I spent the morning painting a board.
It was a plain plank of pine, sanded smooth, that Borrik had pulled out of the customs house cellar. I painted it white, waited for it to dry, and then, in careful black letters, I painted what every bank branch in Indonesia has hanging by its entrance.
CORRINFORD TRUST HOUSE: OUR RATES
Savings Account: deposit and withdraw any day. No interest. Fee: 5 bits a year. Closed within the first year: the year's fee is kept.
Term Deposit: one season or longer. Interest: one part in twenty-five per year.
Trade Loan: for vetted merchants, with collateral. Interest: one part in twelve per year.
All rates within the Debt Edict's limit of one part in ten.
Corvin watched me hang it beside the door with an expression of deep suspicion.
"You're telling everyone exactly what you charge," he said.
"Yes."
"Before they even ask."
"Yes."
"Grane would never do that."
"That," I said, "is the point."
Back home, it's the law, I thought. Every branch has to display its rates. Nobody reads the board. But everyone notices if it isn't there.
By noon, we were at the town hall.
It seemed as though half of Corrinford had come. The long hall was packed from wall to wall: market women and dockworkers, the tanner's apprentices, the turnip seller and the carpenter with sawdust in his hair, Master Tobin the boatman and his daughter. Liesl stood near a window in her green Guild coat with her arms folded, pretending she had only stopped by on an errand. Fenn had climbed onto a windowsill. Brenna sat on the end of a bench with her good grey shawl around her shoulders and her hands knotted in her lap.
At the front of the hall stood a long table. Reeve Ashby sat at one end of it, his chain of office gleaming on his round chest, looking uncomfortable. Osric Vane sat at the other end in a fresh crimson sash, a thick sheaf of papers in front of him, looking perfectly at ease. He did not look at me once.
Okay, I thought. Okay. This is an OJK examination. I've seen two of those. I hid in the pantry for the first one.
There is no pantry here.
The chair in the middle of the table was empty.
I noticed him only because the room noticed him first. There was a man sitting alone on the very last bench, by the door, and the people nearest him had left a little space around him without seeming to decide to.
He was small and neat, in his early fifties, with smooth silver hair combed back from a high forehead and a short, well-kept silver beard. He wore round spectacles with thin gold rims, and a coat of dark green wool that was plain and very expensive. A thin gold chain crossed his waistcoat, and from it hung a tiny brass scale, no bigger than a thumbnail. His hands rested on top of each other on the head of a walking stick. He had the gentle, attentive face of a schoolmaster listening to a favorite pupil recite.
He saw me looking, and smiled, and inclined his head politely.
"Hollis Grane," Corvin murmured beside me, without turning. "Don't look at him."
"He looks kind."
"Yes," said Corvin. "He always does."
At that moment, the door opened, and the hall went quiet.
Inspector Anselm Voss was not what I had expected.
I had expected someone tall and grand, like a judge in a film. Instead, the man who walked down the aisle was short and broad as a barrel, about fifty-five, with close-cropped iron-grey hair, a square, deeply lined face, and black eyebrows so thick and so straight that they looked like two strokes of a brush. He wore a plain dark-grey traveling coat, dusty from the Aubrelle road, with the crimson sash of the Office across it. A pair of reading spectacles hung from a cord around his neck. Under one arm, he carried a battered leather satchel stuffed so full of papers that it wouldn't close.
He sat down in the empty chair in the middle of the table, took out a single sheet of paper, put on his spectacles and looked over them at the room.
His hands, I noticed, were very still.
"I am Anselm Voss," he said. His voice was quiet, a little hoarse, and it reached every corner of the hall without seeming to try. "Inspector of the Royal Office of Fair Coin. I have twenty-two years on the roads of this kingdom, and in that time, I have learned one thing." He laid his palm flat on the table. "People lie. Paper is harder to make lie. So today, we will look at paper."
He glanced at the sheet in front of him.
"The keeper of the Corrinford Trust House."
I stood.
Okay, I thought. Okay. Smile. Fold your hands. You've done this. You've survived angry customers, quarterly reviews and a god with a brochure.
You can survive a man with eyebrows.
"Two charges," said Inspector Voss. He read from his sheet without inflection. "First: that the Corrinford Trust House lends money at interest beyond the measure permitted by the Debt Edict. Second: that it takes coin from the public without registration with the Office." He looked up. "The Registrar's report."
Osric rose, smoothing his sash, and read. He read well. His voice was smooth and reasonable and a little regretful, the voice of a man doing an unpleasant duty. A foreign woman, of unknown origin and unknown house. An iron vault. Rates concealed from the public. Rumors of lending at extortionate terms. No registration on file. In the Registrar's judgment, a danger to the honest commerce of Corrinford.
He sat down. Somewhere near the back, someone murmured agreement.
He's good, I thought. He's very good. If I didn't know him, I'd believe him.
I'd also report him for the rosewater. But I'd believe him.
"Miss Halim," said the Inspector. "Your answer."
I had decided the night before, sitting in the Copper Kettle in Corvin's coat, that I would answer the way I answered every customer who walked up to Counter 3 angry and confused. Not with a defense. With an explanation.
"Inspector," I said. "The Trust House offers three products. May I explain each of them?"
His black eyebrows rose a fraction. "Go on."
"The first is a Savings Account." I turned slightly, so that the hall could hear. "You bring your coin to the counter. We write the amount in our ledger and in a book that you keep, called a passbook. You can take your coin out again any day the doors are open. We pay no interest on it. We charge five bits a year to keep it safe, which pays for the guards and the vault. If you close the account before the year is out, those five bits are kept as a closing fee."
A few people in the crowd glanced at each other. Five bits. That's two and a half loaves.
"The second is a Term Deposit. If you know you won't need your coin for a season or more, you can leave it with us for that agreed time. In return, we pay you one part in twenty-five per year. If you take it out early, you get all your coin back, but no interest."
"And where," said the Inspector, "does the one part in twenty-five come from?"
"From the third product," I said. "Trade Loans. We lend part of what we hold to merchants who need it, for barges, for cargo, for stock. My partner checks every merchant before we lend a single bit, and we require collateral or a guarantor. We charge one part in twelve per year." I paused. "The difference between what we pay depositors and what we charge borrowers pays our costs. Everything we charge is below the Edict's limit of one part in ten. It's written on a board beside our door, for anyone to read."
There was a silence.
The Inspector took off his spectacles and looked at me with his naked, deep-set eyes.
"You publish your rates," he said. "On a board."
"Yes, Inspector."
"Before anyone has asked for them."
"Yes."
He put his spectacles back on. Somewhere at the very back of the hall, very quietly, I thought I heard Hollis Grane laugh. It was a soft, pleasant sound, like someone enjoying a play.
"And half of everything deposited stays in the vault, untouched," I added. "Always. So that anyone who wants their coin back can have it."
The Inspector made a note.
"The charge," he said, "is lending at interest beyond the Edict. How many loans has the Trust House made?"
Corvin stood up beside me.
He was sober, and combed, and wearing his grey coat with the torn-away badge, and he held the bank's brown leather ledger against his chest like a shield.
"None, Inspector," he said.
"None?"
"We have made no loans," said Corvin clearly, "because we have no money to lend. We have no money to lend because we have no depositors." He opened the ledger, turned it around and held it up so the whole front row could see its empty pages. "Not one. The Trust House stands accused of usury on a total of zero bits."
The hall was silent for exactly one heartbeat.
Then Master Tobin the boatman snorted, and his daughter giggled, and the giggle spread along the benches like a fire through dry grass until half the hall was laughing. The turnip seller laughed so hard she had to hold onto her neighbor. Even Reeve Ashby's round face twitched.
That, I thought, is the first time in my life I have ever been happy that my funding achievement was zero percent.
Inspector Voss did not laugh. But his left eyebrow moved, very slightly, the way a stone moves when the ice around it starts to melt.
"And the second charge," he said, when the hall was quiet again. "Registration."
"No registration was ever filed," said Osric smoothly, before Corvin could open his mouth. "I checked the Office's records myself. Nothing."
Corvin reached into his coat.
He took out a small square of paper, unfolded it and walked to the long table, where he laid it in front of the Inspector without a word. It was a receipt. Received of Corvin Dalle, for the registration of a house of safekeeping at the old customs house, Corrinford: two marks. It was dated the morning after Aldous Penhallow had signed our agreement, a little over two weeks earlier.
At the bottom was a signature, neat and looping and very confident.
Osric Vane, Registrar.
"I keep copies of everything," said Corvin, to nobody in particular.
The Inspector looked at the receipt for a long time. Then he looked at Osric. Osric's pale, smooth face had gone a shade paler, but his voice stayed even.
"A clerical oversight," he said. "The papers must have been misfiled."
"Must they," said Inspector Voss.
It was not a question. He laid the receipt to one side, squared its edges exactly with the edge of the table, and turned back to me.
"Is there anything further, Miss Halim?"
I took a breath.
"Yes, Inspector," I said. "There is one more matter I'm obliged to report."
I told it the way I would have written an incident report at my branch. Plainly. In order. Without adjectives.
On such a date, after closing, the Registrar had come to the Trust House. He had offered to write a favorable report in exchange for one-tenth of the bank's yearly profit, paid to him personally. He had also asked me to dine with him privately at his lodgings. I had asked him to leave his draft agreement with me so that I could review the terms. The following evening, at the Copper Kettle, he had explained those terms, and had said certain things about payments he received from the Scale Brotherhood. When I declined his invitation to go upstairs, he had blocked the door and held my wrist.
I didn't look at Osric while I spoke. I looked at the Inspector. My voice stayed perfectly level. My hands stayed folded.
It was the hardest thing I have ever said out loud in a room full of people.
When I finished, the hall was so quiet that I could hear the river under the bridge outside.
Osric laughed.
It was a light, incredulous, wounded laugh, beautifully done. "Inspector, really. A foreign woman, facing a charge of usury, suddenly remembers that the Registrar who reported her made advances?" He spread his soft hands to the room. "It's the oldest trick there is."
A few people murmured. Not many. But some.
"Do you have anything," said Inspector Voss to me, "that is not your word?"
I reached into my blazer, took out the folded paper, and walked to the long table. I laid it in front of him, beside Corvin's receipt.
Agreement of Contribution.
The Inspector unfolded it and read it. He read the whole thing, every line, as carefully as I had by Brenna's oven. When he reached the last clause, his straight black eyebrows drew together and stayed there.
Then, without a word, he picked up the receipt Corvin had given him, and laid it beside the agreement. And then he picked up Osric's own report, the thick sheaf he had read aloud to the whole hall, and laid it beside them both.
Three papers. One hand. Neat, looping, very confident.
Inspector Voss looked from one to the next. He didn't need a magnifying lens. Anyone could see it from three benches away.
"Registrar," he said quietly. "Is this your hand?"
"It's a forgery," said Osric at once. "She has a stamp that makes papers, everyone knows it, she could have—"
"Her stamp," said the Inspector, "turns ink gold. This ink is black." He tapped the agreement. "And it is not stamped."
Osric opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
"Inspector." Tamsin had stood up from a bench near the wall, her crossbow left behind for once. "I was in the store cupboard beside that room. I heard every word. The tenth. The forty crowns a year from Grane. The rooms upstairs."
"So did I," said Marga, from the back. Heads turned. She stood with her massive arms folded and her bald head shining like a lamp. "Marga, of the Copper Kettle. Twenty-six years on Tanner's Row. And my wall's thinner than his excuses."
The murmuring in the hall had changed. It wasn't for Osric anymore.
Inspector Voss turned in his chair.
"Clerk," he said.
A thin, pimply young man who had been sitting behind the long table with an inkpot, and whom I had not noticed until that moment, jumped as though he had been stung.
"Bring me the Office's local ledger. The license fees for Corrinford, the last six years. Now, please."
"I... it's at the Registrar's lodgings, Inspector—"
"Then go to the Registrar's lodgings," said Inspector Voss, without raising his voice at all. "I will wait."
The clerk ran.
We waited. The whole hall waited, in a silence so long and so heavy that Fenn, on his windowsill, fell asleep and had to be poked awake by a tanner's apprentice. Osric sat very straight in his crimson sash and looked at nothing. Reeve Ashby looked at Osric, and his round, rosy face slowly went from puzzled to troubled to something close to ashamed.
When the clerk came back, out of breath, with a thick ledger under his arm, the Inspector opened it, put on his spectacles and turned the pages. He turned them slowly. He ran one blunt finger down each column.
It took a long time.
"The Scale Brotherhood," he said at last, without looking up, "is registered in Corrinford as an exchange house. Its license fee is six marks a year." He turned another page. "Six marks. Every year. For six years." He closed the ledger. "There is no record of forty crowns. Anywhere."
He took off his spectacles.
"Osric Vane," he said, "you are suspended from the office of Registrar, pending a full inquiry in Aubrelle. You will surrender your sash, your seal and your keys to my clerk before sundown."
Osric stood. For a moment I thought he was going to say something. His small soft mouth worked. Then, very slowly, with fingers that fumbled at the buckle, he unfastened the crimson sash and laid it on the table, and walked out of the hall through the parting crowd, leaving the scent of rosewater behind him.
Nobody watched him go except me.
I watched until the door closed. Then I let out a breath I felt as if I had been holding since the Copper Kettle.
"Master Grane," said Inspector Voss.
Every head in the hall turned toward the last bench.
Hollis Grane had not moved during any of it. He sat exactly as before, his hands folded on the head of his stick, his kind schoolmaster's face mildly interested.
"Inspector," he said pleasantly.
"I will want to see the books of your exchange house before I leave Corrinford."
"Of course," said Hollis Grane. "They're always open to the Crown. You'll find every figure in them correct."
I'm sure we will, I thought. Honest, and cruel.
Grane rose. He was smaller standing than I had expected. He bowed to the Inspector, a neat, correct, unhurried bow, and then walked up the aisle toward the door. As he passed me, he stopped, just for a moment, and looked up at me through his gold-rimmed spectacles with gentle, curious eyes.
"Welcome to Corrinford, Miss Halim," he said softly. "A lovely board you've painted. I do hope you'll be staying with us for a long time."
Then he was gone.
My face didn't move.
Inside, every single hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up.
"The charge of usury," said Inspector Voss, "is dismissed. No interest can be charged on zero bits, beyond its measure or otherwise."
A ripple of laughter went through the hall again, quieter this time, and warmer.
"The Corrinford Trust House is granted a license to take deposits and make loans under the Debt Edict," he went on. "Conditionally."
Conditionally, I thought. Of course. Even in another world, the regulator gives you a conditional approval.
He counted the conditions off on his blunt fingers.
"One. Your rates stay on that board, where anyone can read them, and they never cross the Edict's limit. Two. Half of every coin deposited stays in your vault, as you have described." He glanced at Corvin, and something in his expression shifted very slightly. "A sound rule. Keep it. Three. Every season, you send the Office a written report of your deposits, your loans and the coin in your vault."
Quarterly reporting, I thought. I left my world to escape quarterly reports, and the very first thing the government of my new world asks me for is a quarterly report.
Somehow, that's comforting.
"Four," said the Inspector. "In six months, I will come back, and I will look at all of it."
"Thank you, Inspector," I said. "Those are very reasonable conditions."
"They are not meant to be reasonable," said Inspector Voss. "They are meant to be kept."
His clerk wrote out the license on two sheets of heavy paper, and the Inspector signed both, and pressed the Office's crowned seal into hot red wax at the bottom of each. Then he looked at me over his spectacles.
"I am told," he said, "that you have a stamp."
I laid the two sheets one over the other, shifted them slightly so that the edge of the top sheet crossed the wax seal on the one beneath, signed both, and pressed my stamp down across the seam.
The ink flared gold.
A murmur ran along the benches. The Inspector held up his copy, turned it toward the window, and studied the half-stamp and the thin golden line along its edge for a long, long moment.
"Hm," said Anselm Voss. And from a man who believed in paper, I decided, that was very high praise.
The hall emptied slowly. People lingered in clusters on the steps and in the square, talking, and more than a few of them glanced back at me as they went. Not the way they had glanced after the Reeve's proclamation. Differently. As if they were trying to decide something.
Reeve Ashby came over before he left. He stood in front of me turning his chain of office over in his plump hands, and his round, rosy face was redder than usual.
"Miss Halim," he said. "I may have been... hasty. Registrar Vane assured me that... well." He cleared his throat. "I read out what I was given. I should have asked who gave it to me."
"You read the Edict very clearly, Reeve," I said. "It's a good law. It protects people."
He blinked at me. Then he nodded, slowly, and something in his shoulders eased.
"It does," he said. "It does, doesn't it." And he went out, still turning his chain over in his hands.
Inspector Voss was the last to leave. He packed his overstuffed satchel without hurrying, gave his clerk instructions about Osric's sash and seal and keys, and walked toward the door. Then he stopped in front of Corvin.
Corvin, who had been standing by the wall with the empty ledger under his arm all this time, straightened.
The two men looked at each other. One tall and thin and stooped, one short and square as a barrel.
"Dalle," said the Inspector.
"Inspector."
"Your report on the royal mint. Forty pages." Anselm Voss's voice was very quiet. "It reached my desk eight months after you were dismissed. Someone had filed it in the wrong archive."
Corvin did not move. I don't think he breathed.
"I read it," said the Inspector. "Twice." He settled his satchel on his shoulder. "It was correct."
Then he walked out into the afternoon sunlight, and did not look back.
Corvin stood very still for a long time after he had gone.
I didn't say anything. I didn't look at his face. In customer service, you learn when a person needs you to look somewhere else.
Instead, I looked out of the open door at the square, where the crowd was still breaking up slowly in the sun, and at the bench at the very end of the front row, where Brenna had been sitting with her good grey shawl and her knotted hands.
She was gone. I hadn't seen her leave.
That evening, I wrote my daily closing by the light of Brenna's oven. Brenna had already gone up to bed. She hadn't said much at dinner. She hadn't said much at all.
Day 10. Depositors: 0. License: granted (conditional). Registrar: suspended. Days remaining until the Harvest Festival: 73.
Achievement: 0%.
I looked at the line for a while.
It was still zero. Exactly the same number as three days ago. We had won, and the number hadn't changed at all.
But the door's open now, I thought. Properly open. With a license, and a board, and a stamp the Crown has seen.
Now someone just has to walk through it.
I closed the notebook.
The next morning, for the first time since I had arrived in Corrinford, I overslept.
When I opened my eyes, grey light was already showing at the shutters. The oven was roaring, the first loaves were in, and Brenna was nowhere to be seen. Fenn was sitting cross-legged in front of the oven door, eating a roll and watching the bread with enormous seriousness.
"Where's Brenna?" I asked.
"Out," said Fenn. "She said to mind the loaves." He took another bite. "She said if I burn them, it comes out of my honey buns."
He wouldn't tell me anything else. I assumed she had gone to the mill for flour, as she sometimes did at dawn, grabbed my lanyard and hurried out with my hair only half tied.
When I reached the Trust House and turned my key in the lock, there was already someone waiting on the step.