A rumor, I learned that week, is not one story. It is a dozen stories wearing the same coat.
The turnip seller had heard that the vault was empty. By the next morning, Hettie Brook had heard, from three different women at the river steps, that the vault had never been full in the first place, and that the iron door was a painted board. Master Tobin had heard at the docks that I was shipping coin east in barrels of salted fish. The cheesemaker with the magnificent mustache had heard that the gold in my stamp was a conjuror's trick and would fade within a year, leaving every passbook in Corrinford blank.
And Fenn, who heard everything, came back from the Copper Kettle with the worst one.
"They're saying the Inspector only looked at paper," he reported, his small face furious. "That he read your ledger and your license and never once went down to the vault. That on the day he came, there wasn't any coin to look at anyway. And that gold ink on a page doesn't mean there's gold in the cellar."
That one, I thought, is the worst, because it's true.
Anselm checked our papers, not our coin. On the day of the hearing, we had zero depositors and nothing in the vault to count. Since then, nobody outside this building has seen the inside of that iron door.
Osric said it himself, at the Copper Kettle: Anselm Voss believes in paper. And Osric was Grane's man for six years. I doubt that was the first time he said it.
None of the stories agreed with each other. That didn't matter. Every one of them ended in the same place: one morning, the door will be locked, and she'll be gone.
The first frightened customer came on the second day.
She was Nell, one of Hettie's washerwomen: a thin, anxious girl of about eighteen with a cough and a baby, and she stood at my grille twisting her passbook in her red hands.
"I want it out," she said. "All of it. Please."
She had a mark and seven bits in her account.
"Of course," I said, and smiled. "May I ask if anything is wrong?"
She flushed. "No, miss. It's only... my mother says..."
She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
"There's a closing fee of five bits," I said gently, "as it says on the board."
"I know, miss," she whispered. "You told me when I opened it."
I wrote the withdrawal in the ledger and her passbook, laid them together, signed, stamped across the seam. Gold. Corvin brought a mark and two bits up from the vault and counted them onto the counter coin by coin, slowly, where she could see every coin.
She gathered them up with shaking fingers and fled.
Pay quickly, I thought. Pay cheerfully. Pay every single bit, every single time, without a single question they could mistake for hesitation.
That's what they taught us in the training module about liquidity crises. The one I fell asleep in.
I wish I'd stayed awake.
She wasn't the last. By the end of the third day, six people had closed their accounts. A tanner's apprentice. Two washerwomen. The nervous young bargeman. A carter who had only been in once.
And the cheesemaker.
He stood at the counter with his arms folded and his magnificent mustache bristling, and said: "I'm not saying I believe it. I'm saying a man has to be careful."
"Of course," I said. "Thank you for trusting us these past weeks."
He watched me write his withdrawal. He watched the gold run along the seam. He watched Corvin count out his two marks, less the five-bit closing fee, and he weighed the coins in his palm, and looked at them for a long time.
"Five bits!" he said. "You see? A cut. Just like they're saying."
"It's on the board," I said. "And on the first page of your passbook. And I read it to you, word for word, the day you opened your account."
He opened his mouth. Then he closed it again, slowly, under the magnificent mustache.
Then he looked at me.
"Spy," he muttered, without much conviction, and left.
Every person who came to withdraw was paid at once, in honest coin, every bit they were owed. Not one of them waited longer than it took me to write. I made sure of it.
And every one of them cost me a validation.
By the third evening, the headache that had moved in during the week of the heir forms had brought its whole family to stay. It sat behind my eyes from the moment I unlocked the door until long after I had gone to bed. My fingers were cold all day. Twice, signing in the officer's box, my hand simply stopped, as though it had forgotten what it was doing, and I had to wait for it to remember.
Corvin put the honey-and-ginger down beside my stamp at noon each day, the way he had for a week now.
On the third day, he also put down a stool, behind the counter, where I could sit.
I didn't sit on it.
But I looked at it, sometimes, the way you look at a door you might need later.
That evening, after we had locked the doors, Corvin spread his ledger open on the counter under the lamp and turned it toward me.
"You should see this," he said. "All of it. Before it matters."
I pulled the stool over and sat down on it at last. My head was pounding.
Corvin laid it out the way he did everything: in short, flat sentences, one figure at a time.
"Forty-one depositors. Seventy-two crowns on deposit, all together, counting Tobin's term deposit. Half of that, thirty-six crowns, is in the vault, as the rule says. The other half has gone upriver to the barges, a little each week, as it came in." He moved his ink-stained finger down the column. "Penhallow's capital. Three hundred crowns. We've spent thirty on the building, the guards, the bowls and the rest. We hold twenty in the vault as a buffer. The other two hundred and fifty—"
"Are on the river," I said.
"Are on the river," Corvin agreed.
I knew. I had signed every one of those loans with him, eighteen days ago, the day after the Inspector left. Five barge merchants, vetted by Corvin down to their grandmothers. Sound boats, sound cargo, good collateral. Aldous's capital had paid for the first draw. Every week since, as deposits came in, Corvin had sent half of them upriver after it, and not a bit more. It was the start of the harvest. The barges went upriver empty, bought grain from the farms while it was cheap, and came back down full to sell it in Corrinford and Aubrelle when the Festival markets opened. Every year. Like clockwork. The loans would come back after the Festival, with interest, and the bank would make its first real profit.
They were good loans. The best kind.
They were also, at this moment, a hundred miles upriver.
"So in the vault," I said slowly, "we have thirty-six crowns of deposits, and twenty of capital. Fifty-six crowns."
"Fifty-six."
"And if every depositor in Corrinford came and asked for every bit of their coin back. On the same day."
"Seventy-two," said Corvin. "We'd be sixteen crowns short."
The lamp hissed. Somewhere outside, Tamsin's boots scraped on the step as she shifted her weight.
We're not broke, I thought. Not even close. We have more than three hundred crowns' worth of coin and sound loans, and we owe seventy-two. If you count everything, we're one of the safest houses in this town.
But two hundred and fifty of it is on a barge, and you can't pay a frightened washerwoman with a barge.
Back home, there was a word for this. Two words, actually. They had been on a slide in the liquidity training module, the one I had fallen asleep in, in big friendly letters, with a cartoon of a bank wearing a sweat drop.
Solvent but illiquid.
A bank can be perfectly healthy and still die in a single morning, if everyone comes for their money at once. That was the whole point of the slide. That was why, back home, there were central banks that could lend coin overnight to a bank in trouble, and a government agency that guaranteed deposits so that people didn't panic in the first place.
There was no central bank in Lorvane. There was no deposit insurance. There was a regulator who believed in paper and had gone back to Aubrelle, and a rich old man on a hill.
"Penhallow," I said.
"He'd give it," said Corvin. "Sixteen crowns, sixty, whatever we asked. He hates Grane more than he loves his money." He shook his head slowly. "But think. If the town sees Penhallow's men carrying chests down the hill to rescue us, what does the rumor become?"
I thought about it.
That we were empty, I thought. That we needed rescuing. That the rumor was true.
"Then we show them the vault," I said. "Open the door. Let anyone come down and see the coin with their own eyes."
Corvin looked at me for a long moment.
"Never," he said quietly, "show a crowd an open vault."
"Why not?"
"Because they'll count it," said Corvin. "And then they'll count themselves. Fifty-six crowns looks like a fortune on a counter. In a cellar, in the lamplight, in front of two hundred frightened people, it looks like a small pile. And every one of them will look at the pile, and look at the crowd behind them, and do the arithmetic." He closed the ledger. "And then they'll run faster."
I sat on the stool with my aching head in my cold hands, and said nothing for a long time.
There was a knock at the door.
It was Mistress Hale, straight-backed and iron-grey in the lamplight, with her black dress buttoned to the chin. She didn't come in.
"Master Penhallow," she said, "has heard what is being said in town. He wishes to know whether he should be worried."
I stood up. My Service Smile arrived, a little late, but it arrived.
"Please tell him," I said, "not yet. And please tell him thank you for asking."
Mistress Hale studied my face for a moment, the way everyone did. Then she nodded once and went back up the hill in the dark.
Not yet, I thought. Sixteen crowns. Not yet.
The strangers came on the fifth day.
The first was a plump, pink-cheeked man of about fifty in a mustard-yellow waistcoat, with a cheerful round face and very small, very clean hands. He introduced himself as Bartholomew Keane, a grain factor from Aubrelle, newly settled in Corrinford for the harvest season. He had heard, he said, such good things about the Trust House.
He laid thirty crowns on my counter in a heavy leather purse.
The second came that afternoon: a tall, thin woman in a grey travelling cloak, with a long hawk-like nose and cool grey eyes, who said she was Mistress Odile Fenwick, a draper's widow, moving to Corrinford to be near her sister. Twenty-five crowns.
The third came the following morning. A languid young man of about twenty-two in a velvet coat far too warm for the weather, with long fair hair and the bored, half-closed eyes of someone who had never once had to count anything for himself. Piers Ambry, son of a wool merchant upriver. Thirty-five crowns, tipped out of his purse onto the counter with a careless flick, as though it were sand.
Ninety crowns, in two days. More than the whole town had deposited in a month.
Behind his grille, Corvin had gone completely silent.
I did everything by the book. My book, from my world.
For every one of them, I asked the questions we asked every customer who walked in with a large sum of cash and no history at the branch. Name. Address in town. Occupation. Where the money came from. What they intended to use the account for.
They all answered. Smoothly. Pleasantly. Without hesitating once.
That was what bothered me.
Back home, real customers hesitated. They forgot their own postcodes. They argued about whether their occupation was trader or entrepreneur. They asked what the money was for, as if it were a strange question, because nobody ever thinks about their own money that way until someone asks.
These three had answers ready, the way you have answers ready when someone has rehearsed you.
And there was something else.
"A Term Deposit would earn you one part in twenty-five each year," I told Bartholomew Keane, pointing at the board. "On thirty crowns, that's more than a crown, for doing nothing at all."
He smiled his cheerful, pink smile. "Oh, I'd rather keep it where I can reach it, miss. You never know."
Odile Fenwick said the same thing. So did Piers Ambry, yawning.
Three people with ninety crowns between them, and not one of them wanted interest.
Nobody with thirty crowns says no to free money, I thought. Not here. Not anywhere. Not unless they're planning to take it back out very soon.
Back home, we had a phrase for it, in the anti-fraud training I had actually stayed awake for. Hot money. Large deposits from new customers with no history, placed in accounts with no lock-up, ready to be pulled at a moment's notice.
I couldn't refuse them. There was nothing in the Edict, nothing in Anselm's conditions, nothing in my own rules that let me turn away an honest-looking customer with honest coin because I didn't like the way he smiled. And refusing them would have been its own story by nightfall: the Trust House is turning away coin. Why? Because it can't hold it.
So I opened their accounts. I wrote, and signed, and stamped across the seam, and watched the gold run along the edges.
Then, when the third of them had gone, I turned to Corvin.
"Their coin doesn't go out," I said. "Not one bit of it. Not to the barges, not to anyone. It stays in the vault. All of it."
Corvin looked at me over his cracked spectacles for a long time.
"That breaks my rule," he said. "Half stays. Half works."
"Your rule is that at least half stays."
He opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. And then, very slowly, the corner of his mouth turned up.
"You'd have made a decent auditor," he said.
"I'm a customer-service officer," I said. "We're the ones who see the customers' faces."
I didn't ask Fenn to follow Bartholomew Keane. I want that on the record.
But Fenn had been sitting on the doorstep when the plump man in the mustard waistcoat came out, and Fenn had noticed, as Fenn noticed everything, that a grain factor newly settled for the harvest walked straight past the grain wharf without even looking at it.
So Fenn followed him.
He came back an hour before closing, breathless, with mud on his knees and his eyes shining.
"He went down Tanner's Row," he panted. "Then round the back of the dye works, then through Cooper's Yard, like he didn't want to be seen. And then he knocked on a door. A little green door, round the back." He gulped air. "The back door of the Scale Brotherhood's counting house."
Nobody said anything.
Corvin put down his pen.
"Ninety crowns," he said quietly. "In accounts they can empty at a moment's notice. Grane's money, wearing three different coats." He looked at the vault stairs. "If you'd followed my rule, and lent half of it to the barges—"
"We'd be sixty-one crowns short," I said. "Instead of sixteen."
He wanted us to lend it, I thought. He wanted to fill the vault with his coin, wait for us to send half of it upriver, and then take it all back on the same morning, in front of the whole town.
He isn't trying to make a rumor true.
He's trying to make it come true.
The next morning, the notices went up.
They appeared overnight, the way mushrooms do. One was nailed to the parapet of the bridge, right where everyone crossing into town had to pass it. Another was pasted to the side of the market fountain. A third was on the door of the Copper Kettle, until Marga tore it down and fed it to her fire with her own three-fingered hand.
They were all the same: big, crude letters, painted in black on cheap paper.
THE TRUST HOUSE CANNOT PAY.
ASK FOR YOUR COIN BEFORE IT IS GONE.
Most of Corrinford couldn't read. It didn't matter. By noon, there were men standing beside each notice reading it aloud, helpfully, to anyone who passed. Quiet, ordinary-looking men in ordinary coats. I didn't recognize any of them. I didn't need to.
I went to look at the one on the bridge myself, late in the afternoon, after we closed.
I stood in front of it for a long time with my hands folded and read it three times, the way Brenna counted coins. People passing on the bridge slowed down to look at me looking at it. Some of them whispered. A few of them, people I knew, people with passbooks in their pockets, wouldn't meet my eyes at all.
No rebuttal, I thought. No angry speech. Back home, the worst thing a bank can do in a rumor is look frightened in public. The second worst thing is look angry.
So I did neither. I read it, and nodded politely, as if it were a notice about the price of turnips, and walked back across the bridge with my back straight.
Inside, my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
That night, Corvin and I counted the vault together.
We did it by lamplight, in the cold stone room behind the iron door, the way Corvin had counted Aldous's capital the week we opened. Every crown, every mark, every bit. He weighed. I wrote. Tamsin stood at the top of the stairs with her crossbow across her knees.
"A hundred and forty-six crowns," said Corvin at last. "The fifty-six that were here before, and the ninety Grane lent us without meaning to." He set down the last stack. "Against a hundred and sixty-two crowns on deposit."
"Sixteen short," I said.
"If every last depositor comes. If not one person in this town stays."
We looked at each other across the stacks of coin.
"They'll come early," Corvin said. "Grane's three will come first, to make a show of it. Then everyone who's heard the notice read out." He paused. "Then you'll be validating every withdrawal yourself. All of them. All day."
I didn't answer.
On market day, after twenty accounts and a handful of trial deposits, I had been signing my name like a woman walking on ice. This week, after twenty a day, my headache had moved in with its whole family. Tomorrow could be all forty-four of them, one after another, from dawn to dusk, on top of a week that had already worn me thin. I had no idea what happened to a person who kept validating after the ice ran out.
"You could pay them without it," said Corvin quietly. "Just tomorrow. Write it in ordinary ink. Stamp it afterwards, when it's over."
I thought about it. Honestly. For a long moment.
"No," I said.
"Sekka—"
"If I pay someone without validating it," I said, "then the ledger says one thing, and their passbook says another, until I fix it. And tomorrow, of all days, the only thing we have that Grane doesn't is that our books cannot lie. Every withdrawal on the record, in gold, the moment it happens." I looked at the stacks of coin. "That's the whole bank, Corvin. If I stop doing it on the one day it matters, then the notice is right. We can't pay. Not properly."
Corvin looked at me for a very long time.
Then he picked up the lamp.
"Then sleep," he said. "Now. All of it you can get."
I didn't sleep.
I lay by Brenna's oven in the dark and listened to the house settle, and counted crowns in my head until they stopped meaning anything. Upstairs, I heard Brenna moving around long after she should have been asleep. At some point, she came down, without a lamp, and put a cloth bundle beside my pillow. Bread, still warm. Two honey buns. A wedge of cheese.
"For tomorrow," she said, in the dark. "You'll forget to eat."
"Thank you."
She didn't go back up right away. I heard her stand there, breathing.
"I'm not taking mine out," she said at last. "Whatever happens. I want you to know that."
Then she went upstairs before I could answer.
Sometime in the last hour of the night, I gave up and sat up and wrote my daily closing by the dim red glow of the banked oven.
Day 33. Depositors: 44. Days remaining until the Harvest Festival: 50.
Achievement: 44%.
Then I went to the shutter by the flour bins, the same shutter the thieves had come through, and opened it a crack.
From Brenna's window, if you leaned out a little, you could just see the bend of the river and the near end of the bridge, black against a sky that was only beginning to turn grey. And on the far side of the bridge, where the street ran down to the old customs house, there were lights.
Lanterns. Small yellow lanterns, one after another, in a long, slow, wavering line along the riverbank. Ten. Twenty. More, coming down the lanes from the market square and the tanneries and the river steps, joining the end of the line one by one.
It wasn't even dawn.
They were already queuing outside the Trust House.
I stood at the shutter in my spotless blazer, which some god had pressed for me in the night, and watched the lanterns come.
My face didn't move.
I tied my hair back. I put Brenna's bundle in my pocket. I picked up my stamp.
And I went to open the doors.