I Come Freely

Part One: The East Road

Seven coppers. I’d counted them four times since Vespers, and they still weren’t nine.

I laid them out on my knee again, in the dip my skirt made between my thighs, so none of them could roll into the hearth. The slate over the counter at the Tanner’s Rest had been chalked by someone who pressed hard and spelled by ear: LOFE 2. POTAGE 3 WITH BRED. ALE 1. ROOM 6. LOCK 1 MORE. Underneath, in newer chalk, somebody had written BUTTER and then crossed it out, as if the house had lost its nerve. In Velundra a loaf cost one copper. I didn’t know much about money, but I knew that, because a widow on Tallow Stair had sent her grandson down for bread every morning of the three nights I sat with her. Every morning she put one coin in his hand and folded his fingers shut over it. “One, and I’ll know if you’ve eaten the heel.” She died on the third morning. The heel was still on the windowsill when I left.

So. Here was the problem, set out the way Sister Imre made us set out a fault before we were allowed to confess it: I had seven coppers, and what I needed cost nine. I could see three ways through, and I’d been chewing on them for most of an hour. One: the room and the lock, no bread, which I’d done before and could do again. Two: bread and pottage, and a spot on the floor by this fire with the teamsters, their boots, and their breath. I’d never done that and I wasn’t going to start. Three: the purse. I didn’t like three, so I’d put it at the bottom of the list, where a novice puts the sin she’s hoping to skip.

The purse had a pocket sewn inside it, and in the pocket were three white coins. Any one of them would have bought the room for a week, plus the loaf, plus the butter the slate had given up on. Any one of them would also have been noticed from the door the second it touched the counter: the Sanctuary sun stamped on its face, twelve rays around a ring, and Velundra’s mint mark underneath. Out here, nobody carried temple silver unless they’d come from the temple. Back at Cadden’s Ford a drover’s wife had held one up to her lamp, and then she’d studied me a lot longer than she’d studied the coin. I’d paid in copper ever since. I smoothed the pocket flat with two fingers, like shushing a child.

The fire was its own problem. I’d taken the bench closest to it because it was the only seat in the room that faced the door. Then I’d found out its second feature, which was that it was cooking me. My shins were hot through my stockings. My winter cloak sat folded beside me with the high collar tucked in, and without it I only had the grey wool scarf, wrapped twice, covering for a whole cloak in a room where nobody else had so much as a neckerchief on. Sweat had collected where the wool met my jaw, and every so often one drop slid down to my collarbone, right along the line the scarf was there to hide. Wool is miserable on skin as tender as mine had gotten. Every time I swallowed, it scratched.

And the room wanted things. Rooms did, now; that was the trouble with them. A garrison man in a boiled-leather jerkin had been leaning on his elbows at the counter since before I came in, watching Mag Rudd’s niece pour ale, and whatever he was thinking about her got to me before I’d even looked his way. It came the way it came every time: warmth under my jaw on the left side, sliding down, like someone had pressed the back of a hot spoon to my throat and was dragging it, slowly, toward the neck of my shift. Then lower. The strip of skin between my breasts. The soft spot under my navel. I squeezed my knees together on the bench, and the seven coppers slid into each other in the fold of my skirt with a little clink.

I put my thumb on the inside of my left wrist, where the prayer beads had worn a band of hard skin since I was a girl, and ran through the Hours under my breath. Lauds, for the light. Terce, for the work. Sext, for the bread… and I stopped there, since now I was thinking about bread. I started over. It didn’t help. It hadn’t helped once in all the weeks I’d been doing it, and I kept doing it anyway; the alternative was giving my hands nothing to do but sweat. Was the heat his, or mine? I’d asked myself that on every road between here and the river, and I’d never gotten an answer. I was starting to think there wasn’t one, which was worse.

The door opened and let in the cold and a tinker at the same time. I looked, because I always looked. He was a skinny man under a pack twice as wide as he was, muddy to the knees, and he didn’t look at anyone longer than it took to decide they weren’t buying. His eyes went over me, the coppers, the fire, and came back to the fire. He walked over to the hearth, said “Mistress” to my boot, and unrolled a strip of oilcloth on the stone ledge about a hand’s width from it.

“Won’t be a quarter hour,” he said. “Gate-bell’s at Compline, and I’ve three to sell before it or I sleep with the mule. He kicks.”

From the counter Mag Rudd said, “Yorrin Sade, if that cloth drips on my hearthstone, you’re the one scrubbing it,” and he raised a hand to her without turning.

I drew my boot back from his oilcloth. “The ledge is yours; I’m only borrowing the fire.”

He set out his tray fast, like he’d done it a thousand times: tin buttons sewn to a card, a cork stuck full of needles, bundles of waxed cord, a paper of pins, two horn combs missing teeth. At the far end, off by themselves on a scrap of red flannel where the firelight could catch them, lay a row of pendants on leather cords. Each one was a disk of stamped pewter about the size of my thumbnail.

Suns.

I knew the shape before I’d even realized I was looking at it. I’d been holding it in my hand since before I could read. A ring, with rays coming off it the way the Sanctuary’s east window throws light across the floor at Lauds. Except these were wrong. The stamp had slipped on every single one, so the rings were lopsided and the rays leaned over like wheat after a rainstorm, and when I counted, because I couldn’t stop myself from counting, because I’d counted those rays on the chapel tiles every morning of my life until the last one reached the altar, there were eleven.

“Ward,” the tinker said, following my eyes. I shouldn’t have let him. “Against whatever comes out of the grey. Blessed by a sister of the Light in Torburgh, on her knees, and I stood right there and watched her do it. Three coppers.”

“It has eleven rays.”

I heard it after I’d said it, the way you hear a cup after it’s already hit the floor.

He picked one up and ran a black thumbnail around the edge, counting under his breath. “So it does.” Then he actually looked at me, and it wasn’t my throat he looked at. It was my face, my hands, the coins on my knee. “How many’s it supposed to have?”

“My mother wore one. I only remember that it looked fuller.”

It came out in my bedside voice, low and even and a little sorry, the voice that tells a scared man his face looks rested. Nothing showed on mine. I’d never had a mother to wear anything; the Order had me before I could talk. I sat there with that and waited for my face to give me away, and my face didn’t do a thing.

He didn’t argue with my mother. He dug in the flannel with two fingers and came up with another one, turning it toward the fire. This one had been stamped straighter. Only the bottom rays had smushed together into a blob. “There. Twelve, if you’re generous, and you look like you are. Same price. For your mother’s sake.”

“And does it work?”

He grinned. He was missing three bottom teeth on one side, so he grinned with the other side. “Sold forty since harvest. Two of ’em to Varro drivers, back in the summer.” He raised his voice, and not for my benefit. “Neither one’s come back asking for his coppers!”

The soldier at the counter laughed, short and not very happy about it. The niece didn’t laugh at all. It took me a second longer than him to get the joke. Two Pell & Varro wagons had gone into the Ashveil since midsummer. I’d heard about it at the well that morning, and at the tannery gate, and from Mag Rudd herself, with her hand flat on the slate like I’d accused her of something. “Varro’s short two wagons, the flour comes on Varro’s wagons, and there’s your loaf at two.”

The tinker was still holding the better sun out to me across the fire, patient as a heron. I looked at it and did the sums the only way I’d learned to do anything this autumn, one coin at a time. Three for the sun left four. Four was a loaf with two to spare, or it was nothing, because four wasn’t a room, and I wasn’t sleeping in a room without a lock. As a ward it was worth exactly what the pewter was worth. I’d been drawing real wards on doorframes in chalk and chrism since I was fourteen. I knew what one felt like in the hand that drew it, and lately I knew how mine flickered on the wood before they caught. Would his flicker less? The stupid part, the part I wouldn’t have admitted to anybody alive, was that I wanted it anyway. I wanted to hold that shape without my name stamped under it.

“Forgive me,” I said. “I have none to spare.”

He didn’t take it personally. The sun returned to the flannel, and his eyes went to the counter, right to where the wanting in the room was coming from, like he could smell it too. He had an easier time with the soldier than he’d had with me. “Corporal Abbot! You’ll want one for the gate.” Two coppers instead of three, and he got the better one. I watched the corporal duck his head and pull the cord over it himself, then push the little sun down inside his shirt against his skin and pat it twice through the leather. He wasn’t looking at the niece anymore. He was looking at the shutters on the east wall. The warmth along my throat faded out of the wool by a degree, and then another, like a kettle coming off the boil.

So fear worked too. I added that to the pile of things I’d learned about the marks since the leaves turned, none of which I’d wanted to learn.

I pushed all seven coppers together on my knee and stacked them into one little tower: a room, the lock on its door, and nothing extra. My stomach complained, loud enough that the tinker, rolling up his oilcloth, glanced down at it like it had said something to him. He’d left the crooked sun on the ledge, face up, the one with eleven rays. Had he forgotten it, or was it a joke, or bait for tomorrow? I couldn’t tell. The firelight ran along its edge and made it look almost gold. I didn’t pick it up. I kept my hand over the pocket in my purse, where the straight ones were, and watched the door.