Copies in Ordinary Hands

The upstairs room smelled of onions for two days after they began copying the schedule. The innkeeper had no spare paper but had a stack of wrappers in which a merchant had delivered winter seed. Ren bought the cleanest ones. They wrote between old weights and prices, leaving the useful side uppermost.

Ada made the first copy. Pella read each number back while Ysra checked its place on the diagram. The work was slow enough to make Ada impatient, which was precisely why they did it that way. A mistake in a capacity figure could look entirely convincing. It might even improve the plan until someone tried to walk it.

On the second afternoon Pella read out forty-six where Ada had meant to write sixty-four.

“No,” Ada said automatically.

Pella turned the page towards her.

Ada stared at her own figures. Her thumb had slipped against the pen. She had made the second digit too early and repaired it into the wrong first one, a small, fluent error that her eyes had agreed to accept.

Ysra laid a fresh wrapper beside her.

“Start the column again.”

“I can correct—”

“The column. Not the kingdom.”

Ada wanted to resent the joke. She was too frightened by the ease of the mistake. She began again, using the larger pen Ren had given her, and wrote slowly enough that she could feel the pressure against the side of her forefinger.

Downstairs, the innkeeper's daughter was practising a tune on a reed whistle. She could manage the first seven notes with confidence. The eighth defeated her. She returned to the beginning each time, increasingly loud.

“Someone teach that child the end,” Pella said.

“Do you know it?”

“No.”

“Then we're well matched.”

At dusk the copies lay drying on chairs. They had made three of the full schedule and more of the shorter account. The complete version included things the Hall could use to identify people. Ren would not send it with anyone who had not agreed to that risk.

The first carrier was a woman called Jessa who transported fish upriver in barrels packed with river weed. She examined the packet rather than Ada's face.

“What am I being stopped for, if they stop me?”

“Possession of a copied capacity schedule,” Ren said. “Possibly interference with a Crown measure.”

“Have I interfered with one?”

“No. That may not stop them using the words.”

Jessa turned the packet over.

“My sister keeps the eastern warehouse at Salt Steps. She'll take it. I won't hide it beneath the fish. They'll look there before anywhere else.”

She slid it into the flat case she used for customs weights and took a receipt. Ada had imagined people carrying the truth secretly inside a boot. Here was a woman making sure she could prove whose property she had accepted.

The second copy went with a travelling cooper. He had spent the previous evening arguing against Ren's plan because the slower road would make his next delivery unprofitable. He still thought that. He also thought the people who charged him for the road should tell him where its speed came from.

“Don't put me down as agreeing,” he said.

“We haven't,” Ada told him.

He checked. Then he signed for the packet.

The third remained at the White Net, though not in the upstairs room. The innkeeper took it without revealing where she intended to keep it. She had once survived an inspection for unlicensed brandy.

“I don't need children suggesting hiding places,” she said.

Ada was seventeen and very tired of that description. She let it stand.

After supper she carried a bowl upstairs for Ysra, who had forgotten to come down. Her aunt was trying to button the cuff of her clean shirt. She had made three attempts by the time Ada reached the door.

“I can—”

“I know.”

Ada put the bowl down and waited.

Ysra tried once more, failed, and held out her wrist. The skin around the old burns was pale. Ada had seen those marks for years without asking the right questions.

“Did your hands ever get better?”

“Sometimes a little, after rest.”

“And the places that didn't?”

Ysra watched her fasten the button.

“They didn't.”

Ada went on looking at the cuff after the work was finished. Her right thumb had not worsened. It had not improved either. She could still lift the bowl, tie her hair, write a useful line. It seemed unreasonable that such a small patch of absent feeling should take up so much of her attention.

“I thought you wore thick gloves because you felt the cold,” she said.

“I do feel the cold. And sometimes I don't feel heat soon enough.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I wanted to be good at something you admired.”

It was not the answer Ada had expected. She looked at her aunt properly.

Ysra's mouth moved, almost a smile.

“I could give you a better-sounding reason. There are several. None is the whole one.”

Ada sat on the edge of the bed. Through the floorboards she could hear Tomar disputing a charge for a boat he said was too small to deserve its own rope. He and the innkeeper had taken to arguing after supper as though they had arranged it in advance.

“I still admire you,” Ada said. “Not for the parts you keep from me.”

Ysra lowered her eyes to the bowl. The onions had gone soft and sweet in the broth.

“I don't know what to do with that yet.”

“You could eat.”

“That seems to be your mother's answer to everything.”

“It works surprisingly often.”

Later, Ada went down to fetch water. Cal was at the kitchen table with the stable boy, drawing a knot that could be loosened under tension. His bandaged arm rested on a folded cloth. The boy kept making the wrong loop, and Cal kept undoing it without taking the rope from him.

Ada stopped where the stair turned. For a moment she allowed herself to watch without weighing what his name meant or how much time remained. There was a person here she liked, teaching a child something useful, making an ordinary mess of string.

Cal looked up and saw her. He smiled.

She smiled back before she remembered to be afraid.