I) Thora: The Map Beyond the Window

Thora discovered that the bridge was missing halfway through a speech about how reliably it had been repaired.

The governor had reached the part about enduring cooperation. Outside his window, beyond a descending street and a row of red roofs, the river ran brown between two stone piers. There ought to have been something between them.

There was not.

Thora looked at the painted map on the council chamber wall. On the map, a handsome bridge joined the two halves of Bellwater. A little cart crossed it. Someone had gone to the trouble of giving the horse a white forehead.

“Governor,” she said.

Ambassador Meret turned her head a fraction. It was a small movement, but Thora had spent three years learning the language of small movements around negotiating tables. This one meant: be certain.

“The generosity of the northern Council,” the governor continued, “will allow us to increase traffic across—”

“Which bridge?”

He stopped.

Thora pointed through the window.

The governor looked. His secretary looked. The merchant seated nearest the hearth began studying his fingernails.

“The spring flood,” the governor said, “caused a temporary interruption.”

“When?” Meret asked.

“Nine weeks ago.”

There were several reasonable questions to ask next. Thora had learned to recognize reasonable questions. Unfortunately, she had also spent the morning listening to figures for bridge tolls.

“Then who,” she asked, “has been paying to cross it?”

Meret shut her eyes briefly.

The meeting ended before lunch.

Outside, the ambassador handed Thora her satchel.

“You were right to ask.”

Thora relaxed.

“Your timing was appalling.”

She stopped relaxing.

Meret descended the steps. “Now we have an embarrassed governor, a defensive treasury, and no agreement to let the eastern towns send representatives through Bellwater. We also have a missing bridge. Find out whether those problems are connected.”

“You want me to investigate?”

“I want you to finish the question you started.”

Thora had once believed that being taken seriously would feel like praise.

More often, it felt like someone handing her a considerable amount of work.

She bought lunch in the lower market, where a woman named Nessa sold river fish wrapped in flatbread. Nessa listened to the bridge question, took Thora’s coin, and pointed with her knife toward the downstream bend.

“They pay for the ferry.”

“The toll accounts say bridge.”

“The accounts don’t have to stand in the rain.”

Thora took out her notebook.

Nessa looked at it, then at her clean embassy coat.

“You’ll want that put away if you’re walking down there.”

“Why?”

“Mud.”

There was mud. There were also forty-three carts, two frightened goats, an exhausted ferryman, and a woman arguing that her mother’s medicines should take precedence over wool. At the water’s edge, a man in a toll collector’s coat explained that priority passage could be arranged for an additional fee.

Thora waited until he finished speaking.

“Whose fee?”

He glanced at her, saw a young woman with river mud above her boot tops, and made an unfortunate decision.

“If you can’t pay, wait.”

She could have shown him her seal. She could have told him whose daughter she was. The satisfaction would have lasted perhaps a minute, and she would have learned very little afterward.

Instead she joined the queue.

By late afternoon, she knew the medicines belonged to a woman in Eastbank. The wool belonged to a merchant who paid the additional fee every week. The ferryman owned neither the ferry nor the rope that held it. Those belonged to the treasury, which paid him only for completed crossings.

She also learned that someone had been mending the ruined bridge.

From underneath.

“Old sluice passage,” the ferryman said. “Runs through the eastern pier. The stoneworkers get in from the far bank. Council says the foundations won’t take a new span until they’ve looked at them.”

“Have they?”

He nodded upstream. “Ask Sella. She’s the one who keeps telling them.”

Sella was sitting on an overturned boat with a measuring rod across her knees. Her hair had gone white in a stripe above one ear. Thora recognized her immediately.

She had been silent throughout the governor’s meeting.

“You had something to say,” Thora told her.

“I had something written. Three copies. They went to three offices.”

“And?”

“They’ve become very well traveled.”

Thora smiled despite herself. Ignatius would have understood the matter at once.

Sella’s report described a flood channel above the town. Once, before the upper mill had expanded, spring water had spread through reed beds and returned to the river gradually. A new embankment now forced it all toward Bellwater. Repairing the bridge without opening the channel would simply provide the next flood with fresh timber.

“Why hasn’t the mill agreed?”

Sella tapped the report. “The old channel crosses its drying yard.”

“And the governor?”

“His brother owns the mill.”

There it was: the sort of answer that made a meeting seem easier than it really was. Thora could already imagine herself carrying it triumphantly back to Meret.

Then Sella added, “Forty families work there. Don’t arrive with a clever speech about dishonest men unless you’ve somewhere for the wool to dry.”

Thora shut her mouth.

That evening, she wrote to Ignatius. She asked about raised drying floors, temporary ferries, and the method by which he had once forced eight people to acknowledge a leaking roof.

At the bottom she added: You may enjoy this. I have found a city where rain has become someone else’s responsibility.

Then she opened another sheet for her parents.

The bread has fennel in it. There is a woman who cooks fish better than anyone in Concordia, though please do not tell the kitchen I said so. My window looks east. I can see the mountain road if I lean out far enough, which I do not, since I know exactly what you will say.

She paused before continuing.

I made a meeting worse today. I think I can still make the work better.

She left that sentence in.

In the morning, rain reached the mountains.

By noon, Sella was knocking at the embassy door.

“The survey crew is still under the eastern pier,” she said. “The water’s rising too quickly for the ferry.”

Meret was already reaching for her cloak. “How many?”

“Three. And the apprentice who brought their food.”

Thora saw the river through the same window from which she had noticed the bridge. It had climbed past yesterday’s stain on the stone.

For one foolish instant she wanted her sister.

Seraphina would have brought light and certainty into the room. Ignatius would have seen forces Thora could not see. Thor could have crossed the river in a way that made the distance irrelevant.

None of them was here.

Sella held a rolled survey in one hand. Thora took the other end and cleared the breakfast things from the table.

“Show me the passage.”

The public entrance was already submerged. The older maintenance shaft opened inside the mill’s lower storehouse, above the flood line, but a jammed iron door separated it from the pier.

“Who has the key?” Meret asked.

“The mill steward.”

“Then I’ll speak to him.”

“He won’t open his stores without an order.”

Meret fastened her cloak. “I have spent forty years asking men to open doors. Go.”

Thora ran with Sella.

At the mill they found Nessa organizing men who had abandoned the ferry queue. The medicine buyer had brought rope. The wool merchant had brought nobody, but he had surrendered a wagon when Nessa asked whether he intended to watch four people drown from the comfort of its seat.

Meret arrived with the steward and a key.

They opened the storehouse.

Thora smelled wet grain, lamp oil, and the mineral cold of water moving beneath stone. At the bottom of the maintenance steps, the iron door stood crooked in its frame. Its handle turned. Its latch did not lift.

She crouched.

“I can break the hinges,” said one of the carters.

Sella looked at the wall. “You might bring the lintel down.”

“Then the lock.”

“It’s open,” Thora said.

They looked at her.

She worked the handle again and felt the slight movement inside it. The door had settled downward, pinning the latch against its socket. She had met the same arrangement years ago in a cupboard Seraphina had forbidden her to investigate.

That cupboard had contained sewing baskets.

This one contained four lives.

“Lift it while I turn.”

The carter pushed. Iron scraped stone. The handle moved another fraction.

“More.”

“I am lifting.”

Thora reached into her satchel for the small wrapped tool Ignatius had given her when she left home. A folding knife, a narrow awl, and a little flat blade for screws. She had written to thank him for it. She had never told him that it was the only gift she took everywhere.

She slid the flat blade under the latch.

Something yielded.

The door opened inward, and dark water slapped across her boots.

They tied the rope above the steps. Sella went first because she knew the passage. Thora followed because someone had to carry the second lamp, and because her hands were shaking too much to stand still.

The passage turned twice. Water pulled at their calves. Beneath its rush, someone was knocking.

“We hear you!” Thora called.

The knocking stopped.

“Four of us!” a voice answered.

“We know. Keep talking.”

The apprentice had hurt his ankle. One of the stoneworkers had been holding him above the water for long enough that she could no longer straighten her arms. The oldest man refused to move until someone took his survey case.

Thora took it.

“Now you.”

They came out one at a time along the rope. The apprentice cried when he reached the steps and then apologized for it. Nessa wrapped him in a wool blanket of disputed ownership and told him to save his breath for complaining about the weather.

Thora emerged last behind Sella. She was wet to the waist. Her notebook had swollen inside her coat. Her excellent embassy boots made a sucking noise at every step.

Meret looked her over.

“Anything broken?”

“My dignity.”

“It needed airing.”

The governor arrived as they were serving hot soup in his brother’s storehouse.

Thora stood to meet him. The sharp speech rose easily. She had earned it, surely. Everyone could see what his delay had cost.

Behind him, the mill workers waited, watching their employer’s face.

She remembered Sella’s forty families.

“We need a dry room for the next meeting,” she said. “And the mill steward, the ferry workers, Sella, and representatives from Eastbank.”

The governor began an explanation.

“Tomorrow,” Meret said. “At nine.”

It took twelve more days.

The new channel crossed the drying yard, but the replacement drying floor stood on supports above it. Ignatius’s reply included two drawings and a question about how quickly the local carpenters could obtain straight timber. Thora took the drawings to those carpenters before presenting them to the council. They corrected one measurement and improved another.

The ferry acquired a second crew, published fares, and a covered waiting place. The bridge accounts were rewritten to say ferry. A bridge would follow when its foundations were ready.

At the signing, the governor made a speech about cooperation.

This time, Thora listened to all of it.

When the embassy finally left Bellwater, Nessa packed lunch for the road. Sella gave Thora a corrected map. Across the place where the handsome painted bridge had stood, she had written: Not yet.

Thora laughed.

“An unusually honest map.”

“Try to keep it that way.”

On the first night south of the town, Thora finished her letter by lamplight. There was soup on the corner. She identified the stain for her father’s benefit.

I was frightened in the passage, she wrote. I knew what to do about the door, and I was frightened anyway. I thought those things would be less possible together.

Outside, Meret was arguing with a mule driver about the road ahead. Someone laughed. The evening smelled of onions, wet earth, and the unfamiliar blossoms growing beside the inn.

Thora looked at Sella’s map, then at the blank page beyond her letter.

There would be another town tomorrow.

She wanted to see it.