He did the sums on the fourth day, which meant he had lasted three, and he did them properly because doing them improperly would have been a way of not doing them at all. He did them on the back of a page of notation in the room he had shared with his brothers for fourteen years, with the door shut, at an hour when everybody else was out, and he did them the way he did everything, which was in columns. The first column was what it was worth. That one was harder than he expected and took most of the morning, because he had never sold anything in his life and had no idea what essence crystal fetched, and what he had instead was four months of reading about deposits and a rough sense of rarity and one useful memory, which was Instructor Vance saying in a second-term lecture that the lensing grade they used in the workshop cost the academy eleven silver a piece and was mostly poor stuff out of Drennick tailings. The thing in his pocket was not poor stuff out of tailings. It was a single unfractured piece off a formation that had been laying itself down since before anybody in Corvane had a surname, and it was, he was reasonably confident, better than anything he had handled in a year of handling things. He wrote down a number. He looked at it for a while and then halved it, because he was aware that a person doing this sum wants a large number and that wanting it is precisely the sort of thing that gets into arithmetic. Then he halved it again, on the same principle. It was still an enormous amount of money. The second column was what it bought, and that one took eleven minutes, because he had been keeping that column in his head since he was nine and had simply never had cause to write it down. Boots for Wick that would last two years. Boots for Tobin, since the split would go through by autumn. The lean-to, properly, not patched. The roof over the back room, which took water in three places and which his mother had stopped mentioning about a year ago, which was how he knew it had got worse. A year of not doing piecework by lamplight until she could no longer see. Two years, if she was careful, and Nessa Colton was careful the way other people were tall. He added a fourth line and then crossed it out, because the fourth line was a cart from Draymere so I never have to walk it again and he did not care for what it said about him that it had arrived unprompted. The third column was the risk, and he sat over the third column for two hours. A piece like that does not go through a village. It goes to Draymere at the absolute minimum and probably to a house that deals in essence goods, and the man who takes it will look at it, and the man will have handled a great deal of poor stuff out of tailings and almost nothing else, and he will ask where it came from. That is not suspicion. That is his trade. He will ask because a piece like that has a provenance and provenance is most of what he is buying. And Briar would have to answer him. He wrote out the possible answers and there were four. He could tell the truth, which was unthinkable. He could refuse to say, which in a trade built on provenance is the same as saying stolen and would halve the price or end the sale. He could name a false deposit that existed, which meant naming somebody else's ground and putting a man with money on a road toward it. Or he could name a false deposit that did not exist, which would be checked, because these men check, and which would come apart in about a month and leave a dealer in Draymere with a story about a boy from an academy and a piece nobody could account for. He looked at the four of them for a long time. Then he wrote a fifth, which he had been not-writing for two hours, and which was the only one that worked: that he had come by it on the road, from a peddler, in Astoria, and paid too much for it because he was young and it was pretty, and that he had no idea what it was until somebody at the academy told him. It explained a provincial boy with a piece above his station. It explained his ignorance of the value. It was unverifiable in both directions and it accounted for everything, and it would work, and it was a lie so complete that constructing it had taken him two hours and had felt, the entire time, like building something. He sat back and looked at three columns and a fifth answer. The sums came out clean. That was the part he could not get round and had known he would not be able to get round from the moment he picked the thing up off the passage floor. Nothing happened to Beckwith. That was the whole of it. A piece this size, sold in Corvane, four provinces west of a hillside nobody had surveyed, with a provenance pointing at a road in Astoria - nothing followed. There was no mechanism. He had spent two hours looking for the mechanism specifically so that he could point at it and stop, and there was not one, and what he was left with was a boy holding a perfect argument for doing the thing he had already decided to do on the fourth day. He knew that too. That was the humiliating part. He had done the arithmetic honestly and the arithmetic had told him what he wanted, and somewhere underneath it he understood that he had never once, at any point, been running a calculation about whether. He had been running a calculation about how. He put the page in the fire that evening and watched it until it was gone, which he had never done with a page of his own working in his life. He went to Draymere on the ninth day, on the cart, which cost two coppers and which his mother watched him pay without comment. The house he wanted was off the market square behind the wheelwright's and had a green door and a name on it he did not recognise, and he stood across the street from it for eleven minutes doing nothing whatsoever. He was extremely aware of the eleven minutes. He had a full account of what was happening in him during them and it did not help. Then he went in. The man behind the counter was perhaps fifty, with an eyeglass on a cord and hands that had been burned a long time ago, and he looked at Briar the way men in shops look at fifteen-year-olds, which is to say briefly.
MAN: Help you.
BRR: I've got something to sell.
MAN: We're not a pawn house.
BRR: It's essence crystal.
The man's face did not change at all, which Briar understood immediately was the first real thing that had happened.
MAN: Let's see it, then.
Briar put it on the counter. He watched the man pick it up without any particular interest, and watched him turn it once, and watched the exact moment the particular interest arrived, which was about a second and a half in, and after that the eyeglass came up and neither of them said anything for a full four minutes.
MAN: Where'd you come by this?
And Briar Colton, who had never in his life been able to lie to a teacher and who had gone red to the collar earlier that summer over a doubled carry-forward that was not even his error, heard himself deliver two hours of carefully assembled work in an entirely even voice.
BRR: A peddler. On the Astoria road, coming back at the end of term. He'd a tray of bits and I liked the colour of it and I gave him more than I should have because I was on my own and he could see it. I didn't know what it was until somebody at the academy looked at it.
MAN: Which academy?
BRR: Solmere.
MAN: ..You're at Solmere?
BRR: Scholarship.
The man looked at him over the eyeglass for a moment and something in his manner adjusted, and Briar understood that this was the lie working and felt exactly nothing about it, which frightened him considerably more than guilt would have.
MAN: Peddler on the Astoria road.
BRR: Yes.
MAN: You'd not find that in Astoria.
BRR: I know that now.
MAN: Hm.
He put the eyeglass down.
MAN: I'll be straight with you, son, because you're young and because you've been honest about not knowing what you had. That's a Drennick-grade piece and better. I could give you four silver and you'd walk out of here delighted and I'd have done nothing illegal.
BRR: But.
MAN: But I've a daughter your age and I'd want somebody to tell her. It's worth considerably more than four and I'll give you twenty-two, which is under what I'll get for it, and that's the trade and I'll not pretend otherwise.
Twenty-two silver. Briar had written a number that morning and halved it twice on principle, and the number the man had said was higher than the halved one.
BRR: Twenty-two.
MAN: Twenty-two. And a piece of advice for nothing, which is that you don't tell anybody in this town what you got for it, because that's a good number and people are people.
He counted it out. It took some time. It was more coin than Briar had ever seen at once and considerably more than he had ever touched, and he put it in the inside pocket where the crystal had been for the last eleven days and found that the weight was almost exactly the same, which he thought was probably the single most unbearable detail of the entire enterprise.
MAN: Do something sensible with it.
BRR: It's for boots.
The man laughed and then stopped laughing and looked at him properly for the first time.
MAN: Right, then. Off you go.
He walked out into the market square at four in the afternoon with twenty-two silver in his coat, and stood in the middle of the Draymere market with his hands at his sides, and waited for whatever it was that was supposed to arrive. Nothing arrived. That was the thing. He had spent nine days constructing an apparatus for a feeling and the feeling did not come, and what he had instead was a square with people in it and a cart to catch and a very specific awareness that there was a village four provinces east where an old man sat in a beck with his boots off and would never, for the whole of the rest of his life, have any idea that this had happened.