It started at the Festival.
I didn't notice it at first. I was too busy being introduced to people by Hettie Brook, loudly, from thirty yards away, and being handed things to eat that I had not asked for. But somewhere between the roast chestnuts and the hot cider, I began to hear it.
"That's her. That's Sekka. From the bank."
At first it was only my name, the way everybody in Corrinford says it, with the r lost somewhere in the river. Sekka's bank. The bank where Sekka works. Sekka's place, by the bridge.
By the time the fiddlers by the fountain had started their third song, it had lost a word.
"I've got my wages in at Sekka's," a carter told his friend at the cider stall.
By the fifth song, it had lost another.
"Put it in the Sekka," Hettie Brook was telling a girl from the dye works, with one red arm around her shoulders. "That's what I do. Every coin I don't need goes in the Sekka, and it sits there, and it grows."
Master Tobin, with his daughter asleep on his shoulders, told a bargeman that his girl's money was in the Sekka for a year, locked, and the bargeman nodded as though that settled something. Jory Penn gave a wooden bowl to an old woman and told her it came from the Sekka, and she turned it over and over in her hands, looking for the word. Borrik, very full of cider, informed three strangers and a horse that he was Head of Security at the Sekka. The horse seemed the most impressed.
And by the fountain, a little girl with gappy front teeth had cut a potato flat on one end and was stamping her brother's hand with it, very seriously, over and over.
"Thank you for your trust," she told him, with no expression whatsoever. "Next."
"What are you playing?" her mother asked.
"Sekka," said the girl.
That's my face, I thought, staring. She's doing my face. She's doing it very well.
"I trust my money to the Sekka," someone said behind me, to someone else, as if it were a perfectly ordinary sentence.
It's called the Corrinford Trust House, I thought. Aldous chose that name in his own study, with Mistress Hale witnessing. It's written at the top of every passbook. In ink.
I opened my mouth to correct them. Then I closed it again, because I didn't know who to correct first, and because something in my chest had gone strange and tight and warm, the way it had when Fenn put his twenty-three bits on the counter.
Back home, nobody ever named a bank after the woman at Counter 3. Banks were named after founders, and cities, and words that sounded like strength. The woman at Counter 3 had a name badge and a queue number over her head, and customers who forgot her the moment they reached the door.
It's a mispronunciation, I told myself firmly. A mispronunciation of a mispronunciation. It doesn't mean anything.
I would correct them all tomorrow. Politely. With the Service Smile.
I had no idea, yet, how that was going to go.
The morning after the Harvest Festival, the Corrinford Trust House smelled faintly of roasted chestnuts and very strongly of Borrik.
He had slept on the customers' bench. Nobody had asked him to. When I unlocked the door at dawn, he was lying on his back with his new axe on his chest like a stone knight on a tomb, snoring so hard the brass grilles hummed, and he only woke up when Tamsin dropped a ledger on him from a considerable height.
"Guarding," he explained, sitting up and scratching his beard. "Head of Security."
"Thank you, Mister Borrik," I said. "Please guard it from a slightly greater distance."
He went and guarded the doorstep instead, which put the smell outside, where the river could deal with it.
New season, I thought, tying my hair at the nape and taking my place behind the counter. Same counter. Same queue tokens. And a target of two hundred.
The first customer of the season was a cheerful young tanner with a hangover and a purse full of Festival winnings.
"Morning, Sekka," he said, tipping a fistful of silver onto the oak. "Come to put this in the Sekka before I drink it."
"Good morning, sir. Welcome to the Corrinford Trust House."
"That's what I said." He beamed at me. "The Sekka."
Correction number one, I thought, writing his row. Polite. Firm. Service Smile. It will catch on eventually.
"Thank you for your trust," I said, and stamped his passbook across the seam, and the gold ran along the edge.
He was my first validation of the morning. By the third bell, he was one of nine. By noon, Corvin reached across from his grille without a word, took the stamp out of my hand, and put it in the drawer under the counter.
"Fifteen," he said.
"There are still people in the queue."
"There will be people in the queue until the end of the world," said Corvin. "PENDING."
So I wrote PENDING in the officer's box of every row that afternoon, and the customers looked at it, and nodded, and went away with passbooks full of ordinary ink, promising to come back tomorrow for their gold. They didn't mind. That was the strange, lovely thing that had happened to Corrinford since the run. Nobody minded waiting anymore.
I minded.
Fifteen a day, I thought, watching the stack of pending passbooks grow at Corvin's elbow. If I open ten accounts a day, and the old customers keep coming in once a week, that pile gets taller every single evening. By two hundred depositors, it'll be taller than Fenn.
At the back of my mind, in the quiet place where [Validation] lived, the other word was still there. Grey. Dim. Patient.
[Delegation]
I nudged it, the way you press a lift button you already know is broken. Nothing happened.
Not yet, Lumeth had said.
Then when? I asked it. It didn't answer. Words at the back of your mind rarely do.
Late in the afternoon, Fenn came in with a folded note. He handed it over and then recited it anyway, word for word, because Liesl had read it to him twice and he was proud of remembering.
"'The Guildmaster will see you tomorrow at the fourth bell,'" he said. "'Please bring Mister Dalle. Please do not bring Borrik.'" He frowned. "Then there's an L. Which is just a letter, I think."
That night, I wrote my closing.
Day 84. Depositors: 102. Pending: 6. Target: 200. Achievement: 51%.
Back home, the first day of a new quarter was called a reset. Everything you had achieved the quarter before was folded away into a report, and you started again at the bottom of a brand-new hill.
I had always hated resets.
The Guild Hall at the fourth bell was full of adventurers comparing Festival bruises.
Liesl met us at her counter in her green coat, with the sword-and-key on the collar, and led Corvin and me up two flights of dark timber stairs. Halfway up, through a gap in the banisters, I saw the back of the hall: a locked iron grille, and behind it, on a stone plinth, a block of pale crystal the size of a bread oven, humming very faintly to itself.
The crystal ledger, I thought. The thing that lets an adventurer deposit in Corrinford and withdraw in a city three weeks away. I looked at it the way Pak Haris used to look at head office's new core banking system: with admiration, envy and a strong suspicion about what it had cost.
Rook Varga's room was at the top of the house. It was small and full of maps of the Greywood, pinned edge to edge, and he sat behind a desk that was much too small for him, as broad as a barn door, chewing his liquorice root.
"Sit," he said.
We sat. Liesl stayed by the door with her hands folded in front of her, exactly the way I fold mine. I wondered whether she knew she was doing it.
Rook took the liquorice root out of his mouth and looked at it.
"Clause four," he said. "Hm."
I waited. Corvin waited. Rook Varga, it turned out, could out-wait both of us without the slightest effort, which I had not thought was possible.
"Since your widow came to my counter," he said at last, "forty-one of my members have named heirs. One of those forms has been used already." He put the root back. "A young archer. His mother had his coin in four days instead of a year." He chewed. "She brought Liesl a cake."
"It was a very good cake," said Liesl quietly, from the door.
"My members die," said Rook. "That's the job. Their coin shouldn't die with them. And it shouldn't sit in my vault doing nothing while they're alive, either. It earns nothing there. It never has." He spread one big, scarred hand flat on the desk. "I can't change the charter. The Grandmaster in Aubrelle writes the charter, and the Grandmaster doesn't like new things. But I can tell my members what I think."
"And what do you think, Guildmaster?"
"I think coin a member won't need this month should sit somewhere it grows, with a name on it for when he doesn't come back." He looked at me. "From now on, when a member comes back from the Greywood with more than he'll spend, my clerks will tell him so. Travel coin on the card. The rest at the Sekka."
"The Corrinford Trust House," I said.
"Hm," said Rook.
He's offering me eleven hundred adventurers, I thought. Eleven hundred. He's offering me my whole target in one sentence, with a face like a boulder, and I have no idea what he wants in return. Say something. Say something grateful. Say—
I said nothing. My face, I suspect, said even less.
Rook studied it for a long moment. Then he grunted.
"Hm. You want more."
I don't! I don't want more! I want to know what the catch is!
"There's more," said Rook, as if I had argued him into it. "When you move coin, you hire my people to guard it. Guild rates."
"We don't move coin, Guildmaster," I said carefully. "We only have one door."
"Hm." Rook chewed. "Hob Marrin's been telling the whole wharf you'll open a door in Aubrelle."
I said NEXT YEAR. I said it very clearly. In front of witnesses.
"Bargemen," said Rook, with something that, on a smaller face, might have been sympathy. "They hear 'next year' and remember 'yes'."
Corvin, who had said nothing so far, took out a pencil.
"How much," he said, "for a run to Aubrelle?"
"Ten crowns. Four blades. Three weeks down, three weeks back."
"Eight," said Corvin. "And the escort captain signs the shipment record at both ends."
"Hm," said Rook.
"That isn't a no," Liesl murmured in my ear as she showed us back down the stairs. "A long 'hm' is a no. A short 'hm' means he'll think about it. That was a short one."
"How many kinds of 'hm' are there?"
"Seven," said Liesl. "I'm still learning the last two."
At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped. In her official voice, she said, "The Corrinford branch of the Adventurers' Guild thanks the keeper of the Trust House for her time." Then, in her own voice, quickly, with her braid swinging: "He's letting me tell members about you. At my counter. Officially."
It took me a moment to understand what she meant.
Don't make me choose, Sekka, she had said to me once, across her counter.
She didn't have to, now.
Hob Marrin came back seven days after the Festival, to the day, exactly as he had promised.
He walked in at the second bell with the coil of rope over his shoulder and his gap-toothed grin, and he counted his loan back onto the oak himself, crown by crown, and then the interest on top in silver, to the bit, the way the board said. Corvin checked every coin on his little brass scale. Twice. One of the crowns was a new issue, light by a whisker, and Hob made it up with a bit from his own pocket before Corvin could even open his mouth.
"All proper," said Hob, beaming. "Like I said."
I wrote the row. Loan repaid in full, with interest. I stamped it across the seam, and the gold ran, and behind his grille, Corvin made a small mark in a column of his own that I knew he had been waiting to make since the day we signed it.
One, I thought. One of five. The first loans this bank ever made, and the first of them to come home.
Then Hob leaned on the counter and scratched the back of his sunburnt neck, and I knew exactly what he was going to say, because I had seen that exact scratch before.
"Now, miss. About my partner."
"I said next year, Master Marrin."
"You did," Hob agreed. "And I've thought about it, and next year's a terrible long way off." He lowered his voice. "So here's what I'll do. I'll leave the forty crowns here. With you. In one of them passbooks. My partner can wait for the next barges up; he's waited before. And when you've got your door in Aubrelle, he walks in and takes it out up there, and I never carry forty crowns in my boots past the bandits on every bend again."
No, I thought clearly. No, that isn't how it works. We have one door. A deposit made here is paid here. If I take this money with a promise attached, I'm promising something that doesn't exist. Corvin is sitting right there. Say no. Politely. With the Service Smile. Say—
"Of course, Master Marrin," said my mouth. "We'll have a door there."
Behind his grille, Corvin's pen stopped.
Hob whooped, and slapped the counter so hard the queue tokens jumped, and counted out forty crowns in a long gold line. I opened his account. I wrote his name, and took his signature, a large, confident H with a squiggle after it, and his thumbprint as well, because I was beginning to suspect I would need to prove a great many things about this account someday.
Corvin weighed every crown. When Hob had gone, he picked up the whole stack, carried it down to the vault himself, and set it on a shelf of its own.
"Not lent," he said, when he came back up. "Not a bit of it. It is promised to leave." He sat down behind his grille, very slowly. "For a city where we have no door."
I did that, I thought. My mouth did that, all by itself, with my face completely calm. The same way it once promised a customer back home a callback from head office that I knew perfectly well would never come.
Four years of "of course, sir." My body doesn't know how to stop.
Corvin waited until the last customer had gone and Tamsin had barred the door. Then he laid a sheet of paper on the counter between us and began to rule it into boxes.
"Aubrelle," he said, "is three weeks away by cart. Six there and back."
He wrote it in the first box.
"There is one keeper. She may validate fifteen records a day. Nobody else in either world can validate anything at all."
The second box.
"A branch needs a counter, a vault, guards and clerks. I can build a vault in Aubrelle for forty crowns, if the walls are already stone. Every crown of it comes out of Aldous's capital, and he will want to know why."
The third box.
"The Royal Office of Fair Coin sits in Aubrelle. So does the Treasury. So does the mint." He paused, very briefly, over that one, and his pen left the smallest blot. "And so does the Grandmaster of the Guild, who doesn't like new things."
The fourth box. He put down the pen.
"And you," said Corvin Dalle, "have just taken forty crowns from a bargemaster on the strength of a door that does not exist."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Because my mouth is a service professional with no supervision, I thought.
But that wasn't the whole of it. I made myself think it through, the way he would.
"Because Hob was right," I said. "Every merchant on that road carries his money in his boots. Robbery is the biggest cost of trade in this kingdom. Maren's husband died in the Greywood, and his coin sat in a Guild vault for a year because nobody had thought to write down a name. Rook has just offered us every adventurer in Corrinford, and half of them come from somewhere else." I looked at the four boxes. "One door was enough to prove a bank can work. It isn't enough to be one."
Corvin said nothing.
"And there's this," I said, and I told him about the word.
I had never told anyone. Not about the grey flicker at the back of my mind on the morning of the Festival, when Aldous's agreement flared gold. Not about the plain brass stamp in Lumeth's robe. I told him now, all of it, quietly, across the counter, with the river going by outside.
When I had finished, Corvin took off his cracked spectacles and cleaned them on his sleeve, which he only ever does when he needs somewhere else to look.
"A word," he said.
"Delegation."
"Which you cannot use."
"Not yet."
"Then until you can," said Corvin, "it is a word, not a plan." He put his spectacles back on. "Write the rest down. Costs. Staff. Escorts. Reserves. Every box. We take it up the hill to Aldous, and if he says no, you walk down to the wharf and tell Hob Marrin you were wrong."
"And if he says yes?"
Corvin looked at the fourth box for a long time. At the word mint, and the small blot beside it.
"Then I'll have to go back to Aubrelle," he said.
"You don't have to," I said. "I could—"
"Who else," said Corvin Dalle, "is going to count it?"
That night, I wrote my closing.
Day 90. Depositors: 109. Achievement: 54.5%. Pending: 14. Doors: 1.
I looked at it for a while. Then I added one more line underneath.
Promises: 1. Unbacked.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. He held out his hand for my pen, clicked it four times, and wrote below it in his cramped, ink-stained hand.
Noted. Back it. (C.D.)