The Keeper's Share

Chapter One: Saltcomb Quay

The morning fog on Saltcomb Quay smelled of fish scales and hot bronze, and Justine Lemaire had her needle in a dead man's year.

She knew it was a man before she knew anything else. The thread told her in the way thread always told her — not in words at first, but in a sort of pressure under the pads of her fingers, a hum with a shape to it. This one hummed low and tired. A dockhand, she thought. Something in the rhythm of it, the way it went slack and then tightened, like a man hauling rope all day and sleeping badly.

The lace itself was a cheap collar-piece, three fingers wide, sold to a woman who had no business buying it.

"It's pretty," the woman said. She was maybe forty, with a raw red patch on her throat and a widow's black scarf gone grey from washing. "The seller said it was pretty and it would take the pain from my knees."

"It is pretty," Justine said.

She turned the collar over. In good light, hourlace looked like nothing else in the world: not white, not silver, but faintly warm, as if the thread remembered being alive. Good lace had a shine that moved when you moved. This collar had a shine that stayed put, and along the inner edge, where a thumb would rub it, the fibers had gone the colour of weak tea.

"How much did you pay?"

"Two soldi and my copper pan."

Justine set the collar down on her worktable, on the square of grey felt she kept for exactly this. "Then you paid two soldi and a pan for four months of somebody's misery. It's soured. Look here where it's yellowed. Feel it — go on, it won't bite you, not yet."

The widow touched the lace and pulled her hand back. "It's cold."

"It's cold because it's rotting. Somebody spun a year out of a man who didn't want to give it." Justine heard the hum again as she said it, and this time the shape of it was clearer, and worse: not tired, but frightened. Held down. Someone had held that dockhand down. "Wear it against your skin and it will take from you instead of giving. Slowly. Your knees will go first because your knees are already weak. Then your teeth."

The widow's face did the thing Justine had watched a hundred faces do on this quay. First the disbelief, because disbelief is cheaper than grief. Then the arithmetic of a pan and two soldi. Then the flat, closed look of someone who has decided the mender is only trying to sell her something better.

"You're saying it because you want me to buy your lace," the widow said.

"I don't sell lace. I mend it." Justine pushed the collar across the felt. "Take it to the Weir steps and give it to the tide-wardens. They burn soured stock. They'll give you a token for it, maybe a half-soldo. That's all it's worth and it's more than it's worth."

The widow took the collar. She looked at it a long moment with a kind of hunger that made Justine's chest hurt, and then she folded it into her sleeve and walked off into the fog toward the low market, where a man with a barrow would tell her it was the finest Weir remnant, salvaged, a bargain, and her knees would be fine.

Justine sat down on her stool and picked up her real work.

Saltcomb Quay ran along the north lip of the Rope Quarter, where the bronze pilings came up out of the silt green as old coins. Anvezza had a hundred quays and this was not one of the good ones. On the good quays — Netmenders' Bridge, the Lamp Walk, the long marble shelf under the Council House — hourlace was sold by weight and by ledger, with a warden's seal stamped in soft wax at the corner of every bolt, and the buyers were bankers and shipwrights and the very old rich. Here on Saltcomb they sold offcuts, remnants, sweepings, spoiled bolts recut into collars, and the deep bottom trade: lace nobody would name, spun from years nobody had surrendered.

Justine mended for whoever paid. Torn cuffs. Frayed edges. Bridal veils gone brittle. Sometimes a widow's mourning band, which was a sentimental thing, since a mourning band held no years at all and was only silk dyed grey.

She worked fast, and she worked well, and she worked with her whole hands, which was the part nobody could copy. Other menders judged hourlace by eye. Justine judged it by the humming. A thread of clean-given years hummed like someone singing in another room, half heard, content. A thread that had been taken hummed like a hand over a mouth.

Her mother had said, when Justine was seven and had just told a fishmonger's wife that her wedding shawl was crying: *Never say it out loud, sweetheart. Never in the street. There are people who own the years, and they pay dearly to keep them quiet.*

The fog lifted around ten. Across the water the city came out of it in layers: the low islands first, tarred roofs and drying nets, then the rope-bridges strung between them, swaying with hand-carts and children, then the bronze towers of the inner ring, and behind everything the pale hard line of the sea wall, which was not a wall at all but the top of the Weir, showing its teeth at low water.

Beyond that, six hundred yards out, the Slow Tide lay grey and flat and patient as a sheet of lead.

Justine did not look at it often. Nobody who lived did. It was simply there, the way death is there, except that death at least has the decency to stay abstract. The Slow Tide you could see from any window on the north side of the city. Grey water that did not drown. Every child in Anvezza had thrown a stick into it, and every child had watched the stick go silver, then white, then powder, in about the time it took to count to three.

Once, when Justine was eleven, a barge had slipped its cable in a squall and drifted eighteen feet past the fourth ring. She remembered the shouting more than the sight. When they hauled the cable back, they hauled back a rope with nothing on the end of it and a fine grey drift on the water like flour spilled on a floor.

That was what the Weir held out. That was what the years were for.

At noon a boy came along the quay with the upriver post, and Justine paid him her quarter-penny and unfolded a page of coarse paper covered in her sister's big square hand.

*Justine — the roof leaks over the bed again so I sleep at the foot and it is fine. Widow Coste says the rent goes up at Candles because of the flood tax. I told her you would pay it and she made a face but she always makes a face. I coughed only four times yesterday, which is my record. Do you remember the summer you taught me to swim off the pilings and I bit you? I have been telling everyone about it. Come at Candles if you can. Bring almonds. Your Marion.*

Justine read it twice. She read the part about the swimming three times, because it was her favourite thing in the world, that day, hot water and green weed and Marion's small furious face going under and coming up, and because she liked being reminded of things she already had.

Then she folded the letter into her apron and did the sums she did every week.

Rent at Thrale, two days upriver, in a fen room with a leaking roof: eleven soldi the month. The lung-tincture the fen physician sold, which did nothing but which Marion believed in: six. Bread, oil, peat: eight, if Marion was careful, and Marion was not careful. Justine's own room above the cooper's shop: five. Ferry fare when she could manage the trip: two, each way.

Her wages, on a good month: thirty-one.

Four years since their mother died. Four years of holding her sister's life together with a needle, and the arithmetic had never once come out with anything left over.

"You're pulling that face," said Nardo, who mended nets four stalls down and had been mending nets there since before Justine was born. "The face like you're chewing a stone."

"Rent's going up at Thrale."

"Rent's going up everywhere. Council's dredging again." He spat over the edge of the quay. "Four new islands, they say. Out past the Sunken Ward. They'll want more lace for that, and they'll get it out of us the way they always do."

"Where do you get four islands' worth of years?"

Nardo looked at her with the particular patience old men keep for young women who are pretending not to know things.

"Where they've always got it, girl. Same as they got yours."

He meant her mother, which he had no right to mean, so Justine bent her head over her work and said nothing.

At the far end of the quay, a warden was nailing up the notice for the Winter Audit: three days of open market at the Weir steps, every bolt in the city to be shown and inspected, all menders welcome to hire. It was the one week in the year when the great houses opened their chests, and the one week a quay mender could earn three months' wages if she was fast, and clean, and lucky.

Justine looked at the notice for a while.

Then she got up and went to sharpen her needles.