed. Lotte's closing agreed with the book to the bit, and Wat.
I looked for the bad, as hard as I knew how. I couldn't find any.
So I wrote my closing.
Day 199. Depositors: 201. Corrinford 159, Aubrelle 42. Target: 200. Achievement: 100.5%.
I looked at it for a long time. Then, because I couldn't think what else to do with my hands, I did something I had never done before. I went down the list of all two hundred and one names, every one of them, and counted how many of the people behind them I had actually seen. With my own eyes. Across my own counter, or Lotte's.
One hundred and eighty-six.
Fifteen I had never seen. Thirteen of them from down the road.
At home, in four years at Counter 3, I had never once put a customer's name in a ledger without seeing their face. Not once. It was the one thing about the job I had always been sure of.
I picked up my pen, and wrote one more line at the bottom of the page, and underlined it twice.
Know your customer.
I didn't stamp it. It wasn't the kind of thing you stamp. It was the kind of thing you are supposed to already know.