Seyun untied his leather coin pouch at the supper table. Then, he was careful not to dump the whole bag onto the wood like a wealthy patron endowing a charity ward.
He remembered his earliest mistake in Oran all too clearly. The night he had secretly paid the ferry blacksmith out of his own medicine money to forge Ilyra’s marsh-iron spearhead so she would advance faster and send him a seven-dawn echo. That left himself too poor for reed ash until his chest inflamed under the pier. And he remembered the first letter Mina had ever sent him at Mother Renn’s stall. Telling him plainly that she wanted usable evidence and honest rent money, not grand, self-destructive gestures carried out in her name.
“The landlord at the market gate asked for the first month’s lease and the stove-chimney pipe deposit by Saturday noon,” Seyun said, resting his hand lightly on the pouch. “Tell me what you actually need to open the ledger cleanly.”
Mina reached to the shelf behind her. Then she took down a newly bound ledger of plain gray rag paper. She opened to the first page. She showed him columns ruled in the exact, neat three-line housekeeping hand their mother had taught both of them at the kitchen table before she fell ill.
