Book Two Chapter 13: Balanced

Book Two: Chapter 13

Balanced

In the mornings, Aldous wrote letters and supervised Milo as he studied up on every topic laid out before him, a campaign he conducted from the pillows with his spectacles down his nose and no mercy whatsoever. Afternoons he slept, longer and longer with each passing day. In the evenings, Sera sat with him, and he told her the merchant tales of old one at a time – the fraud he committed when he was young and too eager to become someone in a town called Helmsward, the tale about how a whole caravan full of wool sank in the river and he’d sold the salvage rights before it hit bottom. How he saw her mother across a market square for the first time, with her sleeves rolled up, arguing a spice man down on price and how that was the exact moment he knew he loved her. He told some of them, the good ones, twice, and she let him.

This lasted nine days. On the ninth evening, Aldous was sharp as a nail through supper, and ate more than he had all week, corrected everyone twice, and laughed and talked as if the sickness was never there. Sera, who understood what a last rally was, stayed when Petra took the plates down.

He didn’t pretend that he didn’t know what was going on either, as neither of them had ever managed to lie to the other successfully, and it was late to start.

“The letters on the desk go with the morning post,” he said. “The one to your uncle isn’t sealed. Read it first; that old bastard will claim I promised him some of the contacts and I did no such thing; it’s in writing, third drawer.”

“Third drawer.”

“The boy’s sevens are fixed, and I also taught him some of the family sales tactics, but still, tell him I said his fives have ambitions now and to watch them.” His breath went shallow a while and came back. The lamp made the room small and gold, and below the window, the market square lay bare and empty and frosted, the stalls skeletal and pale in the dark, waiting for the next morning the same as always. “I had a good run of it, Sera. Fifty years on the roads and I die in a bed with my books balanced. Most men in my trade get one or the other.”

“You could rest now, and finish balancing tomorrow.”

“Don’t manage me, girl, I invented that.” He shifted deeper into the pillows, and his hand grasped hers on the blanket. The lamp burned ever so slightly lower, and the frost thickened on the glass.

“Sera…”

“I’m here, Father.”

“The ale recipe…”

She laughed, it breaking in the middle, but it was a laugh. “No.”

“Final offer…I’ll haunt the inn. Free of charge. I’ve never made a free offer before.”

“You’d haunt it anyway.”

“True,” Aldous said, and smiled with his eyes shut, entirely satisfied, a merchant who had got the last word at the last opportunity he had for words. He did not say anything after that. His breathing went on a long time, slower and slower, the intervals drawing out like a day winding down. Sera held his hand and didn’t count.

Some time past midnight, between one breath and the place the next one should have been, Aldous Veldine died.

His daughter sat with him until the lamp burned out, then she folded his hands, kissed his forehead, and went down through the dark house to the kitchen, where she found Milo asleep at the table with his head on his arms, having tried to wait up, and Petra awake by the stove, having known better than to try to send him to bed.

Petra looked at her face and needed nothing said. “I’ll heat some water,” she said. “There’s things to do, and doing them is the only door out of the first night. I’ve been through it so come on.”

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Sera nodded in agreement, waited for the water, then washed her father’s face and hands, cleaned and prepared the room and wrote the notice for the market crier in her plainest hand. The doing of it held her together through the night.