The bathhouse still advertised hot water.
Its sign hung over the street, a woman reclining in a painted cloud, her expression suggesting that no one had ever asked her for money. Beneath her, Mara Vell had nailed a smaller sign explaining that the baths were shut, the boiler was for sale, and inquiries about reopening would receive no answer.
Ysabet went around the side.
At the yard gate, Kettle had become lodged beneath the lower rail again. The pack tortoise had three legs, a shell wide enough to serve supper on, and a conviction that the gate must have grown since yesterday.
“Good afternoon to you, too.”
Ysabet lifted the rail out of its slots. Kettle advanced six inches and stopped to eat a weed.
“Worth the trouble, then.”
The yard smelled of sun-warmed tiles, old straw, and the bitter leaf wash she used on harness sores. Beyond the bathhouse roof, gulls wheeled over the salt marsh. The dry road came into Bent Reed from the west and left to the north; everything that traveled along it shook dust onto a town that spent half the year trying to keep the mud outside.
Her treatment bench stood beneath the former laundry shelter. Beside it were three clean water pans, two leaking ones waiting for repair, a pile of reed mats, and a carriage lizard asleep with its chin in a bucket.
“Tallow.”
The lizard opened one eye.
“Is there water in that?”
He closed the eye.
She went over and looked. No water. No lizard tongue trapped in a handle. She left him to it.
Sedge was in her box under the bench, curled around the warm brick Ysabet had left before dawn. Only the reed-marten’s whiskers showed. Ysabet slid two fingers beneath the bedding to check that it was dry, then put her gloves on the shelf beyond reach of the little teeth.
Nobody in the yard paid rent. Of the three, Kettle had once earned money by carrying a grocer’s stock through the market. The grocer had bought a younger tortoise when she lost her leg. He still waved to Ysabet in the street, which she thought showed considerable courage.
She took off her boots.
Her socks made a discouraging sound when she peeled them away. She hung them on the sunny side of the shelter and poured the boots out behind the mint.
“Didn’t know they sold them by the bucket now,” Chaska said from the gate.
Ysabet looked up. “Do you have a delivery for me?”
“No.”
“Then I have a fee for you.”
“I haven’t asked for anything yet.”
Behind Chaska, Lilt pushed a broad, sand-colored nose through the opening. The sandray’s leading fins folded back along her sides, making her look temporarily as though someone had rolled up a carpet with an opinion inside. A narrow courier harness crossed her shoulders.
Ysabet looked at the worn patch under its left strap.
“You were about to.”
“She keeps leaning.”
“You keep putting the heavy packets on that side.”
“There were only two.”
“Full of what?”
Chaska hesitated. “Type.”
Ysabet held out her left hand. Chaska gave her the harness.
Lilt flowed into the yard, rose a handspan on a passing gust, and landed on the warmed paving beside the empty baths. Her fins spread, showing the fine pale veins underneath. She was made for gliding above sand, where heated air rose steadily, but she had adapted well to caravan roads and the long ridges of discarded shell along the marsh. Gusts between buildings required more effort. Chaska claimed the route made them both better fliers.
The pale rub under the strap suggested that improvement had limits.
“No flying until we’ve cleaned this.”
“I have a packet for the north post.”
“How far?”
“A mile.”
Ysabet looked at her.
“Two, allowing for the bends.”
“You can walk.”
Chaska dropped her delivery satchel onto the bench. She wore the road openly: dust on her lashes, sun in the dark hair escaping its tie, a faded stripe on one cheek where her courier goggles sat. She had been earning her own food for years. Ysabet occasionally forgot this, particularly when Chaska did something foolish at speed.
“Sit down if you like,” Ysabet said. “Or take the packet now and collect her later. I need to eat before my hands are useful.”
Chaska glanced at the gloves drying on the shelf.
“How was the mill?”
“The hound’s out.”
“And?”
“He needs small meals.”
“And Vennick?”
Ysabet took yesterday’s bread from the covered crock. The crust required concentration.
“He still owes me.”
Chaska sat down.
For a few minutes she said nothing. She cut the bread while Ysabet warmed broth over the little charcoal stove. Lilt watched the knife with the special interest of an animal who had once been given cheese during a harness fitting and had never stopped allowing for the possibility.
“You could charge in advance,” Chaska said eventually.
“I could.”
“That wasn’t an argument. I was leaving room for you to say you will.”
Ysabet put a bowl beside her.
The broth was mostly onion. They ate while Kettle worried the same weed loose from three directions.
Afterward, Chaska held a clean cloth against Lilt’s neck while Ysabet washed the rubbed skin. It was tender and dry, with no broken surface. She adjusted the padding and worked the loose seam open with her small silver needle.
Her mother had left her five useful tools and a box of letters she still could not read all the way through. The tools had survived the weather better. The needle’s eye was large enough for harness thread, its shank worn smooth beneath her thumb. She turned it in her left hand, caught the strand on the second attempt, and began sewing.
Chaska loosened her grip on the cloth as Lilt settled.
“They sent Rovan through the Teeth,” she said.
“Who did?”
“The postmaster. Letters to the storm stations. There’s a whole route beyond the passes now.”
“Rovan knows the stations.”
“Rovan knows the postmaster.”
Ysabet looked up from the seam.
“Did you ask for the route?”
“Twice.” Chaska rubbed a spot of dried mud off her wrist. “He said the marsh packets suit me. I arrive quickly and I know where everyone lives.”
“You do.”
“So does a bell on a string. Nobody rewards it with a longer string.”
Ysabet drew the stitch tight. She wanted to say that the Teeth were dangerous, that the roads changed with the snow, that Lilt had never flown at that height. Chaska knew all those things. She was sitting beside a sandray she could afford to feed only because she worked every day.
“I know someone who used to guide the northern migrations,” Ysabet said. “Quirin Sile. If you want to ask him about the winds.”
Chaska’s expression eased a little. “Does he talk to people who haven’t already been?”
“He talks to anyone who doesn’t leave quickly enough.”
Lilt nosed the empty broth bowl. Chaska took it away before she could lick the onion residue.
“I’ll go after the north post.”
They finished the harness. Lilt endured a trial fitting with the aggrieved patience of an animal being praised for standing still. Ysabet checked that she could move her fins freely, then took it off again.
“Carry it on the walk. Give the skin another night.”
Chaska paid for the wash and sewing. When she tried to add two extra copper, Ysabet pushed them back across the bench.
“That’s bread money,” Chaska said.
“I’ve eaten.”
“I noticed. Plan ahead.”
She put the coins on the shelf beyond Lilt’s reach and left before Ysabet could hand them back.
In the quiet afterward, Ysabet brought out the small wooden box from beneath her bed. Her bed occupied the bathhouse’s former linen room, which had a roof, a door, and a window that opened if she first lifted its lower corner with a knife. She counted the winter reserve. Eighteen silver, wrapped in old flannel. Enough for rent through the hard weather, feed for three animals, and modest confidence about her own meals.
Six more would have made the confidence less modest.
She shut the box. The ordinary cash in her purse would buy charcoal, a sack of grain, and a little meat. Mara would want the month’s three silver at the end of the week; that was already set aside in a separate folded scrap of paper. She had become good at putting little barriers between money and what she wanted to do with it.
Outside, a boy rang the evening sale bell.
“South road! Last clearance before the caravans! Household goods, sound tools, recovered military effects! Livestock!”
Ysabet lifted her head.
Her largest water pan had cracked through its old mend. Clearance sales sometimes had pottery, particularly the ugly heavy kind that survived a tortoise setting its foot inside.
“Any pans?” she called through the window.
The boy stopped ringing. “Probably.”
“That’s a poor advertisement.”
“I’m paid to get you there.”
“By the person or the day?”
“The day.”
“Then you needn’t sound so sure.”
He grinned and rang the bell again. Kettle withdrew into her shell. From beneath the bench, Sedge hissed a thin old protest.
Ysabet put the silver needle back in its case. She returned her working tools to the linen room, then paused beside the box.
A sound pan could cost more than the copper in her purse. She took the flannel-wrapped silver, intending to bring most of it home.
At the gate, she went back for the needle case. Better to repair a bad seam before walking a cheap purchase through town.
The sun had dropped below the bathhouse roof. Beyond the western houses, the bell was moving toward the road.