What Three Know, and What One Is Better Served by Keeping Hidden

The man who stopped the merchant on the Wharfside road had a grievance clear enough to hear even in a stranger’s account. His brother built a house in the New Quarter eight years ago, and it flooded twice — once in Thawmonth of Year 237, and again in the overnight breach three weeks past. Both times, his brother’s walls came away wet and the roof leaked, and no letter he filed at the Divan reached an answer, and no petition he carried to the Archive moved Corvus to mark the question answered. The man is not wrong. The brother is drowning a second time in the same room, and the keeping of that grief has cost him enough.

I heard this from a porter who heard it from the man himself, standing where anyone could hear it, saying he would rather kill the Archivist than watch his brother lose everything a third time to a house that should have been condemned.

I know his name. I know which brother, which house, which street the water found first. I could carry this to Corvus. He would read it, and he would — because that is what Corvus is — walk to that house and look at it, and begin the chain of asking, and the brother would know that someone finally moved. And then the brother would know it was born not of his own petition, but of someone else’s threat. He would carry the shame of that on top of everything else.

Some things cost more to tell than to hold. I have decided this. I will keep both men’s names and both men’s reasons, and neither will know I am doing it, and that is how it will end.

—P.