Rebecca was counting coin when Orinna knocked, three stacks of silver already sorted by size on the desk in front of her, a habit her father the merchant had drilled into her before she was old enough to understand what any of it bought.
Count twice.
Trust no total you haven’t checked with your own hands.
Her fingers moved through the coins, each one familiar against her callused palm.
She didn’t look up.
“Come.” Orinna came in already talking, which told Rebecca everything she needed to know about how this visit would go before a single useful word arrived.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Rebecca’s hands kept moving.
“Forgive me for coming to you like this, my lady, but I don’t know what to believe anymore, and it’s making me sick over it.” Orinna’s hands twisted the edge of her shawl into a rope and back out again.
“The young miss told me herself she’d already given my wages to my son.
Three months at once, since I was too ill to come collect them myself.
Only my son swears he never received a copper from her, and that she sent him away and is telling this house a story to make herself look generous while she keeps the coin.” Rebecca’s hand stopped on a coin.
She held it a moment, weighing it in her hand, then set it down.
“Sit.” Orinna sat.
“Tell me exactly what the young miss said to you.
Word for word, if you can manage it.” “She said my son came to her rooms three days past, my lady, and told her I’d taken ill and needed the money for medicine.
She said she handed it to him then and there so I wouldn’t need to make the trip myself once I’d recovered.” Orinna’s chin came up a fraction, some of her nerve returning now that she had a task instead of a grievance.
“I’ve not been ill a single day this month.
I never sent him with any such story.” “And your son’s account?” “That he went to ask, just as she describes it, but that she refused him outright and sent him off with nothing.” Orinna pressed her lips into a thin line.
“He swears she’s the one lying now, dressing up a refusal as a kindness so no one questions where the coin went.” Rebecca picked up a coin from the stack in front of her, turned it over between two fingers, and set it back down.
“And which of them do you believe?” “I want to believe my son, my lady.
He’s my own blood.” Orinna’s hands settled at last, folding flat in her lap.
“But he’s sworn to me before that debts were paid when they weren’t, that he’d stopped drinking when he hadn’t, that a man he owed money to had forgiven the whole sum out of kindness.
A man who’s lied about smaller things doesn’t earn easy belief on a larger one, even when he swears this time is different.” “There’s your answer, then,” Rebecca said.
Her hand found another coin, weighed it, set it aside.
“Not because the young miss has earned your trust outright, but because your son spent his a long time ago and hasn’t found a way to buy it back.” It wasn’t kindness that made Rebecca say it, and she didn’t pretend otherwise to herself once Orinna’s back was turned.
A servant who trusted the house over her own blood was a servant who came here first with every worry, every rumor, every small thing that didn’t sit right, long before she’d take it anywhere else.
Whether the young miss had told the truth about those wages mattered far less to Rebecca than the fact that Orinna now had one more reason to walk through this door instead of any other.
She counted two more coins while the memory surfaced.
Orinna had been Loretta Hawthorne’s hire, not hers — placed in the North courtyard when Seren was small enough to need a nanny and kept on long after the need had passed, because Loretta trusted her and Loretta trusted freely, especially in the people she left behind when she and Harlan traveled.
The name had gone into Rebecca’s accounting long before she’d had a use for it.
Then the boy’s debts reached the kind of men who collected in blood instead of coin, and Orinna had come to the South courtyard with nowhere else to go.
It had been eleven years since Rebecca first put money into Orinna’s hand.
Rebecca remembered the exact sum.
She remembered the look on the woman’s face when she understood what the money would cost her going forward—the way her hands had shaken, the way she’d swallowed and agreed anyway.
She remembered the speed with which she’d said yes, because a mother with a drowning son doesn’t spend long negotiating the price of a rope.
The boy had cost his mother a small fortune since then, in debts paid off without a word to anyone and favors called in with men who didn’t forget a name.
Rebecca’s thumb pressed into the edge of a coin.
It hadn’t been personal then and it wasn’t personal now.
Orinna was a line item that paid dividends in information, one more placement among a dozen Rebecca had spent a decade working into this house’s walls.
She set the coin back in its stack and smoothed the edge of it with her thumb.
“Go home,” Rebecca said.
“Don’t argue with him over it, and don’t go back to Seren asking her to prove herself twice.
Just watch him.
A man who lies about a mother’s wages will lie about worse before the season’s out, and I’d rather hear about it from you first.” “And the young miss, my lady?” “The young miss isn’t your problem tonight.” Rebecca almost let it stop there.
Almost.
She set down the coin she’d been holding and looked at Orinna directly.
“Though I’ll tell you, since you’ve earned an honest answer for once—she isn’t the girl I thought I understood a month ago, and your son’s little complaint isn’t why.” Orinna left the way she’d arrived, edges frayed, gratitude doing most of the work that fear should have been doing instead.
The door closed behind her.
She sat back with the coin, letting her mind go where it had been trying to go since the news reached her three days ago.
She turned the coin over in her hand.
It was the same coin it had always been, but the picture it conjured wasn’t.
Seren Hawthorne had stepped into a circle against a Cass heir and walked out of it on her own two feet.
Dorian Cass hadn’t lost a duel in two years, not to anyone in the junior ranks, not to boys twice his size who trained twice as hard.
He’d certainly never lost to a girl the whole capital remembered pulling out of a river, soaked and screaming, three years running behind every other Hawthorne cousin in anything that mattered.
That girl flinched at raised voices.
That girl went straight to Eliza with her grievances and lost most of the arguments she started before she’d finished making them.
The version who’d walked into that circle hadn’t flinched at anything.
Rebecca held the coin and let that thought settle.
She’d heard three different accounts of the match by now, from three people who didn’t often agree, and all three landed on one word without meaning to.
Controlled.
Not lucky.
Not desperate.
Controlled, the way a girl only gets to be controlled once she’s stopped being afraid of losing.
A refused drunk asking for wages that weren’t his was nothing on its own.
Rebecca wouldn’t have looked at it twice a month ago.
She set the coin down and reached for another.
Set beside a Cass heir losing a fight he should have won in the first exchange, it stopped looking like nothing.
Her thumb found the edge of the new coin and pressed.
Sienna treated Seren like a girl who could be pushed into water and left there.
Yena was building her whole slow campaign in the junior hall on that identical outdated picture.
Neither of them had stood at the edge of that dueling ring and watched Dorian Cass hit the ground.
Rebecca had.
She hadn’t been there in person, but it had come through the accounts, through the word controlled landing in her chest like a stone she couldn’t cough up.
Rebecca went back to the coin.
Three stacks, sorted the way they always were, except now she counted each one twice, because a woman who’d missed a change this large in a girl she’d been watching for years had no business trusting she hadn’t missed something else besides.
Her fingers moved through the stacks.
The coins were the same weight they’d always been.
She didn’t know if that was a comfort or a warning.