Corin of Northreach was not a wicked man.
That was the first thing to understand about him, because wicked men are simple and Corin was not.
He was a man who had looked at the Marches — the long white emptiness between the kingdom’s end and the wilderness’s beginning — and seen not desolation but a margin.
Margins, he liked to say, were where the real money lived.
The crown taxed the cities; the cities fed the court; and the Marches, too cold for wheat and too far for law, fed nobody but the men brave or greedy enough to carry salt across them.
Corin had been both.
By the age of forty he owned the ferries, the way-stations, the winter stables, and the contracts of every drover who would haul a sack through snow.
He did not own the salt mines — the crown owned those, in its muddled, forgetful way — but he owned the only road the salt could travel, and in the north, the road is the mine.
He was also, by every account Old Stone could gather in a day, the only man in Northreach who had gained weight during the famine.
“Not fat,” Old Stone reported, with the disapproval of a man who had counted calories for seventy years.
“Prosperous. There’s a difference, my lady, though it sits in the same places.”
“It usually does,” I said.
We were in the counting room, which was not a room at all but a corner of the governor’s hall that Old Stone had claimed by force of ledger.
The walls were papered with tallies: grain in, grain out, rations issued, rations redeemed, the six kitchen lines, the three wells, the bathhouse fires, the wall crews, the smithy coals.
Every mouthful of Northreach had to pass through this corner before it passed through anyone’s lips, and Old Stone guarded it the way a miser guards a strongbox — except that his strongbox was numbers, and numbers cannot be stolen by anything but a pencil.
“His warehouse,” I said.
“The one on the north row. You looked at the roof?”
“I looked at the roof.” Old Stone’s mouth tightened.
“It’s been patched twice with reed thatch and once with a prayer. The north slope sags. When the thaw comes — and it will come, my lady, the geese are already restless — the melt will find the gap and run straight down onto his stacks.”
“How straight?”
“Straight enough to weep.”
I smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
Old Stone, who had spent a lifetime recognizing the expressions that preceded important financial decisions, wrote something down without being asked.
“Salt,” I said, “is a proud commodity. It will outlast kings, priests, and most marriages. But it has one weakness. Water. Just a little. Just enough to make it sweat, then cake, then weep, then rot the sack from the inside. A man who has built his throne on salt should build his roof better.”
“Shall I send a carpenter?” Old Stone asked, deadpan.
“We are not his charity. We are his weather report.” I stood and reached for my cloak.
“When Corin comes again — and he will come, because a man like Corin does not make a last offer — I want him to find me elsewhere. Tell him I’m inspecting the east field.”
“And if he asks what you’re doing after dark in a frozen field?”
“Tell him I’m praying for black earth.”
Old Stone’s pen paused.
“Will that frighten him, my lady?”
“It will confuse him,” I said.
“Confusion is cheaper than fright, and it lasts longer.”
I went out by the kitchen door, because the front door was for people who wanted to be seen leaving, and I had never been one of those.
* * *
Cassian was in the yard, buckling on his sword-belt with the absent efficiency of a man who had been dressing for war since he was fourteen.
The morning was grey and still, the kind of morning that holds its breath before snow, and the torches along the gate had not yet been doused.
“You’re awake early for a man who was on the north wall until third bell,” I said.
“I’m awake early for a man who was supposed to be on the north wall until third bell.” He finished the buckle and looked up.
“Garrick relieved me. He said I was making the sentries nervous.”
“Were you?”
“I was asking questions. Garrick considers questions on watch duty a form of insubordination.” He came down the steps, favoring the leg that the cold always found first.
“Where are you going?”
“To look at a roof.”
“A roof.”
“A very expensive roof. The kind of roof that decides who eats next winter.” I pulled my hood up.
“You?”
“North gate drills. Brand’s trying to teach the new men to stand in a line without apologizing to each other.” He stopped beside me, close enough that I could smell the cold on his cloak and the faint iron of the oil he used on his sword.
“Evelyn.”
“Mm?”
“The salt merchant. Don’t play with him too long.”
“I’m not playing.”
“Good.” He reached out and straightened the collar of my cloak where the wind had twisted it — a small, soldier’s gesture, gone before I could decide what to do with it.
“Men like Corin don’t break when you beat them. They break when you prove they were never as necessary as they thought. That takes patience. I know you have it. I just don’t want you to enjoy it too much.”
“I enjoy bookkeeping,” I said.
“Corin is a line item.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
“I’ll see you at the map tonight.”
“Will there be two lamps?”
“There will be two lamps,” he said, and went out into the yard toward the gate, leaving me with a collar that sat straight and a pulse that sat less straight than I would have preferred.
* * *
I did not go straight to the roof.
A woman who hurries to a rooftop is a woman with an audience, and I wanted Corin to believe, for at least a few more hours, that his warehouse was the last thing on my mind.
So I walked the east field first.
It was worse than I remembered, and I had not remembered it fondly.
Three hundred acres of frost-locked soil, grey as old bread, scattered with stones that the plows of better years had given up trying to move.
The wind came off the Marches and scraped across it without finding anything to love.
Somewhere under that stone and ice, I was going to make wheat grow.
The idea sounded, in daylight, like the kind of promise a woman makes when she has had too little sleep and too much ambition.
But I had a haystack.
I had a well that was more than a well.
And I had seven days.
I walked the field’s long edge until my boots were numb, until any watcher Corin might have posted would report that I had indeed been praying for black earth, or pacing like a madwoman, or both.
Then I doubled back through the wool-dyers’ lane, climbed the outside stair of a boarded-up chandler’s shop, and stepped onto the roof that faced Corin’s warehouse across a narrow canyon of frozen mud.
The roof was not good.
It sagged in the middle and smelled of birdlime.
But it had a view.
Corin’s warehouse was a squat stone fortress with a timber upper floor and a roof that Old Stone had described with diplomatic understatement.
Even from here I could see the dark line of the sag, the patch of thatch that hung too low, the place where the melt would gather and drip.
The warehouse door was barred with iron.
The windows were slitted.
Two men with cudgels stood outside, looking bored and well-fed.
I sat on the ridge of the chandler’s roof with my cloak tucked around me, and I looked at Corin’s salt, and I thought about my own.
The storehouse had an aisle of salt.
I do not mean a shelf.
I do not mean a corner.
I mean an aisle — a corridor between racks of white blocks that ran away into the sunless light, farther than any salt road in the Marches, farther than Corin had ever walked in his greedy life.
Some of it was fine table salt, some was rock salt from the old southern mines, some was pink and grey and threaded with minerals I did not have names for.
There was enough salt in that aisle to preserve every fish in the northern sea, every cabbage in the kingdom, and every lie Edric had ever told me, with enough left over to make the snow taste of the sea.
I had not put it there.
I did not know who had.
The storehouse was full of things nobody had put anywhere, full in the way that memory is full — inexhaustible, unordered, and occasionally embarrassing.
But I had learned to use what it gave me.
Corin believed he was the only shop in town.
He was about to discover that the town had a much bigger shop, and that it did not haggle.
I stood, brushed the birdlime from my cloak with more resignation than disgust, and looked once more at the sagging roof.
When the thaw came, the melt would find the gap.
When the melt found the gap, Corin’s salt would begin to weep.
And while Corin was busy weeping over his salt, I would open my granary and let the city drink the sea.
Below me, the warehouse door opened.
Corin came out, wrapped in a fur that had cost more than a peasant’s farm, and spoke to one of the cudgel-men.
He was smiling.
He had reason to smile.
He had the only salt in the Marches, a roof that had not yet failed, and a woman in the governor’s house who had not, as far as he knew, moved against him.
He looked up.
I did not duck.
Ducking is for amateurs.
I simply stood there on the ruined roof, a woman in a grey cloak, looking at his warehouse as though it were any other building, any other pile of stones in a city full of stones.
Our eyes met across the frozen air.
He frowned, trying to place me.
I gave him the smallest nod — a neighbor acknowledging a neighbor — and turned away and went down the stairs.
By the time he realized who I had been, I was already gone.
But he would remember the nod.
Men like Corin remember everything that does not fit.
And that night, when he lay in his expensive bed listening to the snow settle on his not-quite-sound roof, he would remember a woman on a rooftop who had looked at his warehouse the way a farmer looks at a field.
As though it were already hers.