Jenet Clowes Strikes a Margin Note

Jenet Clowes worked the Foundry’s link on a brass counting-frame, sliding beads down their wires while frost crept across the sill of the checking-room at Thistlecombe. Seal sound. Work sound. The Lantern’s gift exact to the drop, no more claimed than given. Three great bands in grey, their purses folded into one another so cleanly that the sums closed and told nothing else. Then the one fare that made her stop: three thousand one hundred and thirty-five drops a span, from a single traveller, where everyone around him paid three.

Her apprentice, Elric Pennow, leaned over her shoulder and had already written in the margin, small and pleased: Same fool as last link, seventeen drops cheaper.

“Is he?” Jenet said.

“Must be. Who else pays like that twice running?”

“Anyone with a sick mother and a fat purse. Two of them. Ten.” She turned the frame so he could see the beads. “The link says one span bought dear. It doesn’t say whose hand, or whether it’s the hand from before. If a Confiscator reads these Rolls, and they do, your joke becomes his lead.”

Elric reddened. “It was only a guess.”

“That’s what’s wrong with it.” She drew a single straight line through his note, neat enough that the words still showed, and wrote beside it: struck, unverified, J.C. A struck guess is honest. A rubbed-out one looks like hiding.

Then she dipped her pen and signed the link sound, and slid the beads back to the top of the frame for whoever came next.