What Freely Means

“Void it,” Casimir said.

He said it on the eleventh day, in the library, which was the only room in the keep besides the kitchen with a fire, and the only room where a Reader and a Warden could argue without Wenna taking notes. He had come in while Ilse was on page nine of the cipher and closed the door and stood with his back to it, the way he had in the tower room, and said it as if he had been rehearsing it on the stair.

“I can’t.”

“You’re the holder. You can declare it defective. No origin, no date. You told the council yourself it was incomplete.”

“It was incomplete. It isn’t now.” Ilse put her pen down. “It has a witness. I’ve matched the hand. A witnessed page can’t be voided by its holder. That’s not me being difficult. That’s the whole point of a witness.”

“Then find a flaw in the witness.”

“There isn’t one.”

“Find one anyway.”

She looked at him.

“I know,” he said. “I know what I’m asking. I’m asking anyway, because I’ve been awake for two nights working out what it costs if I don’t.” He came into the room, not towards her, towards the fire, and held his left hand to it. “Stane is coming here with a Justice. Stane can’t make you collect. Fine. But he can stand in my hall and tell every captain in this march that there’s a way to end the winter and the only thing between them and it is a Reader from the city who won’t set a date. And some of them have buried children. Varro’s already halfway there. How long do you think you can stand in this keep while that’s being said?”

“As long as it takes to certify it.”

“And then what?” He turned round. “You certify it. It’s true and whole and witnessed. And then it’s a lawful debt against me with a price on it that the whole march knows, and every day that winter holds, somebody in Lowcross looks at you and wonders why you haven’t paid it.”

The fire cracked.

“I’m not going to pay it,” Ilse said, “because somebody in Lowcross is looking at me.”

“I know you’re not. That’s what frightens me. You’ll stand there being right while they hate you for it, and I can’t bear to watch you do that on my account.”

“Then don’t watch.”

It came out harder than she meant. He flinched, very slightly, and she didn’t take it back, because she was angry now, and the anger had been waiting for somewhere to go since the ice-house.

“You want me to void it,” she said, “so that nobody can ever end your winter. So you can go on paying it with your hands for four more years if you’re lucky, and then a winter where Maud ties you to a bed and doesn’t untie you. You want me to make it impossible, so it isn’t anybody’s choice. Not the crown’s. Not the council’s. Not mine.” She stood up. “Not yours.”

“I’d rather keep the winter,” Casimir said, very quietly, “than be kissed out of pity.”

“And I would never,” said Ilse, “kiss a man to end a policy.”

They stared at each other across the library.

It was, she would think later, possibly the most honest thing either of them had said to anybody in a decade. It did not feel like honesty at the time. It felt like standing on the ice at the Hallow ford with nothing to hold onto.

“Then we agree,” Casimir said at last.

“We don’t agree about anything.”

“We agree it won’t be pity, and it won’t be policy.” He went to the door. “That leaves very little else it could ever be. So I’d rather you voided it, and spared us both the finding out.”

“No,” said Ilse.

He went out. He did not close the door gently this time. It was the first thing she had seen him do in eleven days that was not careful, and she stood in the library with the cipher on the desk and her hands shaking and found, absurdly, that she was glad of it.

· · ·Scene break

The guild courier came in at dusk on the twelfth day, half-frozen, with a letter from Yara under the Registry seal.

It was longer than the last one. Ilse read it in the tower room with her coat still on.

Ilse,

I’ll tell you the worst first because you’d rather have it that way.

Deputy Master Aske has been giving the Treasurer copies of Registry business since at least the spring. That is how Stane knew to write that you favour the debtor. Aske says, and I am told he says it with a straight face, that in the course of routine supervision he observed a private page in your handwriting recording the levies of the Lord Warden of the march, going back three years, with notes. He says it was not filed. He says it is evidence of a private interest.

The Master has suspended your counter pending the Justice’s hearing. Not dismissed. Suspended. Your grille has a cloth over it. People keep asking me where you’ve gone.

I told the Master that keeping private notes on a regular client is what half the counter does and nobody’s ever been suspended for it. He agreed. He also said none of the other half’s clients have a debt on the book that could end a war, and that the crown has asked, and that he has a Registry to run.

I don’t know what’s in your private page. I haven’t asked. I am asking now, not as a Reader, as your friend of ten years who has watched you keep that man’s receipts cleaner than your own: is it only levies?

Whatever it is, don’t let Stane be the one who reads it out.

Y.

Ilse folded the letter twice and sat on the bed with it.

Her counter had a cloth over it.

She had worked at that grille for ten years. She had taken her examinations in the room behind it. Her mother’s grille had been two along. There was a scratch on the brass where Ilse, at twenty-two, had dropped the guild seal on her first day, and for ten years she had put her thumb on that scratch every morning when she sat down, and now there was a cloth over it, because of a book she had kept in a drawer and told nobody about, because she had not wanted to admit even to herself what it was.

She took the private ledger out of her bag and opened it to his page.

Q2, levy 40 cr, paid in full. Gold down 4, copper up. Boots resoled.

Q3, levy 40 cr, paid in full. Left hand gloved throughout.

Q4, levy 40 cr, paid in full. Asked after the Registry’s roof, which leaks. It does.

Three years of it. Every quarter. What he paid and how, and what he wore, and what he asked, and once, in a winter quarter two years ago, in very small letters in the margin, laughed at something Yara said, and then looked at me as if to check whether I’d heard.

And then the pages since Brennock. Asked me to be the one who tells him. Said yes. Approximately four seconds. The whole of the tower-room conversation, in her most careful hand, dated.

Stane would read that aloud in a hall. Or Aske would, or Dorran, or anyone Stane chose, in front of Varro and the captains and Casimir.

Ilse sat for a long time with the book on her knees.

She did not go down to supper. She did not go and find Casimir to tell him, though she thought about it, and got as far as the stair, and stopped, because the last thing she had said to him was then don’t watch, and because she did not know how to tell a man that her livelihood had been suspended for keeping a record of how much she liked him without also telling him that she liked him enough to keep a record.

Rurik brought a tray up at nine and put it outside her door and knocked once and went away without saying anything, which from Rurik was a speech.

· · ·Scene break

On the thirteenth morning she came down early to the kitchen and found Casimir already there, alone, feeding the fire, with his coat off.

He looked up. He looked, she thought, as if he had slept about as well as she had.

“A courier came,” he said. “Rurik said.”

“From Yara. Registry business.” She poured herself tea from the pot on the hob and didn’t sit. “My counter’s been suspended until the hearing.”

He put the log down.

“Because of the page,” he said.

“Because of a complaint about my impartiality.” Which was true, and was not an answer. She heard it not be an answer, and so did he.

“Ilse—“

“I’m not going to talk about it,” she said. “Not yet. I will. When I’ve decided what to say. That’s all I’ve got this morning, and I’m sorry about the library, and I’m not sorry I said no.”

He was quiet. The fire caught the new log and the room brightened by a degree.

“I’m not sorry you said no either,” he said at last. “I’m sorry I asked you in a way that made it about me.” He took a breath. “And I’m sorry about your counter. I know what it is to have the thing you do taken off you by someone who thinks they’re doing their job.”

She looked at him over the cup.

“The Registry has a leak in its roof,” she said. “Over my grille. In the winter quarter the ceiling drips on the ledger and I put a pan down.”

“I know,” said Casimir. “I asked about it.”

“You asked about it three times.”

“It’s a bad roof.”

And they stood on opposite sides of the kitchen hearth in the grey morning, not touching, not agreeing, with nothing settled at all, and Ilse found the knot in her chest had loosened by one turn. She could not account for it. She did not try.