Book Two Chapter 7: Two Ledgers

Book Two Chapter 7

Two Ledgers

Roen set out for Aldham market as soon as the sun came up. Brenner went with him, coins jingling in his pocket, and a scrap of paper tucked into his jacket. Sera had written the list in her clear, confident hand: MOUNTAIN BLEND. LONG PEPPER. THE GOOD SALT. DO NOT LET BRENNER TALK YOU OUT OF THE SALT. AS YOU KNOW, NOT ALL SALT IS EQUAL! These days, her instructions read like contracts. There was no room for mistakes.

“I know what I’m buying,” he’d said, accepting the paper anyway.

“You’ve been measuring that blend like it’s gold since the jar broke. You’ll thank me when you get distracted by something we don’t get in Millhaven and forget about what you came for.” She’d straightened his collar, a thing she had started doing recently and which he had carefully not commented on for fear she’d stop. “Two days there and back. Don’t let Brenner argue with anyone about…I don’t know…axles or whatever is on his mind these days. See you in two days.”

“We both know he will argue with someone about axles. See you soon, Sera.”

She sent him off and stood in the doorway, watching until the wagon was out of sight. Only when she was alone did she let herself think about the fact that with Roen gone, she would be alone in the inn with the scholar.

• • •

Velan let one full day go by, which Sera respected as craft.

It came on the second afternoon, the lull between dinner prep and dinner, Bess staying to help a bit later than usual, Milo writing something in his ledger at the end of the bar with Nyx loafing beside the inkpot, the common room empty but for the fire. Sera sat at her corner with the ledger, and Velan came down with her own book under her arm, and instead of her typical spot, she stopped at Sera’s, two cups in hand.

“It’s frostmint; I helped myself,” she said. “I watched how he makes yours, but I don’t think it would be as good.”

It was a small, careful gesture. The tea seemed to say, “I notice things,” and Sera knew that refusing it would say more than accepting it. She moved the ledger aside.

“Sit. You’ll have got the steeping wrong, everyone does. He counts it by the second.”

“Of course he does.” Velan sat down and placed the cups on the table. They talked about small things: the weather, the south road, Hilde’s cabbages, and the food at the inn.

“May I tell you something I haven’t told the table?” Velan said at last.

“You may tell me anything you like,” Sera said pleasantly. “It’s a quiet afternoon in the inn anyway.”

“I was twelve when my gift came in.” She held her cup in both hands, and she looked into it rather than across it, and Sera understood that she was being shown something true, and that was also a move. “A fishing town, in a small country far, far on the west coast, you won’t know it. Small enough that everyone knew everyone, and most of us were relatives.” A breath. “Magic is rare, you understand. Most people in a town like that live a whole life and never see it. So when the fires in our street started lighting themselves when I cried, there wasn’t anyone who knew what it was. There was only a girl, and fires.”

Sera stayed quiet. She gave Velan room to speak, not shutting her out.

“They weren’t cruel at first. Fear isn’t always cruel, to begin with, but they stopped letting their children near me, and then the boats wouldn’t take my father, and then someone’s drying shed burned, which had nothing to do with me – the man smoked fish drunk, and everyone knew it, but by then it didn’t need to be true.”

She turned the cup and took a sip as if in preparation for the rest of the story.

“I was thirteen when they drove us out of the village, violently. I still carry the scars of the lash that one of them used to make us run. We went inland to this country. My mother told the next town I was simple, because it was safer than what I was, and I learned to hold it down so hard I bled at the nose, because a fire meant we moved again. I held it for four years, and then a boy in the lane hit my brother with a stone, and I was sixteen, and I lost it.”

The fire ticked. Milo’s pen had stopped, and Sera, without looking away from Velan, said, “You have work, Milo,” and the pen started again.

“He lived,” Velan said, to the question Sera hadn’t asked. “Burns down one arm. He lived because a Tower mage happened to be two streets away, buying paper of all things. He felt it, came running, and pulled the heat out of the air before it finished what I’d started, at least that is what my brother told me. I passed out, depleting all my Aether.” She looked up then, with clear, dry eyes, and that was somehow worse than tears would have been.” When I woke up, he was sitting with me in a small hen coop while the neighbours and half the village screamed at my mother in the distance. I remember it as if it happened yesterday. The mage said: ‘You are not wicked; you are untrained, and those, my dear, are different things. One of them can be fixed.’ I’d never heard anyone separate the two; I didn’t know training to control my gift was even possible.” She set the cup down. “The Tower took me, fed me, trained me, gave me a room with a lock on my side of the door. So when I say what I do is a mercy, Sera, I’m not repeating a doctrine. I was the thing in the ground that was growing. I know exactly what would have happened to that town if no one had come, and I know what I’d be now. There are only two endings for a gift outside the walls. The fire takes the town, or the town takes the child. I’ve never once seen a third.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

There it was, Sera thought, laid out with terribly pure honesty. The wound, the rescue, and the conclusion. She wasn’t wrong in her mind; that was the cold truth of it. She had simply taken the one road she’d seen and was convinced no other roads existed.

“Thank you,” Sera said, and meant it, which surprised her. “That can’t be a cheap thing to take out and show.”

“It isn’t.” Velan smiled, and the scholar came back up over the girl like water closing. “Though I’ll confess I show it for a reason, sometimes. People meet honesty with honesty. It’s the best trade I know.”

“It’s a good trade,” Sera agreed. “I do it myself. Though being a merchant, I’m also obliged to tell you that the people who say so at the table are usually about to name a price.”

Velan laughed. “Then I’ll name it for you – your innkeeper’s friend. The warder.”