Vale came down to the crossing with her sack over one shoulder and the kitchen keys in her hand.
Iven had expected her to arrive carrying something else. A forgotten pot, perhaps, or a basket of food for people who would be fed on the ground. She brought only the sack. She stood beside him beneath the queue lamp and looked back once along the upper lane.
“Keys,” he said.
“The new cook has his. These are mine.”
She showed him the small brass pair. One opened her new room. The other fitted a cupboard she had not yet seen.
“I’m trying to believe them,” she said.
The morning had begun cold and clear. A line of pale light lay beneath the eastern clouds, and the lamps still made islands around each clerk’s desk. The first households had crossed long before Iven finished breakfast. Now the approaches held their steady movement: bundled children, people carrying things awkwardly because those things had been theirs too long to discard, a man with an empty birdcage under each arm.
Vale knew him.
