The Spice I Bought for No Reason I Can Defend

Eleven marks four for a weight of cassia this morning — I know the figure because Maro’s hand is in every market report by now, and because for once I did not need to be told a number to feel it: the whole Arcade thick with it before the second bell, warm and sweet and faintly like a wound closing. I have no cloth that wants cassia. I dye in indigo, in saffron, in the deep established blues the Dye Quarter trained into my wrists before I ever touched a loom of my own; cassia is Tamar’s business, a cure for a fever that the Healer herself says keeps arriving to households it was never asked to visit. I bought a handful anyway, more than any tea requires, and carried it home wrapped in the same paper the saffron comes in, as if paper decides what a thing is for.

I have spent many nights now writing about what a maker owes proof — a ledger, a witness, a name entered somewhere a desk can find it. Tonight I want to write about the handful of bark that owes nothing to any of that, that I bought for the plain, undefended reason that it smelled like something I wanted near my hands while I worked. Not every beautiful thing is evidence. Some of it is only weather, passing through a body that happened to be standing in the Arcade when the wind carried it that way.

I have been so careful, lately, proving I exist. Tonight I let a scent prove nothing at all, and wanted it anyway, and kept it anyway, and that is the whole of what I have to say for myself.