The Hide I Am Not Permitted to Weigh

Fayyad —

Kael Dorn’s last wool bale sold before the rain broke. The board posts none to be had before Seedmonth now, no figure attached, because there is nothing left to attach one to. I wrote you three weeks ago that a shortage frozen by law and a shortage that simply ran out are not the same number. This is the third time this season I’ve had to make the distinction again, which tells me the distinction is doing less work than I give it credit for.

The Oru lot you already know about — nine hides, salt still silvering the folds, seven marks four at the board. I priced it yesterday and moved on to the next line. I should not have moved on so quickly.

The cordwainer who took three of those hides without haggling a single sliver off the figure is not the cordwainer two doors down from him. That man is Pavol Yelin, found dead beside his wife two mornings past the Stilling, a sealed room, no mark on either body, no order the examiner could give to say which breath stopped first. Yelin’s own hides — cured, salted, counted as his working stock as recently as last week — are entered tonight as estate instead, and an estate cannot be weighed, sold, or priced by anyone until the law finds an heir, which at present it has not. So there are, two doors apart on the same street, two identical piles of cured leather: one crossed a board yesterday morning at seven marks four and is already under Semyon’s knives on Dye Lane; the other sits behind a shuttered door with a figure attached to nothing at all, waiting on a woman somewhere past the Kael Dorn road who does not yet know she owns it.

I have thirty years of columns for cargo that moved. I own none for cargo that simply stopped, mid-transaction, because the hand that would have sold it stopped first. Corvus calls the two piles a coincidence the board will not record. I call it the one entry in my ledger I would rather leave blank than price with a guess.

What I am tracking: whether the Register finds Hanna Yelin’s people before her husband’s own hides spoil waiting on them, and whether six marks nine for a bale that no longer exists is a price at all, or only the shape a shortage leaves on a board after the thing itself is gone.

— M.