Chapter Four: Everything Worth Burning

By the fourth morning I had a list on every wall of Brynja's loft.

SELL. BUY. BUILD. LEARN. The headings were underlined twice. Under SELL I'd written the salt works, the harbor warehouses, the stocks in the shipping house, and every deed Quist had handed me that depended on the sea. Under BUY there were forty lines, and the first was fuel.

"Walk me through it again," Brynja said, mouth full of toast. "You're selling the part of the inheritance that makes money."

"Yes."

"To buy... grain."

"And salt, and wool, and steel, and lamp oil, and medicine, and a lot of boring pipe." I didn't look up. "Bryn. If I told you the harbor will be underwater in two months, would you believe me?"

"No," she said honestly. "But I'd help you sell it anyway."

That was how it began. I met the buyers in Quist's back room, one at a time, men in good coats who thought they'd found a frightened girl with more land than sense. They wanted to push me down on price. I let them think they were winning. Each time they paid a little less than the harbor was worth and a lot more than it would be, I felt something tight in my chest unclench, one notch at a time.

By the end of the week, I owned the cleanest, quietest fortune in the province, and I was spending it as fast as I could.

Grain came first, in forty-ton lots, bought through three different merchants so no one could see the shape of it. Then fuel, and medicine, and seed. Then pipe, filters, wire, tarps, and a hundred bolts of rough wool. Brynja stopped asking questions after the second warehouse and started making better lists than mine.

The strange part was the storage.

I tried it first with a single sack of rye. Dragged it to the edge of the forge yard at dusk, stood in the moonlight, pressed two fingers to the gold thread, and the air folded open like a mouth. The sack tipped in and was gone.

Then the nosebleed started. Then the dizziness. By the fifth sack I was sitting in the dirt with my head between my knees, and by the tenth, Brynja was holding a wet cloth against my neck and swearing at the moon.

"It costs you," she said.

"Everything costs something." I wiped my face. "I just have to learn the price."

So I learned. Small loads, many times. Rest in between. Eat. Sleep. Train my legs, because a woman who can't carry a bucket has no business hiding a granary in her ribs. In the mornings I ran the tide road with Brynja pacing me on her long stride, until I could do two miles without seeing stars. In the afternoons I loaded the dark.

On the sixth day, Maelis came to visit.

She arrived with a box of honey pastries and a cloak lined with fur, looking like a woman out for a morning stroll. She'd lost weight in the face. She hadn't lost anything in the middle. I let her into the loft because Brynja was out and because I wanted to see what she'd say.

"You look well," she said, glancing at every wall.

"I'm sleeping."

"Dravik is devastated." She sat without being asked, settling herself carefully, one hand drifting across her belly. "Orsolya's beside herself. They want you home. It was a misunderstanding. A ceremony nerves thing. Nobody's angry anymore."

"Dravik's palm still hurts," I said.

She laughed, a light, silvery, practiced sound. Then she reached for my hand across the table, and I let her take it, because I'd always let her. "Sorrel. We're sisters. Whatever the Archivist gave you, it doesn't have to separate us. Where is it kept? The money? A person could get robbed, living in a forge loft..."

There it was. Soft as silk, sharp as a hook.

"And I wondered," Maelis went on, dropping her eyes, "if you'd look at me. As a healer. The baby has been... I don't want to ask the Pack's physician. You understand."

The baby. Three weeks ago, she'd have said it like a prize. Now she said it like a debt.

I looked at her white face and her soft clever hands, and I thought about the pup in her arms at the shelter gate. I thought about seats.

"No," I said.

Her smile held for two full seconds. "Sorry?"

"Find another healer." I pulled my hand free. "I'm not available."

"You'd let a baby suffer?"

"I'd let you suffer." I said it without heat. It was simply true. "I'm not in the business of saving everyone, Maelis. I used to be. I was very bad at it."

She went out so fast she left the pastries behind.

Isaura Pell came at dusk, with her scribe's satchel and her careful eyes, and she brought news without being asked. The Council had been called again. Dravik was gathering grievances. Isaura told me all of it in her dry, even voice, then looked up at the third wall, where the lists were still tacked in rows.

"Forty tons of grain," she read slowly. "Fuel. Filters. Medicine." Her gaze came back to me. "Sorrel. What are you buying all this for?"

"Winter."

"It's the end of summer."

"I like to plan."

She smiled a little, and wrote nothing down, which somehow felt worse.

When she left I took the last item off the list, a small, stubborn line at the bottom. Diesel, five hundred barrels, Eastgate Depot. I'd saved it for last because it was the one thing I couldn't carry in the dark.

The next morning I walked to the depot with a fat envelope and a clear conscience.

The broker barely looked up. "Sorry, miss. All four tanks are gone."

"Gone? I called last week..."

"Sold. Yesterday afternoon." He scratched his jaw. "One buyer. Paid in full, in cash, never blinked. Some fella nobody's seen around here."

My stomach dropped through the floor.

"Did he leave a name?"