Chapter 7 Chapter 7

Isolde POV

By the twelfth day, I could climb the loft ladder without stopping halfway.

The fever was gone and the sickness with it. What was left was stranger. I could smell the stable from the loft, and tell which horse had been fed. I could hear Hesper counting under her breath at the other end of the mill. When I held still, there was a low, steady knocking in my chest that was not my heart. Marga said it was the wolf. She said it would settle. I did not think she knew that for certain.

Hesper had given me the tally books on the tenth day. She did it without a word, dropping six bound volumes on the long table in front of me with a thud, and walking away. I understood it was a test. It was also the best thing anyone had handed me in years.

I had read them for two days. I was on the fifth volume now, at the end of the table, with a candle and a stack of blank paper.

The books were good. Hesper kept accurate figures and clean columns, and she wrote small, tight numbers that leaned to the right. I liked her handwriting. I did not think she would want to hear it.

What the books recorded was less good.

I laid the findings out in a column on a clean sheet, the way I would have for Matron Hale. There were three.

First, salt. Over six years, the camp's salt price had risen by a little more than three in a hundred each quarter. It was a steady climb, never a jump. Markets do not move that evenly. When I had kept the Stillwater accounts, the price of salt had held flat for seven years, because the same trader had supplied us and the same contract had governed it.

Second, the lower road. In his last delivery, Jonas Pell had said the lower road was washed out, and that he had gone by the Casimir tollhouse. I had read freight slips for seven years. Carters who used that road noted its condition in the margin. The lower road had been clear all autumn. And the Casimir tollhouse charged only on ice carts, in deep winter. It did not charge grain wagons in the first week of the season.

Third was the sack.

Hesper kept one empty sack from every delivery. It was a habit from some old pack rule: you keep a sample of what you were sold. I found the box under the table and pulled out the burlap from the last six deliveries. Each one carried a faded stamp near the seam. I turned them in the candlelight.

It was a thorn. A single curved thorn, in black ink, with a number below.

I knew that stamp. I had seen it on nine hundred sacks of Stillwater flour. It was the warehouse mark of the house of Thorne.

I sat back. My heart was going hard. I could hear it in my ears, loud and sharp, a thing I had not been able to do before the tea stopped.

"Hesper," I said.

She was at the far end of the table, scraping a pot. She did not turn. "I'm busy."

"I need you to look at this."

"If it's another speech about how useful you are—"

"It's not."

Something in my voice made her turn.

I put the sack on the table, with the stamp showing. I put the list next to it, with my three points. I did not explain. I had learned that explanation gives people something to argue with.

She came over wiping her hands on her apron. She read the list. Then she looked at the stamp.

It took a long time. I watched the color leave her face.

"No," she said.

"The numbers don't lie."

"Pell has been my supplier for six years."

"He buys from Thorne's depot. I think he has bought from it for six years. I think he sells you the same grain Alaric feeds his own hunters, at a price that goes up by a little each season so you will not notice."

"That's—" She stopped. Her mouth worked. "Why would he do it? For the money?"

"For the money, maybe. Or because he is paid for something else too." I made myself say it. "He asked how many people live in this mill. Dorian said so. He asked twice."

Hesper sat down heavily on the bench.

For a minute, she did not say anything. The fire popped. Somewhere above us, Emeric's boots shifted on a floorboard, and I knew without looking that he had stopped to listen.

"Six years," she said finally. "He has been in this yard. He has seen the loft. He has sat at this table."

"Yes."

"If he has been reporting us to Thorne for six years, we would be dead."

"Not necessarily." I had been working it out for two days, and I did not like the answer. "If I wanted to keep a rival where I could see him, I would not burn his camp. I would let him live somewhere he can be counted. He is easier to manage alive. He does not leave. His men do not scatter. He is a problem that is already solved."

Hesper stared at me.

"A leash," she said. "Not a knife."

"Until something changes."

"Something has." Her gaze dropped to my hands on the table. "You."

I did not look away. "I know."

"Don't think this makes you welcome," she said. But her voice had lost its edge, and she picked up the sack and held it in both hands as if it had weight. "Next time Pell comes, I will check every sack myself. And I'll need that list copied."

"I can have it by morning."

"Do." She stood. At the foot of the stairs she paused, with her back to me. "The tally books are good work," she said. "The columns. Mine are cleaner. But yours are good."

She left before I could answer.

---

I was still at the table when Dorian sat down across from me, near midnight.

He did not say anything. He put a heel of bread and a piece of cheese on a board between us, pushed half toward me, and began to eat his own. The candle was nearly done. The camp was quiet. I could hear everyone breathing.

"You've been at it since breakfast," he said.

"There was a lot to read."

"Hesper told me." He chewed. "She said you found Pell."

"I did."

"She's going to be unbearable about being wrong for at least a month." He grinned. It was a good grin, unforced, and it made me aware of how long it had been since someone had looked at me like that. "You did it in two days. It took me six years to ask the right questions, and I never got past 'that's a lot of wine.'"

I picked up the bread. "I'm not trying to impress anyone."

"I know. That's what makes it work." He tipped his head. "You're doing it again."

"What?"

"The sums. I can see you working out what you owe the camp, and what Hesper owes you, and what I owe you for being nice at midnight." He pointed a crust at me. "I'm not keeping a ledger on this, you know."

I laughed. It was short and surprised, and it came out before I could stop it. I put my hand over my mouth.

Dorian watched me with an expression I could not read. Not amusement. Something quieter.

"I'd like to hear that again," he said.

"I don't know how to stop," I said instead. "Counting. It's how I've survived."

"Then do it out loud. Tell me what you're counting, and I'll tell you where you've got it wrong." He tore a piece of cheese in half. "Start with this. How many people in this camp want you here?"

I thought about it honestly. "Four. Perhaps five."

"Eleven," he said. "Marga, Hesper, who just pretended she doesn't, and nine others who think you're the cleverest thing that's walked in here in a decade." He smiled slightly. "And me. And Emeric. That's thirteen. Rhys is the one you can't count yet."

"I can't."

"No. Neither can he."

I looked at the bread in my hand.

"I felt you from the river," Dorian said, more quietly. "Before I saw your face. I don't intend to pretend I didn't. That's all I'm going to say tonight." He stood, collected the board, and went to the door. "Eat the cheese. You need it."

He left. I sat in the last of the candlelight with the knocking in my chest, and for the first time in my life, I had no figures to give it.