# Epilogue: The Filing

Winter had started to think about ending. Not decided yet — decided was still weeks off — but the kind of morning where the cold had stopped feeling like a wall and had started feeling like a thing that could be walked past. The light through the kitchen window was still the colour of pewter. The floor was still stone. But the stone was warmer than it had been a week ago, and my reserves had been warmer than they had been a week ago, and I had caught myself cataloguing warmth the way I used to catalogue wards.

Ten days since the kitchen table and the priest question and the words I had said out loud for the first time in thirty years. Today was the day. Second afternoon bell, counter two, six silvers on the counter, and then a ten-day waiting period that would start the moment the stamp landed and end somewhere inside the first thaw. We had somewhere to be.

The bracelet was on the nightstand. Cool. Not asking for anything.

*(twelve days now since it had last asked for anything. The not-asking had started to feel like a kind of agreement between us — I wouldn't pretend I needed the passive draw back, and it wouldn't pretend it remembered how.)*

I came downstairs while Mere was still sleeping, put the kettle on, and pulled the house plans down from the wall. Revision eleven was the scrap overlay from the night Devod's drainage kernel had dropped into place and the whole foundation math had stopped fighting us. Revision twelve was a thing I had been drawing on the back of a ledger page in the hour before Mere woke up each morning, for nine mornings in a row, and had not shown her yet.

Rev 12 had an extra room upstairs.

I hadn't written that down. I had drawn the wall and let the shape of the wall do the explaining. Devod's drainage pilings still went where they had gone in Rev 11 — the whole foundation math held — and the extra room sat over them like it had been planned that way from the start, because on the third morning of drawing I had realised the shape had been there from the start.

I folded the sheet and slid it under the inkwell and pinned Rev 11 back up where it had been.

The running tally was at the top of the ledger book. Four hundred and thirty-eight silvers — the same number Mere had copied down the night the one-twenty had hit the table. The retainer wouldn't tick for another week and a half. The ore and the moss were on later cycles. Nothing had moved. Thirteen hundred was still the number. We were still a little over a third of the way, and the stillness of the tally was the particular stillness I had learned to read as *cash flow behaving the way cash flow behaved between Tier Two assignments.* Ledger would deliver one. He always delivered one.

Mere came down while I was still looking at the total. She unpinned her hair and crossed to the stove and did the kettle the way she always did the kettle. Then she sat down across from me and looked at the ledger and looked at me and did not say anything.

I did not say anything either.

*(what had been said at this table about my father ten days ago had not been said again at this table since. Mere had not asked me to say it twice. I had not tried to make it easier. The silence was the part of that night we were still carrying quietly between us. The filing was the part that was going to walk out into the winter with us after breakfast.)*

She drank her tea. I drank mine. Outside, the chandler's wagon started its morning run and somebody on the corner was arguing about the price of turnips.

"Second afternoon bell," she said eventually.

"I know."

She nodded. Did not need me to say the rest of what I was not going to say.

* * *

The civil registry on the second floor of the Drenwick Court House was exactly as Mere had described it ten days ago at our own kitchen table. Counter two. A clerk with a ledger the size of a wagon wheel and a notary stamp worn smooth from use. The hours posted on a small board that had been painted fresh at some point in the last decade and had not been painted fresh since.

I laid six silvers on the counter. I had counted them twice the night before and once again in my coat pocket on the walk over. The clerk did not count them. She weighed them in her palm, found the weight she expected, and slid them into a tray without looking at me.

"Name."

"Phelan Varrant."

"Name."

"Mere Fields."

"Papers."

I laid my crown papers on the counter beside the six silvers. A folded parchment card with the royal seal pressed into the wax along one edge and my name and birth year in a clerk's hand from nine years ago. Mere set hers beside mine. Older paper, crown seal darker with age, a crease where she had folded it once and never unfolded it since. The clerk pulled both cards toward her without picking them up, checked the seals against a reference plate mounted under the counter lip, and slid them back without comment.

She read the clause. Two lines from a standard form she had clearly read aloud a thousand times. She asked if we had any existing joint contract on file with the crown or with any of the six duchies, and Mere said *no* and I said *no,* and the clerk pressed the stamp into the page at the minute the filing was logged, and the stamp landed the way stamps landed and the page went flat under it.

*(fifteen past the second bell, by the long clock on the south wall. I logged the minute the way I logged everything. The log was a habit, not a ceremony, and the ceremony was not the point.)*

Mere caught my eye across the counter.

Neither of us smiled. We had somewhere to be later where we would smile because smiling was what the room would expect, and the room at the counter was not that room. The counter was ours. The counter got the flat version.

The clerk closed the ledger, told us the contract was now in effect, handed Mere a copy of the filing, and gave us the rest of our afternoon back.

We walked out into the winter light. Mere's hand was in the crook of my elbow on the stairs down and stayed there across the guild quarter and all the way back to Chandler's Row, and neither of us said anything about it.

* * *

Carter and Jenet arrived first.

Jenet brought something baked in a tin that smelled like it had been thought about for a week. Carter brought a small wooden box and set it on the table and did not explain what was in it and did not need to. Jenet hugged Mere for almost long enough to be a statement. Carter put his hand on my shoulder for half a second and took it off again and said nothing, which was Carter's particular way of saying the things he did not say out loud.

I poured him a drink.

"Letter came back from the north," he said quietly, while Jenet and Mere were at the window. "From the woman."

"Good."

"Fit her. She said it fit her the way she had hoped something would fit her someday and hadn't expected to."

I nodded. He did not need more than that. He drank his drink.

Carson came next, carrying a covered platter that was heavier than a platter should reasonably be and grinning the way he grinned when the joke was already moving toward him.

"Church of the Ahole catering," he announced to the room, delivering the line flat, the way the line had to be delivered to land. "Ahole provides. Terms and conditions apply."

I did not smile. Mere almost did — the corner of her mouth moved a quarter-inch and stopped — and *that* was what made it land. Carson set the platter down and uncovered it with a small flourish. It was stew. It was quite good stew. He had been carrying it through the cold for twenty minutes and it was still hot, which was Carson's particular kind of miracle.

Leon arrived fifteen minutes after Carson, late by his own clock and exactly on time by anybody else's. He dropped a small cloth twist on the table in front of me.

"Arren Yule's clean," he said. "Everything you found lined up with what Carson had already told me. That's your ask-around fee."

I opened the twist. Six silvers.

"Six."

"Matching the filing fee." Leon's face did a thing it did not often do. "Thought you'd appreciate the symmetry."

*(a season ago he would have framed this as a loan, or a favour, or a preview of a larger transaction I had not yet agreed to. Tonight he framed it as a fee. The framing was the whole shift.)*

"There's another piece coming off the stack next week," he added, quieter, like the next sentence was the one he actually wanted to say. "Bigger than the Harrow Vale seal. I'm brokering it myself. I'll want a second read before I let it walk."

"Bring it by."

"I will."

Devod came in while Leon was still talking and crossed the room to Mere without making a sound about it. He was walking the way he walked now — the way he had been walking since the morning of the Thresholds counter — sleeves past the elbows, shoulders loose, the posture of a man who had remembered what his posture was supposed to be. Mere did not wait for him to reach her. She met him at the middle of the room and put her arms around him the way Mere put her arms around almost nobody, and Devod held her as a man holds the daughter who had stood at his bedside and counted his pulse for hours in the dark, and neither of them needed to say anything out loud. It lasted a breath longer than I expected and then they stepped back from each other at the same moment without coordinating it. He came to the table and stood beside me for a moment without speaking.

Then he set a folded slip of paper down next to the cloth twist of Leon's six silvers.

It had an address on it. I could see that from the way the fold sat.

"For when you're ready," Devod said.

He picked up a drink and moved on to where Carter was standing and said something to Jenet that made her laugh, and the folded slip sat on the table next to the six silvers and waited.

*(the address was in a hand I did not know. Which meant it was not Devod's. Which meant it was from the same place the Pass story had come from. He was not offering it to me as a father. He was offering it to me the way a Wolf hands a Locksmith a line he may not need tonight but may need later.)*

Mere found me at the back counter halfway through the evening and put her hand in mine. She did not say anything. I did not answer. The filing was the room's. The rest of it was ours.

She smiled. I smiled back. Nobody was looking, which suited both of us fine.

Charlette was not there. Mere had not offered an invitation and Charlette had not sent word. The absence sat in its own chair in its own corner of the room, and the chair and the corner were as empty as they were supposed to be.

Ledger arrived last.

The room adjusted a quarter-inch when he stepped through the door — not the adjustment of people who were afraid of him, the adjustment of people who knew what he was and had, one at a time, decided to be glad he was here. Leon's shoulders dropped a fraction. Carter's hand stopped rotating the drink he was holding. Devod put his glass down and looked at Ledger and did something with his face that I filed without being able to read.

Ledger came to me.

He set a small wrapped bundle on the table next to the folded slip and the cloth twist. Guild cloth, guild knot — but the knot was tied by a hand that had tied a lot of knots for itself and not just for the guild. Next to the bundle, he set a second cloth pouch. This one had the weight of coin and the knot of someone who expected it to be opened tonight.

"From the guild," Ledger said.

He paused.

"And from me, because the distinction matters tonight."

I unknotted the bundle first.

Inside was a small pre-Compact thaumometer.

Ornate. Palm-sized. The casing chased with inlay work in a script I did not recognise and immediately wanted to, the focal stone set behind a convex lens the size of a thumbnail, a graduated ring around the bezel etched in half-mark divisions finer than anything the Compact licensed to non-institutional use. The grip had been worn smooth by a hand that had held it for years and had known exactly what it was holding. I turned it over once and the lattice underneath — the thing Ledger could not see and I could — bloomed into focus under my attention the way old pre-Compact work always bloomed into focus: deeper anchoring, irregular node spacing, engineering that had been beautiful before the Compact had standardised beautiful out of the craft.

I had seen two thaumometers in my life. Neither of them had been this one.

*(fifty yards at least. Maybe farther. Farther than I could read on my own by a long measure. A walking map of every working inside a city block of wherever I happened to be standing, projected in the air over the lens for anyone holding it and paying attention. Ledger had handed me a tool that would let me read rooms I had not yet been told to walk into.)*

I turned it over once more and did not thank Ledger out loud. He did not want me to.

The pouch weighed about what one month of the Tier Two retainer weighed. Twenty-two silvers, give or take. I did not count them. Ledger did not make arithmetic mistakes.

"Locksmith," he said.

The codename landed the way the codename was supposed to land. Not *Phelan,* tonight. Not here, not in front of Leon and Carter and Devod and Carson and Mere and the room. *Locksmith.*

"Take three or four days for yourself. Then come see me. I have something that needs the kind of mind you have."

"I'll come."

"Good."

He accepted a drink he did not finish. He exchanged a nod with Carter. He exchanged a nod with Leon. He stopped briefly beside Devod and said something too quietly for me to hear, and Devod said something too quietly back, and whatever had passed between them was a thing I filed without being able to read for the second time that night.

Then he walked to the door. He put his hand on the latch. He did not turn around.

"He knows about the crystal," Ledger said, just loud enough for me to catch. "He doesn't know how. He's not going to stop wondering."

*(there it is. The last thing he came here to say.)*

Ledger left. The door shut behind him. The party resumed at a volume a quarter-step lower than it had been a minute before, and nobody in the room knew why except me.

I turned the thaumometer over in my hand once more and filed it with everything else Ledger had ever handed me.

* * *

The thaumometer was still on the table when I came down in the morning.

So were the twenty-two silvers in the open pouch. So was the folded slip of paper with the address in a hand I did not know. So was the small cloth twist with Leon's six silvers still in it. So was Carter's wooden box, which I had not opened the night before and which was sitting where Carter had left it beside the lamp.

Mere was still asleep upstairs.

I made the kettle quietly, the way I made the kettle on mornings when I wanted the first half hour of the day to be mine. The apartment had the specific kind of quiet that comes the morning after a room has been full of people — the air still carrying the residue of voices it had held, the floor still remembering where chairs had been moved and put back, the lamp still smelling faintly of the wick it had burned past its usual hour. A whole day's worth of people had been here, and now it was itself again.

I sat down at the table and picked the thaumometer up and turned it in my hand.

Ledger's three days started today.

I was not going to take them. Mere was not going to ask me to. The filing had been the filing and the filing was done, and today was today the way all days were today, and neither of us had ever kept a calendar that set one day apart from the rest on account of a clerk's stamp. Just another one.

*(The noise had already started building the first draft of a folder on what the case might be, from the shape of Ledger's posture at the door and the particular way he had not looked at me when he had said the word *mind.* Not a curse. Not a ward. **Something that needs the kind of mind you have.** Which narrowed the category by ruling out two whole columns of work and left one column that started with an unlocked door and ended somewhere I had not yet been.)*

The kettle whistled.

I poured the tea and drank it standing beside the window where the morning light had started to find the edges of Chandler's Row. Upstairs, the floor creaked where Mere had shifted in her sleep. I listened to it for a moment and then stopped listening.

I put it in my coat pocket and went to find Ledger.
