It was Brenna.
She was sitting on the step of the Trust House with her good grey shawl around her shoulders and her floury apron still on underneath it, as if she had come straight from the oven. On her knees, held in both hands, was the cloth pouch. The tear from the thieves' nail had been sewn up with small, tight, careful stitches.
She looked up when she heard my key in the lock.
"You're late," she said. "I've been sitting here since the bread went in."
So that's why Fenn was minding the oven, I thought. She didn't go to the mill at all.
"The boy's watching the loaves," Brenna added. "If he burns them, you're paying for the flour, not him."
"We open at the second bell," I said.
"Then open early."
I looked at the pouch in her hands. Then at her tired, square face. I didn't ask why she had come. In customer service, you learn not to ask a customer why they changed their mind, in case they change it back.
But she told me anyway.
"I said I'd use a place like this when I saw it work," she said, getting stiffly to her feet. "Yesterday, I watched you stand up in front of the Crown's man and the Brotherhood and half this town, and tell the truth with your hands folded. You didn't shout. You didn't cry. You just told it." She held out the pouch. "That's working enough for me."
I unlocked the door.
My hands, I was pleased to notice, were perfectly steady.
I had rehearsed this moment so many times, alone at the counter during the long empty week, that when it finally came, I almost forgot to breathe.
Corvin came up from the vault, saw Brenna standing at the counter with her pouch, and stopped dead on the top step. Then, without a word, he went back down and came up again with his scale.
"Name?" I asked, with my pen over the brown leather ledger, as though I had asked it a thousand times. Which, in another world, I had.
"You know my name."
"I do. But the ledger doesn't yet."
Brenna snorted. "Brenna Holt. Baker. Bakers' Lane, at the bend by the river."
I wrote it in the ledger, and then again on the first page of a fresh passbook, with the account number underneath. C1000001.
I had worked the numbers out the week before, alone at the empty counter. Every bank I had ever worked for built its account numbers the same way: a code for the branch, a code for the product, and then the account itself. So: C for Corrinford. 1 for a Savings Account. And six digits for the account, because if I was going to have a hundred depositors in this world, I wanted them to know there was room for nearly a million more.
"Now I need your signature," I said, "here, and here."
Brenna looked at the pen. Then at the page. Then at me.
"I can't write, love," she said quietly. "Never learned. Tam did the writing."
Of course, I thought. Of course. Half this town can't read the board I painted.
Back home, we had a procedure for that too.
I opened the little tin of stamp ink, pressed Brenna's right thumb gently into it, and guided it onto the page, once in the ledger and once in her passbook. Two neat purple ovals. Every whorl and ridge of a baker's thumb, fifty years of flour and fire, pressed into the paper.
"That's me?" said Brenna, staring at it.
"That's you," I said. "Nobody else in the world has that thumb."
Corvin weighed her coins, one at a time, while Brenna watched him with deep suspicion. Five crowns and some silver. He paused over one of the silver marks, weighed it twice, and set it to one side.
"New issue," he said. "Light. It's worth a sixth less than the face says." He made a note. "We'll record it at its true weight."
Brenna's mouth fell open. "The moneychanger gave me that! Last spring, for good silver!"
"I'm sure he did," said Corvin grimly, and wrote down the true figure.
Then I laid the passbook on top of the ledger, shifted it so that the edge of the passbook page crossed the line I had just written, signed both, and pressed my stamp down across the seam.
The ink flared gold. It ran along the edge where the two pages touched, a thin, bright, living line, and then settled into a quiet golden half-stamp on each.
Brenna made a small sound in her throat.
I slid the passbook across the counter to her. She picked it up in both floury hands and held it as if it might fly away.
"That's it?" she said. "That's all? My coin's in your cellar now, and I've got this?"
"That's all," I said. "Your coin is safe in the vault. And if you ever want it back, you bring that book to this counter, and you'll have it."
She looked at the passbook for a long time. Then she looked up at me with sudden, fierce suspicion.
"Right now?"
"...Pardon?"
"If I wanted it back right now," said Brenna. "This minute. Would I have it?"
Ah, I thought. She wants to see it work. Not hear that it works. See it.
That's fair. That's completely fair.
"Yes," I said. "How much would you like to withdraw?"
Brenna hesitated. Then she lifted her chin. "One mark."
Corvin went down to the vault. I heard the long shriek of the iron door, the clink of coin, the shriek again. He came back up and laid a single silver mark on the counter, an old one, honest weight. I wrote the withdrawal in the ledger and in her passbook, side by side, signed both, and stamped across the seam. Gold again.
Brenna picked up the mark and held it in her palm. She turned it over. She bit it, as if she half-suspected the bank might have turned it into a cake.
Then she put it back down on the counter.
"Put it back in," she said.
So I did. And the ledger, and the passbook, and the gold stamp recorded that too.
When she finally left, with her passbook tucked inside her apron against her chest, she stopped in the doorway and looked back at the empty hall, the long oak counter, the grilles, the white board with its black letters.
"Number one," she said. "Ha."
And she walked back to her bakery, very straight, like a woman carrying something precious through a crowd.
I stood at the counter after she had gone, looking at the first line in the brown leather ledger. C1000001. Brenna Holt. A purple thumbprint, and a half-stamp of gold.
My face didn't move.
But I had to look at the ceiling for a while, very hard, before I could look at anything else.
One depositor was not a hundred.
That evening, after closing, I sat at Brenna's long table with my notebook open to a fresh page, and did what every funding officer at my branch did after a bad campaign. I wrote an evaluation.
Jemput bola, attempt one. Result: 0 accounts. 23 people approached. Why?
I had been thinking about it all week, during the long empty hours at the counter. Now I wrote it down.
-
I explained it in bank words. Nobody here knows bank words.
-
I had no proof. Only promises. Promises are exactly what these people stopped believing in.
-
I went to strangers. Strangers don't trust strangers.
-
I gave nobody a reason to do it today instead of never.
I looked at the list for a while. Then I turned the page and wrote the plan.
-
Explain it in their words.
-
Use proof. Brenna is the proof.
-
Go through people they already trust.
-
Give them a reason to come this week.
"What are you writing?" said Corvin, who had come to the bakery for dinner, which he now did most evenings, on the grounds that Brenna's stew was better than Marga's and cheaper than starving.
"A campaign."
He read it over my shoulder. Then he pointed at item four. "What reason?"
"A gift."
"A gift?"
"Back home," I said, "when you open a savings account, the bank gives you something. A plate. A set of glasses. An umbrella. My branch once gave away three hundred rice cookers in a single month."
Corvin stared at me as if I had suggested we pay people to rob us. "Why?"
"Because people love free things," I said. "Especially useful free things. And every time they use it, they remember where it came from."
I had already thought about what it should be. Not something expensive. Not something they would sell. Something they would use every single day, in their own kitchens, with their own hands.
"Wooden bowls," I said. "Good, plain bowls. With the Trust House mark burned into the bottom."
Corvin pulled the notebook toward himself and picked up my pen without asking, which by now I had stopped expecting him to do. He clicked it four times, as he always did, and began to write.
"How much does a bowl cost?"
"I'll find out."
"Guess."
"...Two bits."
"A Savings Account pays the bank five bits a year in fees." He wrote it down. "So for every new depositor, the first bowl eats two-fifths of the first year's fee."
"And if they leave their coin with us," I said, "half of it can be lent out, and the loans earn more than the fee does. The bowl pays for itself in a season. And they tell their neighbors."
Corvin looked at the numbers. He looked at them for a long time.
"You've done this before," he said slowly.
"Three hundred rice cookers," I said.
"I don't know what a rice cooker is."
"It's a very expensive bowl."
He grunted, which I had learned meant I can't find anything wrong with this and I resent it, and pushed the notebook back.
The carpenter came to the Trust House the next morning.
I recognized him at once: the lanky young man with sawdust in his hair who had listened to my whole explanation at the market and then said I've got a floor and walked away. His name, it turned out, was Jory Penn. He was about twenty, all elbows and knees, with a long, freckled, cheerful face and hands covered in tiny healed cuts. He looked deeply suspicious when Fenn delivered my message, and even more suspicious when he walked through the door.
"You want to buy something from me?"
"Fifty bowls," I said. "Plain. Good wood. Sanded smooth inside. With this mark burned into the base." I showed him a small drawing I had made: a simple house with a key over its door.
Jory looked at the drawing. Then he looked at me, narrowly.
"How much?"
"How much do you charge?"
"Three bits a bowl."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Corvin's head come up sharply behind his grille.
"Two," I said.
"Two and a half."
"Two," I said, "and I'll pay you half today, in advance."
Jory blinked. Nobody in Corrinford paid in advance. Nobody paid in advance anywhere, as far as I had been able to tell.
"Half today?"
"Fifty bits." I paused. "Of course, if you'd like, you could leave it here. In a Savings Account. It would be very safe."
Jory Penn looked at me for a very long moment.
Then he started to laugh.
"You," he said, wiping his eyes, "are the worst merchant I've ever met, and also the best." He held out his hand. "Fine. Two bits. Half today. And I'll leave twenty of it here. Just to see."
He became depositor number two. He signed his name in the ledger in big, careful, wobbly letters, as if it were the first time he'd done it in years.
And when he left, I heard him whistling all the way across the bridge.
The bowls were ready three days later, on market day.
Jory had made fifty-two, because, he said, two of them had come out so well that it seemed a shame to charge for them. They were pale ash wood, smooth as river stones on the inside, and on the base of each one, burned dark into the grain, was a little house with a key over its door.
This time, I didn't go to the market alone.
Brenna came.
She had never sold at the market in her life. Her customers came to her half-door on Bakers' Lane, and always had, and she had always said that a baker who chased customers across town was a baker whose bread wasn't good enough. But that morning, she baked twice as much as usual before dawn, shut her half-door at the first bell with a sign hung on it that neither she nor Fenn could read, borrowed a trestle table from Marga, and carried it all to the edge of the square.
She set out her rye and her honey buns. And on the board beside the bread, where everyone could see it, she laid her passbook. Open. Purple thumbprint, gold half-stamp and all.
"Just this once," she told me, when I stared at her. "Don't get used to it."
And whenever a customer reached for a loaf, she said the same thing.
"See that? That's my savings, that is. In the Trust House cellar, behind a door it took eight men to hang. Thieves came for it once." A pause, for effect. Brenna had a gift for pauses. "They won't again."
People leaned in to look at the gold.
Testimonials, I thought, from across the square. Every bank brochure in my world has a photo of a smiling customer and a quote in big letters. Brenna is a smiling customer and a quote in big letters, except she doesn't smile, and she's louder.
Fenn had his own job. He went up and down the square with a wooden bowl in each hand, banging them together like cymbals and shouting at the top of his voice.
"Free bowl! Free bowl from the Trust House! Ask the lady in the clean coat! FREE BOWL!"
That, I thought, is not in any marketing guideline I have ever read. But it's working.
The turnip seller was the first to come over. The broad-faced farmer's wife with the red cheeks, the one who had asked me, last time, how her money could still be hers if I had it. She had a basket on one hip and a look on her face that said she was prepared to be disappointed.
"Is it true about the bowl?"
"It's true."
"And I just give you my money."
Explain it in their words, I reminded myself. Not bank words. Their words.
"Do you bake your own bread at home?" I asked.
She blinked. "No. Who's got an oven big enough? I take my dough to Brenna, same as everyone on my lane. She bakes it with hers."
"Why don't you build your own oven?"
"Because it'd cost a fortune and burn the house down," she said, as if I were simple.
"The Trust House is an oven," I said. "For money. You don't build a vault in every house. That's expensive, and it burns down. You bring your coin to the one big vault, and it's kept there with everyone else's, and you take yours back out whenever you want. Brenna doesn't eat your loaf. She gives it back."
The turnip seller stared at me.
Then she looked across the square at Brenna's stall, at the open passbook glinting gold on the board beside the bread.
"...Huh," she said slowly. "An oven."
"And you can try it," I said. "Right now. Put in one bit, and take it out again this minute. See if you get it back."
She did exactly that. I wrote it in the little travel ledger I had brought, signed, stamped, gold. I handed her a bit from my own purse. She bit it, the way Brenna had, and looked surprised that it was still a bit.
Then she deposited three marks, took her bowl, and walked off with it held up in front of her like a trophy.
After that, things began to happen.
Master Tobin the boatman came, barrel-chested and red-faced, with his daughter on his shoulders. He didn't want a Savings Account. He wanted to put four crowns away for her, for later, where he couldn't touch it even when he wanted to.
"A Term Deposit," I said. "For a year. One part in twenty-five, so you'll have four crowns and a hundred and sixty bits when she's older."
"When she's older," he repeated, and looked up at the little girl on his shoulders, who was sucking the end of her pigtail, and his big red face did something complicated.
Old Widow Marsh came, tiny and bent like a question mark, and deposited eleven bits, and asked if she could have her bowl now, because her old one had a crack.
The stout cheesemaker with the magnificent grey mustache came last of the morning, glared at me for a long time, and then opened an account with two marks.
"I'm only doing it," he told me darkly, leaning close, "so I can keep an eye on you. Eastern spy."
"Of course," I said. "Thank you for your trust."
And then, around midday, a woman came across the square like a ship under full sail.
She was short and very broad, about forty-five, with forearms as red and thick as hams from years of scrubbing linen in cold water, a scarf tied over her hair, and a voice like someone hitting a cooking pot with a ladle. Behind her, in a loose, chattering flock, came eleven other women with the same red arms and the same tired, sharp eyes.
"Hettie Brook," she announced. "I run the washing on the river steps. These are my girls." She jerked her chin at the flock behind her. "Brenna says your oven's honest. Brenna's never been wrong about an oven in her life." She planted her fists on her hips. "What's the catch?"
"There's a fee of five bits a year," I said. "And you'll have to queue."
Hettie Brook considered this.
"Fair," she said. "Girls! Get a number off the boy!"
And for the first time since I had arrived in this world, there was a queue. A real one. Twelve washerwomen, the turnip seller's sister, two of the tanner's apprentices and a nervous young bargeman, all clutching Fenn's little wooden number tokens, all waiting their turn in the middle of the market square, while I sat at a borrowed trestle table with my travel ledger and my stamp.
A queue, I thought.
There's a queue.
I have never in my life been so happy to see a queue.
"Number four," I called, and smiled my Service Smile, and a tired washerwoman with a baby on her hip sat down in front of me. "Good afternoon. Welcome to the Corrinford Trust House. How may I help you?"
By the time the market packed up and the stalls came down, I had opened twenty accounts.
I counted them three times, the way Brenna counted her coins. Twenty names in the little travel ledger. Twenty thumbprints and signatures. Twenty gold half-stamps, each one paired with its twin in a passbook somewhere in Corrinford, in an apron pocket or a basket or tucked inside a washerwoman's shirt.
And twenty wooden bowls gone. Thirty-two left in Jory's crate.
I also had a headache.
It had started somewhere around the seventh washerwoman: a dull, steady pressure behind my eyes, like the beginning of a cold. By the fifteenth, my fingertips had gone cold, and the edges of the ledger page had started to shimmer very faintly whenever I looked at them too long. By the twentieth, I was signing my name slowly and carefully, the way you walk on ice.
Every validation costs mana, I thought. Corvin worked that out with the scraps at the Copper Kettle. I just never did this many in a single day.
It's fine. It's just a headache. Back home, I did sixty transactions on a bad Monday and nobody gave me a medal.
Corvin, who had come down to the square in the afternoon to carry the travel ledger and the coin box back to the vault, looked at me for a long moment as I stood up from the trestle table.
"You're pale," he said.
"I'm always pale."
"You're paler."
"I'm fine."
He didn't argue. But he carried the coin box and the ledger both, and he walked on the side of me nearest the river all the way back to the Trust House, as if he thought I might fall in.
We were locking up when Borrik came in.
He had been on the door all afternoon, and now he stood at the counter, enormous and a little awkward, turning a small leather purse over in his huge hands.
"Want to put my wages in," he said.
I looked at him. "You have a Guild Card."
"For coin I earn in the Greywood." He set the purse down on the oak. "This is coin I earned from you. Seems right it stays with you."
I opened the ledger. My head throbbed once, sharply, as if in protest, and I ignored it.
"Name?" I said.
"You know my name."
"The ledger doesn't."
Borrik grinned through his bird's-nest beard. "Borrik. Of the Greywood. Of the Trust House door, these days."
I wrote it. He signed, a great, clumsy, enormous scrawl that took up half the line. I stamped across the seam. Gold.
Twenty-three.
Borrik tucked his passbook inside his leather coat, next to his Guild Card. Then he lingered at the counter.
"Couple of the lads asked about your place," he said. "At the Guild Hall. The ones with wives."
"Their wives?"
"Wives don't have Guild Cards," said Borrik simply. "Neither do mothers. If a man goes into the Greywood and doesn't come out, his coin's in the Guild's ledger, under his name. And the Guild doesn't hand a dead man's coin to anyone who isn't on the Guild's roll." He shrugged his enormous shoulders. "Lot of lads have been thinking about that, lately. Since your place opened."
He went out into the dusk, whistling something tuneless.
I stood at the counter with my aching head and my cold fingers, and thought about what he had said for a long time.
That night, by Brenna's oven, I wrote my daily closing.
Day 15. Depositors: 23. Days remaining until the Harvest Festival: 68.
I looked at it. Then I wrote the line I had written every single night for two weeks, and for the first time, it didn't feel like a joke.
Achievement: 23%.
I sat and looked at that number for a very long time.
Twenty-three percent. Back home, at my branch, twenty-three percent of a quarterly target by the middle of the quarter would have earned me a long, quiet conversation with Pak Haris in the small meeting room with no windows.
Here, it was twenty-three people. Twenty-three names. Twenty-three thumbs and scrawls and wobbly signatures, from a baker and a carpenter and a boatman and a widow with bad teeth and twelve women with red arms who had queued in the middle of a market square because another woman told them an oven was honest.
It's not enough, I thought. It's not even a quarter. And the Brotherhood is watching, and the Guild is about to notice, and my head feels like someone is building a vault inside it.
But it's twenty-three.
There was a knock at the bakery door.
Brenna had gone up to bed, so I answered it. Liesl stood on the step in her plain brown dress, with her braid over her shoulder and a basket of apples on her arm that I was fairly sure she had brought purely as an excuse.
"Twenty-three," she said, before I could greet her.
I blinked. "How do you know that?"
"Everyone knows that. Hettie Brook's been telling the whole river." Liesl looked at me sideways in the lamplight. "And Borrik's been showing his passbook round the Guild Hall all evening. To anyone who'll stand still."
"Ah," I said.
"The Guildmaster asked me," said Liesl, "how many adventurers have walked through your door."
"One."
"That's what I told him." She handed me an apple. "And he said, Then it's started."
She went back down the dark lane, her braid swinging.
I stood in the doorway holding the apple, and listened to the river, and did not, for once, think about my headache at all.