We spent three evenings preparing.
Corvin kept his word. On the first evening he arrived at the bakery after closing, sober, with his beard combed and a leather satchel full of paper under his arm, and Brenna stared at him as though a heron had walked in and asked for bread.
"Working day," he said, before she could open her mouth.
We worked at Brenna's long table, by the light of one lamp and the warmth of the banked oven. Corvin did the numbers: what a vault would cost, what the guards would cost, how much coin had to stay on the table, how much could go out to merchants, and how much it might earn when it came back. He wrote in small, cramped columns, and he didn't let a single figure onto the page until he had checked it twice.
I did the rest.
At my branch, whenever we needed approval for anything bigger than a stapler, we wrote a proposal. Background. Problem. Solution. Benefits. Risks. Mitigation. I had written dozens of them. I had never once enjoyed it.
I enjoyed this.
Background: the people of Corrinford have nowhere safe to keep their money. Problem: savings are lost to theft, fire and moneylenders. Solution...
"You've written 'Risks' as a heading," Corvin said, reading over my shoulder on the second night. "On a document you intend to show a man whose money you want."
"Yes."
"Most people hide the risks."
"Most people get found out," I said. "Then they lose the customer forever. It's better to say the worst thing first, while you're still the one saying it."
Corvin looked at me for a long moment. Then he went back to his columns without a word, and I decided to count that as a compliment.
On the third evening, I wrote a letter.
It was short and polite, the kind of letter I would have written to a prospective priority customer: Miss Sekar Halim respectfully requests a brief meeting with Master Aldous Penhallow, at his convenience, to present a proposal concerning the safekeeping of money in Corrinford. Fenn carried it up the hill the next morning, along with the bread delivery.
He came back an hour later, out of breath and grinning.
"He'll see you tomorrow! At the third bell!"
"That fast?" said Corvin, frowning.
"The housekeeper said Master Penhallow wants to see the envoy."
I closed my eyes.
Of course. Of course he does.
The rumor I have been trying to kill for two weeks just got me a meeting with the richest man in town.
I don't know whether to be grateful or file a complaint.
"You're coming with me," I told Corvin.
"I am not."
"You did the numbers. If he asks a question about the numbers—"
"If he sees me, he'll throw you out before you've opened your mouth." Corvin pushed the satchel across the table to me. "Everything you need is in there. You know it as well as I do now. Better, in places. Don't count any months."
"...That was one time."
"It will be the time I remember on my deathbed."
Penhallow House stood at the top of the only real hill in Corrinford, above the river and the bridge and the crooked rooftops, where the air was quieter and the streets were cleaner. It was a tall house of honey-colored stone with a slate roof and narrow windows, the kind of house that had been built to say I made my money honestly, and there is a great deal of it.
I stood at the iron gate a little before the third bell, holding Corvin's satchel in both hands.
My blazer was perfect. My shoes shone. My hair was tied neatly at the nape, because I had spent twenty minutes on it by the bakery's tin mirror while Brenna watched and pretended not to.
Okay, I thought. Okay. It's just a presentation. You've done a hundred presentations. A hundred presentations to people with money. This is the same thing.
Except that if this goes wrong, there's no bank. There's no plan B. There's a baker with five crowns under a floorboard and a man in a tavern who stopped drinking for me.
No pressure.
The door opened before I could knock.
The woman who opened it was tall and very straight, about sixty, with iron-grey hair pulled into a bun so tight it seemed to lift her eyebrows. She wore a black dress buttoned to the chin, and her face had the expression of a door that had been closed for a very long time and saw no reason to change.
She looked at my blazer. She looked at my lanyard. She looked at my face.
"You are the envoy," she said.
"I'm not an envoy," I said. "I'm Sekar Halim. I have an appointment at the third bell."
She studied me a moment longer.
"Mistress Hale," she said, which I understood to be her name and not a greeting. "Wipe your feet."
My shoes were perfectly clean.
I wiped my feet.
Mistress Hale led me down a long hall lined with paintings of ships and barges, through a door, and into a study that smelled of old paper, beeswax and liniment.
There were account books everywhere. On the shelves, on the desk, stacked in towers on the floor, their spines labeled in faded ink by year. Forty years of a merchant's life, bound in leather.
In the middle of it all, in a high-backed chair by the window, sat Aldous Penhallow.
He was about seventy, small and wiry, with the kind of thinness that comes from never having sat still long enough to get fat. He was bald on top, with two fierce white tufts of hair above his ears, and his eyes were a sharp, pale blue that missed nothing at all. His left foot, wrapped in bandages and swollen at the ankle, rested on a padded stool. A cane with a silver head leaned against the arm of his chair. He wore a coat of dark red velvet, thirty years out of fashion, and a heavy gold ring on almost every finger.
He looked at me the way Corvin had looked at my notebook. As if I were a document and he was checking whether I lied.
"So," he said. His voice was thin and dry, like paper. "You're the envoy."
Here we go again.
"I'm not an envoy, Master Penhallow," I said. "I'm Sekar Halim. I work in—I worked in customer service. At a bank."
There was a pause.
"Good," said Aldous Penhallow. "I can't stand envoys. Sit down."
...What?
Two weeks. Two weeks this rumor has followed me around like a stray dog, and the one man who matters is relieved I'm not an envoy?
I sat. I placed Corvin's satchel on my knees and folded my hands on top of it.
"What's a bank?" said Aldous.
And I began.
I had rehearsed it twenty times, at the long table and on my walk up the hill. I told him about Brenna's floorboard, and the nine crowns gone in one fistful. I told him about the cobbler crying through the wall. I told him what I wanted: a place where anyone, not just adventurers, could leave their money; where it would be written down under their name; where it would be kept in a guarded vault and handed back on any day they asked.
I told him how the money would work, too, the way Corvin had taught me. Half always in the vault. The other half lent to honest merchants, carefully, at fair rates, well within the Debt Edict's limit.
Outside, my voice was calm and even, and my hands didn't move on the satchel.
Inside, I was screaming.
Is he listening? He's not nodding. Why isn't he nodding? Customers nod. Customers always nod. Is he asleep? His eyes are open. People can sleep with their eyes open. Can rich people sleep with their eyes open? Is that how they get rich?
Aldous didn't nod. He didn't interrupt. He simply watched me with those pale blue eyes, and once, when I said the word vault, his ringed fingers tapped twice on the arm of his chair.
When I finished, the study was very quiet.
"Anyone can promise to keep money safe," he said at last. "Every swindler in Aubrelle has promised it. Why should a baker believe your promise?"
I opened the satchel and took out a small booklet I had made the night before: a few sheets of paper, folded and stitched with Brenna's thread. On the front, I had written PASSBOOK. Inside, on the first page, I had written: Sekar Halim. Deposit: 10 bits.
My own ten bits. My first day's wage.
I took out my pen. I signed under the line. I pressed my stamp over my signature.
The ink turned gold.
Aldous's eyebrows rose very slightly.
"Please," I said, and held out the booklet and my pen. "Try to change it."
Aldous took the booklet. Then he took the pen, and turned it over in his ringed fingers with deep suspicion.
"You press the top," I said. "The ink is inside."
He pressed it. The tip clicked out. He pressed it again, and again, and his white tufts of eyebrow climbed slowly toward his bald head.
"Where on earth did you get this?"
"From... where I'm from."
He gave me a long look, and I watched him file the pen away somewhere behind those pale eyes, to be taken out and examined later.
Then he bent over the booklet and tried to turn the 10 into a 100. The pen slid away. He tried to tear the page with his thin, strong fingers. It wouldn't tear. He frowned, held the page up to the window, turned it this way and that, and then, with the air of a man who had been cheated before and did not intend to be cheated again, he licked his thumb and rubbed the gold ink as hard as he could.
Nothing.
"What is this?" he said quietly.
"A record that can't lie," I said. "It can't be changed, torn or burned. If thieves come in the night and steal a baker's passbook, they've stolen a book. The money is still in the vault, and the record says whose it is."
Aldous turned the little booklet over in his hands for a long time.
Then he said, "Who decides who borrows?"
Ah, I thought. Here it comes.
"My partner," I said. "He was an auditor at the royal mint for twelve years. His name is Corvin Dalle."
The effect was immediate.
Aldous's face went from pale to pink to a deep, alarming red. His ringed hand closed around the head of his cane. Mistress Hale, standing silently by the door, took one small step forward as if she were preparing to catch something.
"Dalle!" said Aldous Penhallow. "That insufferable, ink-stained, self-righteous heron! Do you know what he did?"
"He audited your books," I said. "For free. Without being asked."
"He walked into my counting house, sat down at my clerk's desk as if he owned it, and went through six years of my accounts in one afternoon!"
I waited. In customer service, you learn that the second question is always more important than the first.
"Did he find anything?" I asked.
Aldous's mouth worked.
"...Two errors," he said. "Small ones."
"Were they small?"
The silence stretched. Mistress Hale looked at the ceiling.
"No," Aldous admitted, through his teeth. "They were not small. My head clerk had been skimming for nine years."
He let go of his cane. His face slowly went back to a more reasonable color.
"I dismissed the clerk," he said. "I never thanked Dalle. I told him to get out of my house." He was quiet for a moment. "He was right, and he was rude about it, and I have never forgiven him for either."
"He's still rude," I said. "But he's still right."
Aldous looked at me sharply. And for the first time since I had walked into the room, I thought I saw the corner of his mouth twitch.
"How much," said Aldous, "do you want?"
"Three hundred crowns."
I said it in exactly the same voice I had used for everything else. Calm. Level. As if I were telling him the opening hours.
Three hundred crowns, screamed the voice inside me. One and a half billion rupiah. I am asking a stranger with gout for one and a half billion rupiah, and I have ten bits to my name, and he knows it, and I'm sitting on a chair that is probably worth more than my entire life.
Aldous didn't blink.
"And what is it I'd be buying, with three hundred crowns?"
This was the part Corvin and I had argued about for most of the second night. Corvin had wanted to lead with the profits. I had wanted to lead with the truth.
I had won, mostly because Corvin was sober and therefore tired.
"Your three hundred crowns aren't a deposit," I said. "A deposit is a baker's money. It must be returned to her, all of it, whenever she asks. Your crowns are different. They're the bank's own money. Capital."
I opened the satchel and took out Corvin's sheet of figures, and laid it on the little table beside Aldous's chair.
"If a merchant we lend to fails," I said, "if his barge sinks or his harvest rots, the bank loses that coin. When that happens, the loss doesn't come out of the baker's money. It comes out of yours. First. Before any depositor loses a single bit."
Aldous stared at me.
"So," he said slowly, "you're asking me to stand in front of the arrows."
"Yes," I said.
The word sat in the room like a stone dropped into a well.
Why did I say that. WHY did I say it like that. Corvin told me to say "cushion." He specifically said "use the word cushion, people like cushions." Nobody likes arrows. NOBODY LIKES ARROWS.
"It's in the proposal," I added, because it was. "Under 'Risks.'"
"And in exchange for standing in front of the arrows?"
"A share of the bank's profit, every year, for as long as the bank stands." I pointed to a line on Corvin's sheet. "A partnership. Not interest. The law allows it."
Aldous looked at the sheet. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked back at me, and his pale blue eyes narrowed until they were almost shut.
"Do you know," he said, "how many people have sat in that chair and asked me for money?"
"No."
"Neither do I. I stopped counting at three hundred." He tapped the arm of his chair. "They all do the same thing. They smile. They sweat. They tell me about the profits first, and the profits are always enormous. Then, if I'm patient, somewhere near the end, they mention very quickly that there may be a small risk, the way a man mentions he once had a cousin who drowned."
He leaned forward, wincing as his bad foot shifted on its stool.
"You told me the worst thing first. You looked me in the eye while you told me I'd be the first to lose my money. And you didn't blink. Not once." He studied my face. "You look like someone reading out a weather report."
It's because I'm too scared to move my face, I thought. It's because if I move my face, everything I'm feeling will come out of it at once, and you will see a twenty-six-year-old woman who is about to cry in your very nice study.
"I believe," I said, "that customers deserve to know the risks."
Aldous sat back.
For a long moment he said nothing. His eyes went to the window, to the town spread out below the hill: the crooked rooftops, the smoke, the bridge over the brown river. His ringed fingers drummed slowly on the head of his cane.
"I had a brother," he said. "Edric. Younger than me by four years. Cleverer, too, though I never told him so."
I waited.
"Thirty-one years ago, we had three barges between us. Edric ran them. A wet spring, a bad harvest, a late cargo." He shrugged one thin shoulder. "Ordinary bad luck. Edric needed forty crowns to carry him to autumn. He borrowed it from the Scale Brotherhood. Old Matthias Grane was master then. Hollis's father."
The name dropped into the room the way Dalle had, but colder.
"A fifth a month," Aldous said. "By midsummer, forty crowns had become a hundred. By autumn, Grane owned all three barges, and Edric was a clerk in another man's counting house, adding up other people's money for six marks a month. He did that for twenty years. Then he died."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Grane's books were perfect," he said. "Every figure correct. I checked them myself."
Honest, I thought, and cruel.
Aldous turned from the window and looked at me again.
"If your bank had existed thirty-one years ago," he said, "would it have lent Edric forty crowns?"
I thought about it honestly. I thought about what Corvin would say.
"If his barges were sound," I said, "and his cargo was real, and he had carried it before, then yes. At a fair rate within the Edict's limit, not a fifth a month. And if the harvest failed, the bank would have given him more time to pay, instead of taking his barges."
Aldous closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, something in his thin, sharp face had changed. It hadn't softened, exactly. It had decided.
"Mistress Hale," said Aldous. "Paper."
Mistress Hale crossed the room, took a clean sheet from the desk and laid it on the little table beside him, along with an inkpot and a quill. She did all of this without the slightest change of expression, as though old men handed out three hundred crowns to strangers every Tuesday.
"Terms," said Aldous.
Everyone in this town has terms, I thought. Corvin had terms. Brenna had terms. Even FENN had terms. I am the only person in Corrinford who signs things without reading them.
"One." Aldous dipped the quill. "Three hundred crowns of capital, paid in from my vault to yours. Not a loan. A partnership. A quarter of the bank's yearly profit comes to me."
"Agreed."
"Two. You'll need a building, and you'll need a vault in it, and you don't have either." He pointed the quill toward the window. "The old customs house, by the bridge. The crown collected river tolls there until they moved the toll gate downstream ten years ago. It's been empty since. It has a stone cellar with walls three feet thick and an iron door that took eight men to hang. I own it. You may use it."
A vault, I thought. A real vault. Already built.
Corvin is going to be unbearable about this. He budgeted forty crowns for a vault.
"Agreed," I said. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet." He wrote steadily. "Three. The name."
"The name?"
"You can't call it a bank." He said the word with distaste, the way Corvin had. "Nobody in this kingdom knows what a bank is. You'll have to spend half your breath explaining it, and the other half defending it. Call it something people already understand." He paused, then wrote three words in firm, old-fashioned letters. "Corrinford Trust House."
I looked at the words upside down.
Trust House.
It wasn't the name I would have chosen. But I thought of Lumeth, and Brenna, and the fraying ribbon, and I couldn't think of a better one.
"Agreed," I said.
"Four." And here, at last, Aldous Penhallow put down his quill and looked me full in the face. "I am an old man, and I have been wrong before. So I'll want proof that this town wants what you're selling. The Harvest Festival is three months from now. By the first morning of the Festival, you will have one hundred depositors. Not a hundred crowns. A hundred people. A hundred names in your book of records, every one of whom walked through your door and chose to trust you with their money."
He let the words settle.
"If you have a hundred, the capital stays, and the building is yours to use for as long as the bank stands. If you don't, I take back every crown and every key, and you go back to selling bread."
One hundred depositors, I thought.
Three months.
In a town where nobody knows what a bank is, the Crown's law caps every bit of interest, the Guild already has a branch network, the Scale Brotherhood owns half the debts on every street, and the only person who believes in me has a rolling pin.
"Agreed," I said.
My voice did not shake. I was very proud of that.
Aldous wrote out the last of the terms in his firm, old-fashioned hand. Then, without looking up, he said, "Hale. A second copy."
Mistress Hale took a fresh sheet and copied the terms word for word in her small, upright letters, faster than I would have believed possible. When she finished, Aldous laid the two sheets side by side and compared them line by line, his lips moving silently, before he gave a satisfied grunt.
"One for you," he said. "One for me. A man who keeps the only copy of an agreement isn't a partner. He's a judge."
Then he turned both sheets around, set them in front of me and held out the quill.
"Well?" he said. "I watched you do it with your little book. Do it here."
I blinked. "You want it validated?"
"Of course I want it validated. I've been a merchant for fifty years." He sniffed. "I don't trust promises, Miss Halim. I trust ink."
Corvin wouldn't let me stamp his promise, I thought. Aldous won't take a promise without it.
Two kinds of trust. And I need both of them.
Aldous signed both copies first, a sharp, spiky signature with a flourish at the end. Mistress Hale, without being asked, signed below him on each as witness. Then I took out my ballpoint pen and signed underneath, once on each sheet.
I hesitated with the stamp in my hand.
Two copies. Two stamps? That's twice the—
Then I remembered the back office at my branch, and the senior officer who used to stamp across the edges of stacked forms, so that half the stamp landed on each page and nobody could ever swap one page for another.
I laid the second copy over the first and shifted it slightly, so that its right edge lay across the signatures on the sheet beneath. Then I pressed my stamp down squarely across the seam.
The ink flared gold on both sheets at once.
When I slid them apart, each held exactly half of my stamp. Along the edge where they had touched, a thin golden line glowed on both pages, as though the two of them remembered each other. Aldous took his copy and held it up against mine. The two halves met, and the stamp shone whole and bright for a moment before fading back to quiet gold.
For the first time in our entire meeting, Aldous Penhallow smiled. It was a small, wicked, delighted smile, like a boy who had been given a new kind of knife.
"Gold," he said. "Ha. Let Grane's clerks try to scrape that off."
I walked out of Penhallow House, through the iron gate and down the hill, with my back straight and my hands folded around Corvin's satchel.
I got as far as the first corner.
Then my legs simply stopped working, and I sat down on the edge of somebody's garden wall, very suddenly, as if a string had been cut.
I did it.
I did it, I did it, I DID it. Three hundred crowns. A building. A VAULT. I asked a stranger for one and a half billion rupiah and he SAID YES and then he made me sign it in GOLD.
I am going to faint. I'm not going to faint. I might faint. Is this what it feels like to close a priority customer? Nobody ever told me it felt like this.
My face, of course, looked exactly as calm as it always did.
"Well?"
Fenn was sitting on the wall a few yards away, swinging his heels. Beside him, leaning against a lamppost with his arms folded and the air of a man who just happened to be passing by on a hill he had no reason to climb, stood Corvin Dalle.
"You said you weren't coming," I said.
"I'm not here," said Corvin. "I'm on a walk. For my health. Well?"
"Three hundred crowns," I said. "The old customs house by the bridge. It has a stone vault with an iron door."
Corvin's eyebrows rose. "A built vault?"
"Three-foot walls."
"I budgeted forty crowns for a vault."
"I know."
He looked genuinely offended, as if the vault had personally insulted his figures. Then he narrowed his eyes. "What did he want in return?"
"A quarter of the profits," I said. "The name Corrinford Trust House. And one hundred depositors by the first morning of the Harvest Festival, or he takes everything back."
The silence was long enough for a cart to rattle past at the bottom of the hill.
"A hundred," said Corvin. "In three months. In a town where nobody knows what a bank is."
"Yes."
"Did he mention me?"
"He called you an insufferable, ink-stained, self-righteous heron."
Corvin considered this. "That's fair," he said. "Anything else?"
"He said you were right."
Corvin was quiet for a moment. Then he looked away, down the hill toward the bridge, toward the old customs house we couldn't quite see from there.
"Then we'd better start tomorrow," he said.
I stood up. My legs held, mostly. We walked down the hill together, the three of us: a former royal auditor, a former thief and a customer-service officer from another world.
A hundred depositors, I thought.
Back home, my quarterly target was measured in billions of rupiah.
Here, it's measured in people.
Somehow, that's so much scarier.