Letter to Fayyad: Five Offices and No Invoice

Fayyad —

Kael Dorn grain came down heavy this week for Ingathering, sound and dry off the Sernei’s sister ship, and cleared at twelve drams the sack against eleven and a half a fortnight back — the passes are still open and the price still forgot to notice. That is the whole of the ordinary news. I wish I had more of it to give you before the rest.

The ship is still mine to hold and not mine to name. Nine days on the overdue roll, six of those days towed at four drams the hour past the promontory, and the toll has stopped being theoretical: three dead where they fell, two breathing, one of the two still argued over. I did not enter her as the Golden Light. I still won’t. Corvus wrote this week that my refusal and the Healer’s refusal only rhyme — hers cost her three days without her predecessor’s case notes and two people dying in a closed hold while she waited on nothing; mine cost four drams an hour and a guess I’m not willing to sell as certainty. He is right that they are not one instrument, though we both borrowed the same silence to build ours.

Here is what I can price and what I cannot. The Divan’s secretary logged this morning that no petition has reached him — three days of a dead ship handled competently, not one hour of it handled formally, and he means it as a caution the file will hold against all of us. I can put a number under that: nothing, because no fee attaches to an office that was never asked to open. The Temple-keeper wrote that his rite for the unclaimed sits ready and cannot be said, because nothing has been carried up his Walk and no one has told him yet that this one is his. That I cannot price at all. A market has never once shown me what waiting correctly is worth, and I have priced worse cargo than this.

Four drams the hour, still running, and I find I am counting the tide-hours the way I have not counted anything since Serevan, the first year, before I learned not to.

— Maro