Chapter 3 One Gold Scale

Two days after a dragon moved into my poetry section, I carried his coin into the Hollybrook Bank and watched the manager go the color of porridge.

“Where,” said Mr. Tuck, “did you get this?”

“A tenant.”

“A tenant.” He took off his spectacles. Put them back on. Held the coin up to the window, then lowered it as if it might bite. “Miss Quill, this is Mountain Court gold. We haven’t seen one in Hollybrook in forty years.”

“Is it real?”

“It is very real.” He leaned across the desk. “Do you understand what this is worth?”

“Three months of back rent?”

“It’s worth considerably more than three months of back rent.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

“It’s worth—” He stopped and glanced at the door, as if the whole street might be listening. He lowered his voice. “I cannot give you change for this. The bank doesn’t have change for this.”

Behind me, the chair creaked.

Idris had come along, because I couldn’t leave him alone in the shop with the roof half open and the cat unsupervised. He wore my aunt’s old brown coat, which stopped well above his wrists, and a pair of trousers from the lost-property box. He stood behind my chair like a very polite wall.

Mr. Tuck’s gaze traveled up. And up. And up.

“Is this gentleman—”

“A tenant,” I said, firmly.

“Of course,” said Mr. Tuck faintly. “Of course he is.”

In the end the bank took the coin. It cleared my arrears and paid thirty days of rent ahead. Mr. Tuck wrote it all down with a shaking hand and said twice that the bank would not be asking any questions.

Then he cleared his throat. “And, Miss Quill, I’ll need your account book. The quarterly statements are overdue.”

My stomach dropped.

“They’re being audited,” I said brightly. “By me.”

“I see.”

“I’ll bring them next week.”

I wouldn’t. The book under my till was a work of fiction, and I was the author.

Idris glanced at me sideways. He said nothing.

Out in the street, half the lane was staring. A man that tall, in a coat that short, walking half a step behind me like a bodyguard, will do that.

“Why is everyone looking at us?”

“Because yesterday I was the girl being evicted,” I said. “And today I have a very large man.”

“I am not large.”

“You’re up there with the church.”

He considered this seriously. “The church is considerably taller,” he said. “The bell tower, perhaps.”

Linus was waiting on the bank steps.

Of course he was. He held two paper cups of coffee and wore his good green coat, and the morning light made him look like a painting of a man who’d never lost anything.

“Marn,” he said warmly. “I heard about the roof.”

“Of course you did.”

“I brought you a coffee.” He held it out. “How are you holding up?”

I didn’t take it. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” He lowered his voice, gently, kindly, the way you talk to a horse you’re about to sell. “Listen. My father wants to buy Marrow Lane. All of it, starting with Number Four. I can get you a fair price for the lease and the stock. A job, even. You’d run Poetry in the new shop.”

“There’s a new shop?”

“There will be.”

“I’m not selling.”

“Marnie.” He sighed. “You were evicted in front of the whole town.”

“Thank you. I was there.”

He noticed Idris then. His eyes went up the coat, past the short sleeves, and stopped on the face above them.

“And who’s this?”

“A tenant,” I said.

“A tenant of what? The bell tower?”

Idris said nothing at all.

He just looked at Linus. Not angry. Not even much of anything. His eyes had gone very still, and very bright, and then I saw the gold start to rise in them, slow as a sunrise, until it was a faint but definite glow.

Linus’s smile slipped.

He glanced at his pocket watch and said, “Oh. Is that the time? I have an appointment.”

“Do you?” I said.

“Terribly important. Marn. Think about it.”

He left, with both coffees. One of them was supposed to be mine, I think. That was Linus all over. Every gift came with a hook.

My hands were shaking. I shoved them in my pockets so Idris wouldn’t see. He saw anyway. He didn’t say a word. He just moved a little closer, so that his shadow fell across mine.

We walked home along the river path. For a while, neither of us spoke.

“Where did you get a coin like that?” I asked finally.

“I had several.”

“Several?”

“I did not know how many I would need.” He kept his eyes on the water. “I do not carry them often. They are heavy.”

“Idris. That coin was worth the whole street.”

“Then it was well spent,” he said, as if that closed the subject. It did not.

“I do not like him,” Idris said at last.

I almost laughed. “You’ve known me two days. You don’t get an opinion on my exes.”

“I do not like him anyway.”

“How do you know he’s my ex?”

“He called you Marn,” Idris said. “You flinched.” A pause. “And he smiled at you in the square.”

I stopped walking. “You were there?”

“I was above it,” he said. “I saw him smile when the crier said your name.” His jaw tightened. “I thought it a strange face to make at a person being hurt.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said, “He’s very good at faces.”

“It is a bad talent.”

“It’s a useful talent.”

“Not,” said Idris, “for him.”

I walked the rest of the way with my hands in my pockets and my heart doing something unreasonable. Don’t, I told it. He’s a squatter. He’s a squatter with a very expensive coin.

That afternoon he covered the hole in the roof with a tarpaulin and a great deal of rope, and I pretended not to watch him climb. He did it with no ladder. Dragons, it turns out, don’t need one.

“How’s the roof?” I called up around four.

“Wet,” came the answer. “But improving.”

“Are you singing?”

The hammering stopped. “No,” said the roof.

By evening the shop was quiet. The wind pulled at the tarp and made it rustle. I swept up the last of the plaster, said goodnight to the shelves, and went to bed.

I woke at some point past midnight, thirsty and out of sorts.

I came down the stairs in my socks, one hand on the rail. The counter was dark. The tarp rustled. The shop was warm, which it never was at night, and smelled of paper and faintly of smoke.

Idris had made himself a nest in the wreckage of Poetry. Blankets, my green curtain, a sack of almanacs for a pillow. It looked ridiculous. It also looked like someone had made it with great care.

The nest was empty.

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

He stood in the dark at the third shelf, in moonlight leaking through a gap in the tarp, with a book in his hands.

It was a small blue book. A collection of sea poems. I knew it well.

He was holding it upside down.

His lips moved. Slowly, silently, as if sounding out every word. His jaw was tight, and the knuckles on his big hands had gone pale. And the whole time, he was looking at the page the way a man looks at a locked door he has stood in front of for years.