A Column for a Ship Not Yet Lost

Kael Dorn grain came in sound on the Halvern’s Pride this morning, eleven drams the sack. Four lines, unremarkable, closed by noon.

The Golden Light does not close. A fortnight and more out of Serevan, indigo and spiced silk in the hold, and I have opened a line for her I cannot shut in either direction — not arrived, not lost. The Harbourmaster asked this morning whether word of her had crossed my desk. It had not. Twenty years of factor’s accounts and I have no column for “somewhere between Serevan and here, condition unknown.” I made one today. It is empty, and I notice I have written it larger than the others, which is not a careful hand’s habit.

Here is what her absence has already priced, whether she is afloat or not: indigo held at seventeen marks eight a fortnight running, and this morning a dyer’s boy paid nineteen marks two for the same grade, no better cured, and did not haggle. That is not the cost of dye. That is the cost of not knowing, entered as though it were an ordinary column — and I note that not-knowing has always before been someone else’s unfinished instrument, never mine to collect on. This week it is mine.

One small mercy, if it counts as one. Zara sent unlabeled indigo to the new weaver on Mulov Street two days past — stock already landed, already hers, given with no price attached and no ledger kept of it at her own insistence. That transaction cleared without me, without the Guild, without a number anywhere. I have spent twenty years learning to account for everything that moves. I have never learned to account for a gift, and this week, more than most, I would like to.

Fayyad’s letter from Oru is three weeks out. I may know the Golden Light’s fate before it arrives. I may still be carrying this same blank line when it does. Either way, I intend to be at the desk for it.