A Voice at the Window

By the time Iona reached the front of the tithe queue, she had decided to give them the afternoon with the apricots.

It had been a good afternoon. She was sixteen, newly apprenticed, eating stolen fruit on the workshop roof with Kes. One of them had dropped a stone into the master’s rain barrel and they had spent an hour trying to retrieve it before he noticed. She could still feel the heat of the tiles through her skirt. She would be sorry to lose it.

She held the memory ready while the assessor adjusted his scales.

“Household?”

“Venn. Ninth Quay.”

“Two residents.”

“Yes.”

“Outstanding storm levy. Three marks of clear recollection.”

“Two. It was two when the notice came.”

He tapped a second notice beside his elbow.

“Revised this morning.”

The queue stirred behind her. Outside, rain blew across the steps of the Tithe House. Everyone waiting had already chosen something to lose. Some were going to have to choose again.

“On whose authority?” Iona asked.

“The Gate Office.”

“That’s a building.”

The assessor looked up. She knew him slightly. His daughter had brought a broken handbell to her shop in winter. He had paid late and apologised sincerely. None of this helped either of them now.

“There’s a storm coming.”

“There was a storm coming yesterday.”

“I don’t set the rate, Mistress Venn.”

At the far end of the hall, a man in a dark coat turned towards them. A brass warden’s key hung at his throat. He had rain on his shoulders and the expression of someone who had arrived in the middle of a mistake.

“Who revised the levy?” he asked.

The assessor showed him the notice. The warden read the seal, then looked at Iona.

She recognised him.

Six years earlier, he had stood in her mother’s doorway while two men removed their shutters because the household hadn’t paid. It had been an efficient operation. He had worn the same narrow, attentive expression then, as though making a thing orderly might prevent it from being cruel.

“The assessment should have been announced,” he said.

“It has been announced,” Iona said. “To the people who have already come to pay it.”

He did not look away.

“I can refer this back.”

“And meanwhile?”

The assessor glanced at the queue.

“Unpaid households lose their shelter seal at the next tide.”

Her mother was at home. The lower windows had been boarded against the weather. Without the small household seal, ordinary timber and brick would have to stand against whatever the harbour bell failed to keep outside.

“How long does a referral take?” Iona asked the warden.

“Longer than you have,” he said.

She appreciated the truth enough to hate him more cleanly.

The assessor placed an empty vessel on the scales. Soundglass, thin as an onion skin, with a silver mouth. When Iona rested her hand against it, the apricot afternoon brightened behind her eyes.

The needle rose to two marks and stopped.

“Not enough,” the assessor said.

“I can see.”

A memory had to be whole enough to hold. Not a list of things that happened; not a story learned from someone else. A lived piece of the world, with enough light and sound and feeling left in it for the glass to take. Fear worked. So did happiness. Most people chose what they could bear to part with. After enough levies, bearing it ceased to be the useful distinction.

Iona withdrew her hand.

At twenty-nine, she could name almost every room in which she had lived and remember fewer of them clearly than she cared to count. She knew her father’s height, his trade, the way he had signed his name. There were drawings. There were notes. His voice remained in one undamaged afternoon.

He was at the workshop window, teaching her to fit a copper collar around a cracked lamp. He sang the same four lines every time the solder wouldn’t run. A ridiculous song about a woman who married a turnip farmer and fell in love with his goat.

She had written the words down long ago. Without the tune they were merely a report of somebody else’s poor judgement.

Iona put her hand back on the glass.

The window appeared. Her father bent over her shoulder. She smelled hot metal and the peppermints he kept in a tin. His voice rose, deliberately dreadful, and the needle climbed beyond the third mark.

“Accepted,” the assessor said.

“I haven’t given it yet.”

“Of course.”

The hall waited.

“I give this memory to the keeping of the harbour,” she said.

The silver rim warmed. Light gathered in the glass.

She removed her hand and knew, for the few moments before the vessel was sealed, that the memory could still be returned to her. Unspent soundglass would recognise the living person it had come from. Once the bell consumed it, no craft in the city could bring it back.

The assessor set it with the morning’s levy.

“Receipt?”

“Yes.”

He wrote one. He always asked, though everyone wanted proof they had paid.

Iona folded the paper into her coat. The warden was still standing beside the desk.

“What is your name?” she asked him.

“Tarin Ash.”

“I remember it now.”

“I remember your house.”

“That must be inconvenient.”

She left before he could answer.

At the next turning of the tide, the great harbour bell sounded once. Iona was halfway home. She stopped under an awning with rain dripping through a hole above her shoulder.

The workshop window was gone.

She could describe it. She had described it that morning. But when she tried to hear the song, there were only the words in her notebook and the noise of water running down the street.

She stood there until a shopkeeper asked whether she meant to come in.