They had one full day of work left and everybody knew it without anybody having said so, which Arthur found was how the ends of things usually announced themselves. Odell Crane let him into the drying loft. It was not a promotion so much as a negotiated settlement, reached after Arthur had lost the same argument three mornings running, and it meant turning grain with a wooden rake using one arm and his own body weight, which was slow and awkward and, crucially, work. He did it for four hours and came down with his shirt stuck to his back and a feeling in his chest entirely disproportionate to the size of the achievement.
ODL: That's the loft done.
ART: It took me four hours.
ODL: It takes me three and I've forty years on you and two working arms. Don't fish, lad, it doesn't suit you.
Roselle Crane and Briar Colton had been at the ledger table since six. They had been at the ledger table since six every day for four days, and Arthur had walked past them perhaps thirty times carrying things, and had never once seen either of them look up. Today there was a fifth book on the table. It was new, and it was thin, and Briar had bought it himself in the village on the second evening without telling anybody, which Arthur only learned afterward and only from Finn, who learned everything.
ROS: Read me the harvest intake again.
BRR: You've had the harvest intake four times.
ROS: I want it a fifth time, because if this table's wrong by half a percent then everything anybody does with it for the next twenty years is wrong by half a percent, and I would rather be tedious now than wrong for two decades.
BRR: That is the single most sensible thing anyone has said to me at this academy or outside it.
ROS: I'm not at your academy.
BRR: I'm aware. Read it back anyway, I've lost my place because you distracted me by being right.
Arthur sat down on a grain sack six feet away because his shoulder had begun to complain about the loft and because nobody had told him to be elsewhere. The problem, as far as he could follow it, was that the mill was paid by weight and the bakers paid by volume, and the ratio between the two was not one number but eleven, because it depended on the grain and on the grind and on how wet the season had been, and all eleven of those numbers lived in Odell Crane's head and nowhere else. Briar had spent four days getting them out of him. He had done it sideways, in pieces, asking about one specific cart at a time, because Odell could not answer the question directly and could answer every particular version of it instantly.
BRR: He knows all of it. Every single figure. He's simply never once had to say it out loud in a row.
ROS: I've asked him. For four years I've asked him.
BRR: I know. You asked him the whole question. Nobody can answer the whole question. I asked him about a cart.
Roselle put her pen down and looked at him for slightly too long.
ROS: Say that again.
BRR: You asked him the whole question.
ROS: Four years.
BRR: It's not a failing. It's a very ordinary mistake and I've made it constantly. It's simply that I've made it enough times to have noticed.
Corin came in at midday with flour to his elbows and stood at the end of the table without saying anything, which was, Arthur had learned, how Corin Ashby announced that he intended to say something.
COR: Miss Crane.
ROS: It's Roselle. You've carried my father's grain for five days, you can manage my name.
COR: Roselle. Why did you not go?
The room changed slightly. Briar's pen stopped. Arthur, six feet away on a grain sack, understood that he was about to hear something and that he had not been invited to and that leaving now would be considerably worse than staying.
ROS: Go where?
COR: You know where.
ROS: I want you to say it, because the way people ask that question tells you what they think the answer's going to be.
COR: Solmere. Or any of them. You are seventeen and you have run a four-book accounting system in your head for four years and you found the mistake in it before my friend did, you simply had no way to prove it. Why did you not go.
Roselle Crane sat back in her chair.
ROS: My mother died when I was thirteen.
She said it the way a person reads a figure off a page, and Arthur recognised the delivery immediately because he had heard Corin do exactly the same thing at this table on the first morning.
ROS: That's not the tragic part, so don't do the face. The tragic part is arithmetic. My father was fifty-four and the mill was four weeks behind and there was one other person in this house who could read a ledger. It wasn't a decision. Nobody sat me down. There was simply a thing that needed doing every day and I was the only one there, and then it had been four years.
COR: You could go now.
ROS: He's fifty-eight.
COR: That isn't old.
ROS: It isn't. He carries more than you do and we've all watched him do it. And in six years he'll be sixty-four and he'll still be carrying more than you do, right up until the morning he can't, and there won't be any warning about which morning that is.
She picked her pen back up.
ROS: I'm not being noble about it. I want that understood, because people get very moved by this and then I have to manage their feelings on top of everything else. I'd have gone. I'd have gone in a heartbeat and I'd have been good at it. I just wasn't ever going to be the person who wasn't here.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
BRR: That's the same reason.
ROS: What is?
BRR: The conversion table. It's the same reason. You're doing it now so nobody after you has to ask him, and you stayed then so nobody after you had to lose the mill. It's one habit. You've just never had it pointed at anything that wasn't urgent.
Roselle looked at the page rather than at him.
ROS: You're going to be insufferable when you're older.
BRR: I'm already insufferable. I'm merely small, so it reads as endearing.
They finished it at four. Eleven rows, each one a grain and a grind and a season, weight on the left and volume on the right, in Briar's handwriting because Roselle said hers was worse and Briar said that was demonstrably untrue and wrote it anyway. Underneath, in the same hand, three lines explaining how to work out a twelfth if a twelfth ever came up. Odell Crane was called in from the yard and stood looking at it with his hat in his hands.
ODL: That's it, then.
BRR: That's it.
ODL: All of it?
BRR: All eleven. Sir, I'd like to say something and I'd like to say it badly, because if I try to say it well I'll take too long and lose my nerve.
ODL: Go on.
BRR: You've been carrying all of that in your head since before your daughter could read, and it never once occurred to you to write it down, because a thing you can do is not a thing that feels like it needs writing. That's not a criticism. That's just what it's like to be good at something. But she's asked you for four years and you've said you know it and walked off, and you weren't refusing her. You genuinely could not find where in your own head it was kept.
Odell Crane turned the hat over once.
ODL: No. I couldn't. Roselle...
ROS: Da.
ODL: I'd have told you. If I'd have known how.
ROS: I know.
ODL: That's not the same as having told you.
ROS: No. It isn't.
She said it without any softening at all, and Arthur, watching from the grain sack, thought that it was probably the kindest thing available, and that it had cost her something to not make it easier. Odell nailed the table to the post beside the ledger desk himself. He took a long time over it and got it crooked and nobody mentioned that either. Briar came out into the yard afterward and sat down on the low wall next to Arthur and did not say anything for a while.
BRR: She told me my ability was enormously useful.
ART: It is.
BRR: Arthur, it's one second. On a good day it's two minutes and I get one of those an hour. I've had it explained to me by three separate instructors that it's a curiosity.
ART: And?
BRR: And she watched me use it for four days to do something that mattered and she never once called it a curiosity, and I've decided I'm going to keep her opinion instead of theirs.
He turned the small crystal over in his pocket. Arthur could hear him doing it.
BRR: We leave in two days.
ART: I know.
BRR: I've been sitting here trying to work out what I'm going to feel about that, and I've got nowhere, and I think that's because I've never in my life left somewhere that I'd been useful in.
The mill wheel turned in the beck. Inside, somebody laughed at something, and it was Roselle, and neither of them commented on it.