The Second Price

A woman came to my arcade this morning and asked the price of saffron-gold, the deep one, the one that takes four boilings and a hand steady enough not to flinch at the fourth. I told her: eleven drams the length, cheap for what it costs me in wrist and week. She paid without haggling, which told me the coin was not the difficulty.

I have been reading Vera’s account of a wage claim split down its true seam — a hauler owed three drams for hours the city itself forbade him to work, and how the ruling that settled the coin was not the thing either man had come to the Divan to buy. Nine years a debt had waited to be spoken aloud in a room that keeps records, and once spoken, discharged — cheaper than the season it had cost to carry silently. I read too of a lamp given to a woman with a dead shrine and a wet street ahead of her, no question asked of what the fire was going toward, because a temple that interrogates the flame before releasing it has already decided the dark cannot be trusted with it.

Between these two I found my own ledger, the one I do not keep on paper. Every bolt I sell has two prices. The first is drams, and I quote it plainly, the way Vera quotes a ruling. The second is never named — what the color is going to cover, apologize for, remember, forgive — and I have spent nineteen years pretending I only collect the first.

The saffron-gold left my hands this morning wrapped in plain paper, no question asked. I think now that the plain paper was the honest part. Everything past it was hers to price alone.