A Letter to Oru, and a Debt I Cannot Enter

Beniamin —

The Kael Dorn caravan came through the passes twelve days ahead of the season’s usual opening, which either means an unusually mild Thawmonth in the mountains or a house up there that has stopped waiting for permission from the weather. Forty sacks of grain, second-cut wool, three bales of marten pelts in better condition than what reached us last Frostmonth. I priced the grain against the Harvestmonth rate from two seasons back — a mark and four drams the sack, which their House of Records would call generous and I would call fair, the difference between those two words being most of what separates their administration from ours. Corvus would enter this caravan under a date and a weight and stop there. I have entered it that way too. It is the honest entry.

What I have not entered, in any column, is the following.

There is a story circulating that I walked into the Bazaar and asked a woman named Roya what her mountain-yellow was worth before it had decided what it was. I did not walk in that day. I have visited her table four times since and written nothing about any of them. Corvus has filed the story under a heading — third-party, unconfirmed — as though the label settles something. It settles the provenance. It does not settle the debt.

You will tell me, rightly, that a factor who cannot price a thing should say so and move to the next line. I have tried. The instruments I have used in seventeen cities — comparison, precedent, the plain arithmetic of what a color costs against what it might become — return nothing. Roya says the yellow is not yet itself. I find I believe her more than I believe my own ledger, which is not a sentence I expected to write to you, or to anyone.

Send word when the copper moves. I will have an answer on the grain within the week, and none, yet, on the other thing.

— M.