Pell fell asleep at the kitchen table a little before the tenth bell, with his head on his folded arms and the copied pages under his cheek. Mara let him sleep. Tavin put a blanket over his shoulders and went on with what he was doing, which was standing at the range and not looking at her.
She sat at the other end of the table with the harness in front of her.
“The yard feeds him,” Tavin said, to the range. “While you’re gone. He sleeps where he sleeps. The back room. He eats what I eat.” He set the kettle on the hob. “That’s settled. You don’t need to arrange it. You don’t need to pay for it.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to—”
“I know you weren’t. That’s why I’m saying it.” He turned around. “And I’m not going to tell you it’ll be safer for him with you gone. It won’t. Two guards in the lane and a director with a folder. Nothing’s safer. I’m only telling you he’ll be fed.”
She looked at Pell asleep on his arms, his inky fingers curled on the table edge.
“Thank you,” she said.
Tavin grunted and turned back to the range.
She packed the harness. She had been studying it for an hour, since she came out of the back room, turning it over, learning its buckles. It was cleverly made: the leather straps went over the shoulders and across the back, and the flat pocket ran down the front, from collarbone to waist, divided into three long sleeves inside. Three. The notebooks fit them exactly, one to a sleeve, I at the top, II in the middle, III at the bottom, lying against the chest. Her mother had carried them that way. Against her body, under her coat, where nothing could take them without taking her too.
Mara slid them in and buckled the flap over them.
The trunk sat on the floor by the range where Tavin had carried it from the back room. Its lid was open. Empty now of the notebooks, empty of the hammer, which lay wrapped in its oiled cloth on the table beside the harness, the trunk looked smaller than it had in the slag pit. Just a box. Grey felt lining, a few flakes of slag in the corners, a luggage tag on the handle. Something you could put anything in.
She unwrapped the hammer.
Tavin had stopped at the range. He turned to watch. She took the strip from her coat, where she had put it again after the back room, and laid it on the table in the lamp light, and held the hammer above it.
The pale lines came up. Silver on dull grey, silver on black, branching, matched, as they had at the bench. The graft rang its clean note.
Tavin looked at it for a long time.
“She used it on that,” he said, his voice gone low. “That hammer. On that metal. Or on metal like it.” He stopped. “I watched her work with that hammer for a year, at this bench, before she went out the last time. I never saw the lines. She never held it near anything that made them, not here.”
“Where, then?”
He did not answer that.
She wrapped the hammer again and slid it into the harness’s side pocket, where it fit as if the pocket had been cut for it. Which, she supposed, it had.
There was one more thing. She got up and went to the call box on the kitchen wall, the yard’s link to the Directorate’s dispatch exchange, the line every licensed yard was required to keep for job assignments and tithe notices. She lifted the receiver and turned the crank.
A woman’s voice came on after a while, tired and nasal. “Dispatch. Yard and number.”
“Rusk’s yard, Low Brace, eleven-forty,” Mara said. “Mara Venn, apprentice. I need to cancel my shifts. From tomorrow.”
“Duration?”
“I don’t know.”
A pause. A sound of paper. “Reason?”
“Travel.”
Another pause. “Apprentices can’t cancel their own shifts. Who’s signing for the yard?”
Mara looked across the kitchen at Tavin. He had not moved from the range. He was watching her, and his face had no expression.
“Tavin Rusk,” she said.
“Then he’ll sign for the hours too,” the dispatcher said. “Every shift you miss goes on the yard’s account against his license. You understand that?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll put it through.” The sound of a pen. “Anything else?”
“No.”
“Dispatch out.”
The line clicked, and hummed, and the hum stopped. Dead. Mara stood holding the receiver to her ear in the silence, and then hung it on its hook.
When she turned around, Tavin was beside her. He had a packet in his hand, a parcel the size of two fists, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. He pushed it into the front of her coat without asking, into the inside pocket, where it made a lump against her ribs.
“Food,” he said. “Bread and dried meat and the hard biscuit. Not the soft.”
She heard the echo and looked at him sharply. He seemed not to notice.
“I don’t need it,” she said. “Sera will have stores. The Tern has—”
“You need it more than you need your pride,” Tavin said.
She took it. She left it where he had put it. It was heavy against her ribs, beside the place where the strip had been, and it smelled faintly of bread through the paper.
The hard biscuit. Not the soft. She had read those words in her mother’s hand two hours ago, in the back room, aloud, with Tavin listening from the shadow. He had heard them. Perhaps that was all it was; he had heard them and they had stuck, the way a tune sticks. Or perhaps he had packed biscuit for her mother too, once, at this same table, and been told the same thing in the same voice, and had never forgotten it. She did not ask which. She thought that if she asked he would say biscuit keeps, and turn back to the range, and she would never know, and she found that she could not bear to hear him not say it.
He stayed where he was, in front of her by the call box, close, closer than he usually stood to anyone. She could smell the forge on his coat, coal smoke and hot iron and the oil he used on his files. Then he turned and went to the trunk by the range and stood over it, and put his hand down on its open lid, the way he had in the back room.
“Don’t go into anything alone,” he said.
His voice was very low. He kept his eyes off her. He looked at his own hand on the trunk lid.
“I’ll have the Tern,” Mara said. “Sera.”
“That’s not what I said.”
She opened her mouth and closed it.
He was not talking about the Tern. She understood that. What exactly he meant, she could not tell. The heart, perhaps. Whatever working the heart meant. Her mother’s first-page rule. The witness. Or something else, something he had watched her mother do, something he had not been able to stop. He did not explain. He stood with his hand on the empty trunk and said nothing more, and after a while he took his hand away and closed the lid, gently, and fastened the clasps.
“Go and finish packing,” he said.
She lingered. She went back to the table and sat down beside the harness and took the hammer out of its pocket once more and held it over the strip.
The pale lines came up. She watched them. Then she lifted the hammer away, slowly, a little at a time, and watched them go out, one by one, from the edges inward: the long branches first, then the short ones, then the fine silver threads at the center, until only one line was left, a single pale thread running across the hammer’s dull head and the strip’s black surface at once.
Then that one went out too.
The kitchen was quiet. Pell breathed on his folded arms. The kettle ticked on the hob. The call box on the wall was silent, its line dead.
She had not yet promised Tavin anything. She knew it, sitting there with the dark strip and the dull hammer. He had told her not to go into anything alone, and she had answered about a ship, and he had said that was not what he meant, and she had said nothing. She was not sure she could promise it. She had no idea what she would find at the end of Sera’s faint grey line, or whether, when she got there, there would be anyone to pull her out.
She wrapped the hammer in its oiled cloth, tucked the loose corner under the way she had found it in the trunk, and put it away in the harness pocket where it belonged.