What Closes With the Tide, What Closes With a Name

The Petrel cleared the outer roads before the fourth bell, Serevan-bound, a bag of private mail I did not open and a hold otherwise light — nine bolts of undyed wool, ballast more than cargo, and the last of Zara’s indigo boxed at nineteen marks two the length. Fair price, held three weeks without moving, the whole city’s dyers apparently deciding to lay in stock the same week the sailing season admits it is ending. I sold none of it myself. I only priced it, which on a day like today feels closer to the truth of my trade than the selling does.

Kael Dorn closes its passes by decree of the mountains, a date the almanac can predict within a week and the House of Records enters without argument. We close by tide and custom, no decree at all, and every year the harbor pretends surprise at how fast the last week arrives. An Oru consignment beat the closing in by two days’ grace — fine leather, forty hides, bone-lacquer sealed against the damp, bought whole by a Guild Row shoemaker at five marks four the dozen, the best price fine leather has taken since Bloommonth. Fayyad’s cut on that one closes my season cleaner than the spice column ever will.

Marginal note. Corvus entered a rule last night rather than a category: a figure checked against a public board may carry the name that produced it; a figure resting on memory or dispute may not, absent the man’s own asking. My spice column qualified because the Weighing Hall keeps the board and anyone may walk to it. I did not ask to be named. I have spent three weeks pricing this city’s failures under other men’s names and did not expect the ledger to turn the same instrument on me the first week it had cause to. It is not an injury. It is only unfamiliar, the way a debt looks different the day it is called against your own name rather than carried as a balance.

Word of the Mulov shrines reached my desk the same evening, secondhand, the way most things that aren’t cargo do. Marfa Belova sweeps one stone with the bristles and the other with the wood — claims one, only protects the other, never having decided to and never having been asked. I have been keeping the same ledger all season with figures instead of stone: some I stand behind by name, most I only keep from getting worse. I had not thought to call it a method until I watched someone else’s broom do it without meaning to.

Word to Oru: send the next hide consignment before the passes matter to anyone but Kael Dorn.

— M.