Chaska did not like the map.
She turned it sideways, laid her own delivery chart beneath it, and placed three pebbles over the corners. Quirin’s northern channel ran directly through a salt store that had been built eight years earlier.
“That part used to be water,” Ysabet said.
“That part is under six feet of stone. The water has had to adapt.”
They were using Mara’s kitchen table. Mara stood at the stove browning onion ends, listening while pretending the pan needed all her attention. Through the open door Ysabet could see the laundry shelter. Pip had eaten three small spoonfuls of clay that morning, with chalk scraped from Quirin’s donated block. It was walking on five legs. The folded sixth no longer trembled, which might have meant it hurt less or might have meant nothing good at all.
Chaska drew a line in blue.
“I’ve taken parcels as far as the north toll. I know this reach. After that we ask people who live there.”
“We?”
She kept drawing. “Yes.”
“You have a route.”
“I have three customers who think it’s a route because they can get me cheaply.”
“And Lilt?”
Chaska looked up. “Has an opinion about every launch I’ve ever made. I shall continue to hear it.”
Mara slid onions into a bowl. “Are you going because she’s going, or because you want to go?”
“Both.” Chaska leaned back from the table. “I want to see the north channels before they’re dredged straight. I asked for a surveying place last spring. They said to come back with something I’d mapped that wasn’t a shopkeeper’s doorstep.”
“You never told me,” Ysabet said.
“You were trying to get a hound out of a mill.”
“For three days.”
“And before that you were trying to get paid for a carriage lizard.”
Ysabet could not dispute either event. She looked down at the map and saw how much work Chaska had already done in the margins of other people’s errands.
“I can’t pay you.”
“I didn’t offer employment.”
“No. But food—”
“I have savings. Actual ones, from work I did. Enough for my food, repairs, and part of a boat. I’ll tell you what part when we’ve seen the boat.”
“A boat?” Mara said.
“Lilt can’t take two women and a sack of pottery for days. We need something to float the slow people.”
From outside came a brief offended click, though Pip could hardly have understood the description. Chaska grinned before the worry returned to her face.
“You’ll need to trust me about water sometimes,” she said. “You keep looking at the chart as though you could persuade a channel to be smaller.”
Ysabet flattened a fold under her left hand. “I was looking for a road.”
“I know.”
Mara set bowls around the map. “Eat before you put north in the onion.”
After lunch a boy arrived from the clerk’s office. He carried no petition, only a note requesting the date and place of purchase and a description of the animal’s unusual capabilities. The paper bore the ordinary licensing mark.
Ysabet read it in the doorway.
“He said I could wait for the answer,” the boy offered.
She put her purchase receipt and license in her case before sitting down to write. She gave the requested dates, the auctioneer’s name, the creature’s appearance. She described the growth as occurring after an outside instrument had been applied against her instruction, and named the man who had applied it. She did not write god.
Mara watched her seal the answer.
“Will that make him angry?”
“He’s already interested.”
The boy went off with the note and a heel of bread. Ysabet had not bribed a messenger with a heel of bread in her life; he had simply been staring at it.
She returned to the shelter. Pip lifted its head, then lowered it against the mouse’s box. The mouse was asleep under the covered half, showing only the end of its damaged foot.
Ysabet set the clean-clay bowl where Pip could choose it. It ate slowly. Between mouthfuls it touched the edge of the box with a fine toe.
Quirin came by near dusk to examine the pigeon. He held it while Ysabet replaced the wing support, grumbling at her knot and then making one no neater.
“A few quiet days,” he said. “Perhaps longer. I can keep it in a flight pen when the skin closes. You can’t carry a bird that wants the sky into every marsh ditch.”
“I have linen.”
“I have linen.”
“I don’t want to leave you expenses.”
“Then finish my sling when you come back. It will have worn through somewhere else by then.”
She nodded, throat tight, and let him pack the hamper into the handcart he had brought.
At the gate Quirin looked back at Pip.
“Don’t make it look at the drawing again.”
“We haven’t.”
“Good.”
Chaska stood on the other side of the gate, studying the evening wind in the lane. She had already moved beyond wanting to go. Ysabet watched her test the strap on her delivery case, then went inside to tell Mara exactly how much rent money remained.