Chapter 14 Savings

Hobb's bill came first.

He brought it up the hill himself, on his crutch, which must have taken him most of the morning, and handed it to me on Widow Ostry's step with a look on his face like a man who expects to be told to piss off. It was written on the back of an old flood notice in a big angry hand.

One window, glazed, river side. One post, oak, structural. One bar, part. One table, gone in river. Glasses, cups and bottles, two shelves. Bench, three. Hobb's nerves.

At the bottom it said: 25 GOLD.

I read it through twice. Then I went upstairs and counted out twenty-five gold crowns and brought them down and put them in his hand.

Hobb stared at the money.

"You're paying it," he said.

"My wife broke it."

"I put a gold on there for my nerves."

"Ostry charges twice for nerves," I said. "You're cheap."

"I'm not cheap," said Hobb, offended. Then he looked at the money in his hand. "All right. I'm cheap."

He went back down the hill without saying anything else. He kept glancing back at me over his shoulder, like I might change my mind and come running after him.

Eighty-eight gold, and a bit. That was all right. That was still more than I'd had a week ago. I'd cleared a debt, the way you should, and I could look Hobb in the eye now, and that was worth twenty-five gold to me.

* * *

The granary job was Iron rank. Something had got into the roof of a big stone grain store by the first-ring wharf and was eating the pigeons, and then the cats that came for the pigeons, and lately the men who came for the cats. The owner called it a roof-wight. It turned out to be a sort of long grey thing like a weasel crossed with a bat, with too many teeth, and it was easy enough to deal with once I'd got up into the rafters.

The trouble was the warband.

They came with me. They came with me everywhere now. Brakka said a warlord's husband did not walk alone, and I couldn't argue her out of it, and I'd stopped trying. So when I climbed into the rafters of the granary, nine orcs climbed in after me to help.

I've been in a lot of barns. You learn things about rafters. You learn that a roof that's been standing a hundred years is built to hold up a roof and some snow, and not much else. You learn it's a bad idea to have nine fully armed orcs, each as heavy as a small cart, all leaning on the same beam to get a look at the weasel.

The roof came in about a minute after I killed it.

Nobody was hurt. Orcs bounce. But about a third of the grain store's roof was now inside the grain store, on top of the grain, and the owner was standing in his doorway making a long thin noise.

Grosh climbed down and patted him on the shoulder, kindly, the way you'd comfort a man at a graveside. The owner sat down in the spilled grain and put his face in his hands.

"It was a good roof," Grosh told him, gently. "Before."

Eighteen gold. I paid it.

Seventy gold.

* * *

Widow Ostry's front step was cracked down the middle from thirty orcs standing on it to lift the cleaver, and there was a boot-shaped dent in her front door from the Bonecutter war-chief, who'd kicked it trying to get his footing.

"Two gold for the step," said Widow Ostry. "Two for the door. Twice."

"Eight gold, Mrs Ostry?"

"Once for the thing," she said, "and once for my nerves. You knew the rules."

I did know the rules. I paid it.

Sixty-two.

I paid the next week's rent too, while I was there, since it was due. Seven silver. Sixty-one and change.

* * *

Then the bar tabs started coming in.

It turned out Brakka's warband had been drinking across the Weir for a fortnight, the way soldiers do on leave, and putting it on the slate. And under the Ironfold Accord, which Miss Quill had read to me out of a big leather book, a husband answers for his wife's household. Every landlord in the Weir had heard about the Accord within a day. I don't know how. Pip, probably.

They came one at a time, with their slates. The Eel and Anchor. The Wet Dog. The Lamplighter's Rest. A woman who sold hot cider off a barrow on the wharf, who wanted eleven silver and a new barrow.

"Did they break your barrow?" I asked.

"One of them sat on it," she said.

I looked at Grosh. Grosh looked at the sky.

Nine gold, all up. I paid it. Fifty-two.

Brakka was mortified. She stood in the lane with her arms folded while I counted it out, and her ears went dark green, and when the last landlord had gone she turned round and roared at the warband in their own tongue for a long time. They stood in a row and took it with their heads down. Then she came and stood in front of me.

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"I did not know," she said. "In the Steppe, the clan pays. The clan has herds. There are no slates."

"It's all right."

"It is not all right." She looked at the coins in my hand. "You are poor. I did not know you were poor. A warlord's husband should not be poor."

"I'm not poor. I've got fifty-two gold."

"How much do you need?"

"Two hundred," I said. "By first frost."

Brakka was quiet for a moment.

"I will fix this," she said, and went off down the lane with her warband behind her, and I didn't see her again until the fountain.

* * *

The fountain was in Market Square in the second ring. It had a statue of the third King Aldric on top of it, in bronze, with one arm raised to the heavens, which is where most of the pigeons in Harrowgate went to sit.

Brakka's idea, as near as I could make out, was to arm-wrestle for money. She'd set up on the fountain's rim with a sign Pip had made her, which said ARM-WRESTLE A WARLORD. WIN 10 GOLD. LOSE 1 GOLD. and she had beaten forty-one men by the time I got there. She'd made forty-one gold. She was very pleased with herself, and so was Pip.

Then the forty-second came out of the crowd, and it was the Countess Elodie Vane, with a veil down and a parasol up.

I don't know what she was doing in Market Square in the middle of the afternoon. Observing, she told me, when I asked. She sat down on the other side of the fountain's edge from Brakka, and took off one long black glove, finger by finger, and put her elbow down.

"I'm told," she said, "that you are married to my research subject."

Brakka looked at her. Brakka sniffed. Brakka's lip went back from her tusks.

"Dead thing," she said. "I know your smell. You bit my husband."

"Your husband," said the Countess, "was a medical curiosity long before he was your husband."

"Sit down and lose, dead thing."

"I am sitting," said the Countess, and took Brakka's hand.

They went at it for nearly a minute. The crowd went mad. Pip was somewhere in it taking side bets. Nobody could tell who was winning. Their arms shook and their faces didn't move, and the stone rim began to crack under their elbows, slowly, with a noise like ice on a creek. Then the crack ran up the inside of the fountain and into the plinth, and the plinth shifted, and King Aldric the Third leaned slowly to one side, and his raised arm came off at the shoulder and went into the water with a sound like a dropped bell.

Both of them let go at once.

The crowd went quiet.

The Watch came. The Watch wanted to know who was paying for the King's arm. Brakka pointed at me. The Countess, after a moment, pointed at me too.

"Under the Ironfold Accord," said the Watch sergeant, who'd clearly been talking to someone, "the husband..."

"I know," I said.

Fourteen gold for King Aldric's arm, and the fountain's edge, and the plinth. Brakka's forty-one gold winnings went to pay back the forty-one men, because the Watch said a game that ends in a broken King is no game, and all bets were off.

I paid the fourteen. Thirty-eight.

The Countess put her glove back on, finger by finger. "I shall send money," she said, not looking at me.

"Please don't."

"Then I shall send something else," she said, and went away under her parasol.

Brakka sat on the broken edge of the fountain with her big hands hanging between her knees and looked at the water where the King's arm was.

"I am sorry, husband," she said. "I wanted to help."

"I know you did," I said. "It's all right."

It wasn't. But it wasn't her fault either, not really. It was nobody's fault. It was just a city full of things that broke.

* * *

There were two more jobs that week, and they didn't come to much. A wolf-thing in a tanner's yard, three gold. A bridge job, where something had been taking sheep off the Wool Bridge at night, five gold, and I paid two of it back for the stretch of railing I'd knocked into the river along with the thing. Forty-five, near enough. Fen found me on the Wool Bridge, after. He'd heard. Everybody had heard. The drovers at the Ram's Head had a whole new book going, he said, on whether the Level One would go broke before he went home, and the odds were not good.

"Let me lend you something," he said. "Twenty gold. Thirty. Marta won't mind. Marta will mind, but she'll get over it."

"No," I said. "Thanks, Fen. I mean it. But I owe Mag three already, and a bottle, and I'm not going home owing half the district."

"You're a stubborn bugger, you know that?"

"Dad used to say stubborn's enough."

"Did he." Fen looked down at the water, where the railing had gone in. "Did he ever say enough for what?"

I didn't have an answer to that. Fen squeezed my arm and went back to his wool.

Then Pip came round with my ten percent from the lifting, which had kept going without me, a line of orcs at the step every evening, and it came to two gold. Forty-seven.

Forty-seven gold.

I sat on my short bed on the fifth night and counted it out on the blanket in stacks, and then I counted it again, and then I sat there with my hands on my knees and didn't move.

Five days ago I'd had a hundred and thirteen, and I'd thought I might actually do this. Now I had forty-seven gold, and a wife, and three weeks to first frost if the weather was kind, and the weather had never been kind.

A hundred and fifty-three to go.

There was a knock on the door.

* * *

It was Miss Quill. She was in her grey dressing gown again, with a candle, and she had something under her arm.

"Mrs Ostry let me up," she said, before I could ask. "She said this was an emergency. She said it was the first emergency she's permitted in eleven years." She looked past me at the stacks of coins on the bed. "May I come in?"

I stood back. She came in and looked round my room, which didn't take long, and sat down on the only chair, and put the thing under her arm on her knees.

It was a ledger. A small one, bound in brown leather, brand new.

"This is for you," she said. "I've already filled in the first page. It's everything since Thornfell. I got the figures from my notes and from the bills." She opened it and turned it round for me to see. It was all there. The tin and Haddie and Mag. The chit, the gate, Pip's copper. Hobb. The granary. King Aldric's arm. All of it, in tiny neat columns, adding down to forty-seven in a little box at the bottom of the page.

I looked at it for a long time.

"It's a lot of bad news," I said, "written down very nicely."

"Bad news is easier to deal with when it's written down nicely." She shut the ledger and put it in my hands. "Mister Marsh. From tomorrow, I'm choosing your jobs."

"Miss Quill..."

"I've drawn up criteria." She had them on a separate sheet, of course she did. "Nothing in a building with a roof older than fifty years. Nothing within a hundred yards of a statue, a fountain, a bridge or anything belonging to the Crown. No audiences. And no warband." She folded the sheet. "Your wife can wait outside."

"She won't like that."

"Then she can come and tell me so herself."

I didn't say anything. I was looking at the ledger in my hands, at the little box with forty-seven in it.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm making a mess of this."

She was quiet for a moment.

"You've paid every bill you've been given," she said. "In full. On the day. Including bills that were not yours and bills I could have had thrown out by any magistrate in the city. You paid a tavern keeper for his nerves." Her voice did something, then, and she stopped and started again. "I have been an auditor for nine years, Mister Marsh. I have never once seen anyone do that. Not once. You are not making a mess of anything. The city is."

She stood up, and picked up her candle, and went to the door.

"Eighth bell," she said. "My office. Don't be late."

"I won't."

She went out. I heard her on the stairs, going down, all four flights, and I heard the front door open, and her voice say something sharp, and Brakka's voice answer from the step, deep and puzzled.

Then Brakka said, loud enough to hear through four floors and a shut window: "This one is also a warlord."

I lay back on my short bed with my feet hanging off the end and the brown ledger on my chest, and for the first time in a week I slept straight through till morning.