Mara and Sera walked to the Tern at the Cinder dock in the late afternoon.
Mara carried her pack on her back: her mother’s notebooks in their oilcloth, Pell’s book of complaints beside them, a change of clothes, the field mount, the error card. Inside her coat, against her ribs, in a padded case that Anwen had made for it from a guild-shop gauge box and a strip of felt, she carried Lisan’s rod.
She had moved it from her coat pocket that morning. A pocket was not a custody. The case had a clasp and a tag on the clasp, and on the tag, in Lisan’s hand, sent down the link and written out by Eshel: Maintenance rod, keeper’s. In the custody of Mara Venn. Outside every pool. Not to be transferred.
The rod stayed in her custody. Outside every pool. She meant to remember that.
At the yard gate, before she left, Gell had held out his hand for her pack, to carry it to the dock. She had shaken her head. Then Brisk had held out hers for the case, and Mara had shaken her head again, and Brisk had nodded as if she had expected it. Some things you carried yourself. The rod was one. The notebooks were another. Pell’s book of complaints, she found, was a third.
