Chapter 5 THE TAX COLLECTOR'S CONFESSION

Chapter Five: The Tax Collector's Confession

Vesper's

I didn't sleep on the wolf carving's message. I sat with it instead, at my kitchen table, lamp burning low, turning the little scrap of paper over and over in my fingers as though a different angle might make the handwriting familiar, might make the three words mean something other than exactly what they said.

Ask her yourself.

Her. Beatrix, obviously; there was no one else in this village the message could reasonably mean, no one else whose scarred wrist and too-warm welcome had already lodged itself under my ribs like a splinter I couldn't quite work free. But I didn't know who'd left it, or how the same carving that had shaken itself half to pieces in Urso's workshop had ended up propped against my own door, or why someone, something, wanted me asking questions I hadn't even fully formed yet.

I thought about knocking on Urso's door and showing him the note. I got as far as standing in my own doorway with my hand raised to do it, twice, before I talked myself back inside both times. He'd said he'd come back with better answers. He hadn't come. I told myself he was busy, that a man who ran a workshop alone had a hundred reasons to lose an evening, and I told myself that with the particular firmness of someone who suspects, underneath the telling, that the truth is simpler and considerably less flattering to her own pride.

I didn't ask her. Not that week. I told myself it was strategy, that a woman who'd survived a tribunal knew better than to walk into an apothecary and accuse a kind old woman of witchcraft on the strength of a scar and a folded note from an anonymous wooden wolf. The truth was simpler and less flattering. I was afraid of what I'd find if I was right, and more afraid, somehow, of what it would mean about my own judgment if I was wrong, if I'd let six months of exile turn me into a woman who saw conspiracies in every kind face that offered her thyme.

So instead I did the only thing I knew how to do with fear that size. I baked.

There is a particular kind of peace in dough that nothing else has ever given me, not prayer, not sleep, not the tribunal's own promised mercy, which turned out to be no mercy at all. Flour and water and yeast don't care what you've done or who's decided to believe the worst of you. They only care whether your hands are patient, whether you've given them enough time to become something more than the sum of their parts. I worked the dough that morning until my shoulders ached and my mind, mercifully, went quiet for the first time in days, and I told myself, kneading, that whatever waited beneath my floor and whatever scar Beatrix kept hidden under her sleeve, I could still do this one true thing without it turning into a disaster.

The bakery wasn't ready, wouldn't be ready, by any reasonable estimate, for another fortnight of scrubbing and patching and coaxing an oven that hadn't drawn a proper flame since Widow Hasler's time, but I opened the front shutters anyway on the fourth morning, because I needed, badly, to do something with my hands that wasn't prying up floorboards or turning cryptic notes over in the lamplight. I set out a single tray of plain rolls, nothing fancy, nothing remotely magical, just butter and yeast and the particular comfort of dough rising the ordinary way dough has always risen, and I told myself that if no one came, at least I'd have proven to myself that I could still do the one thing I'd ever been good at without it going wrong.

Someone came.

He arrived at a dead run, spectacles askew, ink staining two fingers of his right hand, and skidded to a stop in my doorway so abruptly that he nearly took the doorframe down with his shoulder.

"Are you open?" he gasped. "Please tell me you're open. I have exactly four minutes before I'm meant to be reconciling the mill tax, and I have not eaten since yesterday, and if I have to sit through Herr Baumgartner's ledgers on an empty stomach one more time, I am going to say something I cannot take back."

"I'm technically not open," I said, already reaching for the tray, because some instincts don't care what technically means. "But I have rolls."

"You are a saint. An actual saint. I don't care what the tribunal in Zurich says, whoever they were, wherever that is, you are clearly, " He stopped so abruptly the words seemed to catch physically in his throat, and his whole face flooded red beneath the ink stains. "I didn't mean- I don't know why I said that. I've never even been to Zurich. I don't know anything about any tribunal, forget I said tribunal, forget I said Zurich, I need to go reconcile a mill, "

"It's fine," I said, though it was very much not fine, though my hands had gone cold around the tray and my pulse was doing something complicated and unpleasant behind my ribs. Word travels fast up here, Beatrix had said, on my very first morning, smiling as she said it. I hadn't understood, then, exactly how fast, or how far, or through how many unlikely mouths. "You didn't say anything wrong."

"I say a great many things wrong," he said miserably, taking the roll I offered with both ink-stained hands like it might be his last kindness of the week. "It's something of a specialty. I'm Gillon, by the way. Gillon Zindel. Tax collector, professional disappointment to my own nervous system, first customer of, " he looked around at the half-finished shop, the scaffolding still leaning against one wall, the ovens I hadn't fully coaxed back to life, "whatever this is going to be."

"Vesper," I said, and did not offer my surname this time, and watched some small, grateful part of him relax at not having to hear it.

He ate the roll in four bites, standing in my doorway with the particular urgency of a man who has learned to grab happiness wherever it appears because it rarely stays, and told me, between bites, more about the village than I'd learned in three days of asking careful questions of everyone else. That the mayor was sweet but useless. That Beatrix had been the village's apothecary for longer than anyone could actually remember, though nobody seemed bothered by how long that was; she simply always had been, the way a mountain always had been, the way people stop questioning the fixtures of a place they love. That a woman named Kaja had arrived two days ago from the capital, ostensibly to inspect the safety of the valley's water supply, and had instead spent both days asking pointed questions about the new baker who'd moved into Widow Hasler's old shop.

"Asking what, exactly?" I kept my voice light. It did not feel light.

"Oh, you know. Where you'd come from. Whether you'd registered your-" he lowered his voice, glancing over his shoulder at the empty lane as though the cobblestones themselves might be listening, "your credentials, with the capital board. Whether anyone has actually seen your papers." He must have caught something in my face, because his own went instantly, thoroughly apologetic. "I'm sure it's nothing. Routine. She's very thorough. Frightening, honestly, in the way that thorough people often are. I once watched her make the mayor cry over an incorrectly filed permit."

"I'm sure it's nothing," I echoed, and neither of us believed it, and he seemed to sense that we'd both stopped pretending otherwise, because he set down the last bite of his half-eaten roll and looked at me with sudden, startling directness.

"You should know," he said, quieter now, all his earlier scattered nervousness gone still, "that when Kaja Balthasar comes to inspect something, she doesn't leave until she's found what she came for. I don't know what she thinks she's going to find in you. But I'd be careful what you let her see."

He left at a dead run again, four minutes having stretched, by his own horrified accounting, into nearly nine, and I stood in my doorway a long time after his footsteps faded, holding the empty tray, watching mist curl down the lane exactly the way it had my first evening in the village. Careful what you let her see, he'd said, and I found myself cataloguing, with a kind of grim efficiency, everything in my shop that could not, under any circumstances, be seen by anyone official at all, a fractured wand wrapped in a dish towel, a rag rug hiding a trapdoor, a grandmother's book with a cracked spine and no capital seal anywhere inside its cover.

I was still standing there when the second figure appeared at the far end of the lane, tall, precisely dressed in a wool coat that looked entirely too clean for mountain weather, pale blonde hair cut into a severe, geometric line. She didn't hurry. She didn't need to. She walked the way people walk when they've already decided how a conversation is going to end before it's begun, and she stopped, deliberately, directly outside my open door, and looked past me into the half-finished shop with an expression of polite, professional interest that chilled me faster than any amount of magic had managed in three days.

"Vesper Von Flüe." She said my full name the way you'd read a line off a form, checking it against something already written down. "I understand congratulations are in order. A new business. A new home." Her gaze moved, slow and deliberate, from my flour-dusted apron to the scaffolding behind me to the trapdoor I'd carefully, that very morning, hidden beneath a fresh rag rug. There was nothing in her expression to suggest she'd noticed the rug at all, and that, somehow, frightened me more than if she had. A woman who missed nothing didn't need to react to what she saw. She only needed to remember it. "I'll need to see your capital registration, of course. Standard procedure for any new establishment handling consumables in a valley under safety review."

"Of course," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "I'll have everything ready for you."

"Wonderful." She smiled, and it did not reach her eyes, and it did not need to. "I'll be staying in the village a while yet. There's rather a lot to review."

She turned to go, and had made it three unhurried steps down the lane before she paused, looked back over her shoulder, and added, almost as an afterthought, in a voice pitched exactly loud enough for me to hear every word,

"You'll forgive me for saying so, but there's no record anywhere in the capital archive of a baker named Von Flüe ever holding papers at all." She let that sit a moment, watching my face the way you'd watch a pot to see exactly when it started to boil. "Which raises the question, doesn't it, what, precisely, were you registered as, before you came here?"

She didn't wait for an answer. She never intended to. She simply walked on down the lane, unhurried, certain, leaving me standing in my own doorway with an empty tray in my hands and the sudden, sick understanding that whatever name I'd been running from, she already knew it, and had only asked me the question to watch me decide whether I'd lie to her face.