Chapter 1 — The Letter from Edran House

By the time the fourth gentleman complained that the rain had made his violin melancholic, Mara Vey had begun to suspect the rain had chosen the right enemy.

The violin lay open on the felt between them, all polished ribs and offended varnish. It was a costly little thing, amber-brown and narrow-waisted, the kind of instrument that had never been asked to play in a room where anyone was peeling potatoes. A silver maker's charm had been set beneath the bridge. It pulsed faintly whenever the gentleman spoke, brightening on certain vowels as if trying to agree with him and finding the work morally exhausting.

"It was perfectly balanced when Master Orrel tuned it last spring," the gentleman said.

"Last spring it was not raining in your music room," Mara said.

He frowned. "Rain is hardly unusual."

"No. But your north window leaks."

"It does not."

Mara touched the inside seam with the tip of her smallest tool and lifted it away damp. The charm beneath the bridge gave a thin, embarrassed whine.

The gentleman looked at the water-darkened wood as if it had betrayed a family confidence.

"A leak," Mara said, "is often recognizable by water being where it should not."

Behind her, old Pel Dath cleared his throat from the accounts desk. It was the throat-clear he used when he wanted customers to remember that Mara's skill was rare, her manners less so, and both were included in the price.

The gentleman's eyes moved to the framed certificates on the wall. They always did, eventually. The gilt signatures of three licensed wizards hung above the shop counter like small, rectangular gods. The shop itself belonged to Master Orrel, who came in twice a week, sang three notes to the lock, and vanished before a customer could complain near him. Pel kept the books. Mara kept everything else from falling apart.

"Can it be repaired?" the gentleman asked.

"Yes."

"Will it sound as it did?"

"No."

His face tightened.

"It may sound better," Mara said, because Pel's throat had begun preparing another sermon. "If you allow the wood to be wood instead of proof you were born above stairs."

The charm beneath the bridge flickered once, a small blue spark. The rain tapped the windows. Somewhere in the back room an apprentice sneezed, and the suspended chimes over the door answered in sympathetic thirds.

The gentleman gave a short nod. He smoothed both thumbs along the seam of his gloves before putting them back on, one finger at a time.

"Three days," Mara said.

"Master Orrel promised two."

"Master Orrel promises things to avoid conversations. I require three."

Pel made a noise that could have been a cough or a prayer for her eventual employment elsewhere.

The gentleman paid half in advance. He placed the coins on the counter one at a time. When he left, the chimes above the door shivered. For one breath the whole front room seemed to forget the rain: the ledgers, the varnish, the wet wool smell of customers, the apprentices scraping glue from their sleeves. Then the bell's little spell passed, and everyone remembered being tired.

"You might try," Pel said, "leaving a patron's birth out of the estimate."

"I did not compare it. I diagnosed it."

"You diagnosed him."

"He was also warped by damp and entitlement."

Pel pinched the bridge of his nose. He was a narrow man with white hair, ink on both cuffs, and the air of someone who had been disappointed by numbers and people in equal proportion but found numbers easier to forgive. He had taken Mara on eight years ago because she could copy a six-part arrangement without smearing the counterspell marks and because she had been hungry enough not to argue about wages until the third week.

By the fourth week she had argued very thoroughly.

"Master Orrel asked whether the Belverin account was ready," Pel said.

"It is."

"And the rosewood flute?"

"Still possessed by whatever mood Lady Chell breathed into it. I recommend burning it, but I have written that recommendation in more marketable language."

Pel looked at her over his spectacles.

"I said it was unstable near sopranos."

"Mara."

She smiled despite herself and bent over the violin. The charm whined again when she loosened the bridge. Not magic, not really, not the kind wizards did with sealed rooms and witnesses and fees large enough to make a family sell furniture. Shop magic. Maker's magic. Ordinary magic, which meant everyone depended on it and no one thanked it unless it failed.

Mara understood enough to repair what had already been made. She could hear when a charm sat badly in wood, when a room's tone leaned sour, when an apprentice's tuning had left the air feeling overboiled. She could copy the marks wizards wrote and knew better than to invent new ones. That was the difference between useful and dead, and Mara had a healthy respect for both categories.

At noon the public bell rang from the west tower.

It was not a loud sound. Loudness was for town criers, disasters, and boys discovering drums. The bell slipped into the room as a low, rounded note. Mara felt it in the hinges of her jaw. Pel's pen paused. The apprentices stopped whispering.

The west bell did not tell time so much as persuade time to behave. In Mara's neighborhood the bell arrived late when the weather was bad and sometimes sounded tired by the time it got there.

The note faded. Pel blinked, annoyed to find himself human again.

"Eat," he said.

Mara wiped her hands. "Commanding."

"If you faint into the Belverin copies I will dock you for the paper."

"And here I thought you cared."

"I do. Paper has become very dear."

She ate standing in the back room: heel of bread, onion cheese, an apple with one soft side she cut away with a repair knife. The apprentices had gone to the alley to smoke and confuse profanity with wit. Mara watched rain thread down the window and tried to remember whether there was enough coal at home to get through the week if the damp held.

Nia would know. Nia kept domestic accounts with a severity that would have frightened a tax collector. Mara kept the rent paid. Nia kept the household from dying of small, stupid omissions: lamp oil, salt, soap, the mending needle that had gone missing because Mara had used it to reset a harp pin and then denied it in the face of compelling evidence.

Nia also sang while she counted.

Not properly. Not in the approved house style, with the throat lifted and the vowel polished until no one could tell where you were born. Nia sang under her breath in scraps and turns, little street melodies she had no business making beautiful. Sometimes Mara heard Sefa in them, or thought she did: an old river cadence, a bend at the end of a phrase, a laugh tucked behind a note like contraband.

Mara had not seen Sefa in three years.

Four, if one counted honestly. Mara preferred not to undertake reckless accounting.

At three, Master Orrel arrived in a dry cloak though the rain had not stopped. The room improved itself around him. Tools lay still. Damp wool forgot its smell. One apprentice stopped mid-scratch with his finger still behind his ear, then lowered his hand as if he had been caught stealing.

Master Orrel was not cruel. That was one of the more inconvenient things about him. Cruel men could be hated cleanly. Orrel was handsome in the restrained, official way: silver at the temples, long hands, a voice that made customers feel they had chosen well before he had said anything of substance.

He greeted Pel, nodded to Mara, and took the Belverin copies into the inner room. He sang three notes. The door closed on the fourth.

By closing, Mara's fingers ached from fine work and her head had filled with the sour-sweet smell of varnish. She wrapped the Belverin copies in oilcloth, locked the tool drawers, and collected her week's pay in a folded paper packet whose thinness did not improve with familiarity.

Pel watched her tuck it into her sleeve.

"Your sister still taking work from Mrs. Tallow?" he asked.

"When Mrs. Tallow remembers she has a singer and not a trained finch."

"Good voice, your Nia."

Mara looked up.

Pel was adding figures, or pretending to. His pen moved in little strokes that did not quite touch the page.

"Yes," Mara said carefully.

"Master Orrel heard her once. Last winter, I think. One of Mrs. Tallow's winter evenings."

Mara's hand tightened around her satchel strap.

"Did he."

"He said she had a natural ear."

"How generous. Did he also say she had promising lungs?"

Pel sighed. "Mara."

"No, it is kind. I love when powerful men discover organs in poor girls. Very civic."

"He meant it as praise."

"That is usually where the trouble begins."

Pel set down the pen. For a moment he looked older than he usually allowed. "Sometimes praise is only praise."

Mara thought of Nia at twelve, singing to a cracked washbasin because the room's echo made her sound older. Nia at fourteen, furious because Mara had told her not to sing near the college boys who came slumming for authenticity and beer. Nia last week, laughing so hard at something stupid Mrs. Pell's youngest had said that she could not finish the washing, her whole narrow body bent over the tub, joy spilling out of her like water from a kicked pail.

"No," Mara said. "Sometimes it is bait."

Pel did not answer. That was how Mara knew he thought she might be right.

The rain eased by evening. The streets shone in broken strips under the lamps. Mara walked east with her satchel under her cloak and her pay against her wrist. The west wards gave way to narrower streets and cheaper charms. Here the window-glass sweated. Here the door wards hummed sharp if you stood too close. Here people shouted upstairs and across alleys because privacy was expensive and mostly for people with carpets.

At the corner of Tallow Lane, the public bell reached them late. Its note snagged on something overhead and came down frayed. A woman balancing laundry on her hip swore at it. Two boys froze mid-shove, forgot why they had been fighting, then remembered all at once and resumed with greater conviction.

"Useless thing," the woman said.

"It tried," Mara said.

"So did my first husband."

Mara laughed before she could stop herself. The woman grinned, shifted the laundry, and went on.

Their building leaned against its neighbor like the two had entered a long and mutually resentful marriage. The stairwell smelled of cabbage, damp plaster, and cheap incense losing to both. On the second landing, Mrs. Pell's stove charm buzzed so sharply Mara could feel it behind her teeth.

"Tell your charm it is in pain," Mara called through the door.

"Tell my landlord to buy one that wasn't made by a drunk apprentice with a grudge," Mrs. Pell called back.

"I charge for diplomacy."

"Then starve."

Home was two rooms and a wash alcove under the eaves. The ceiling sloped low over Mara's bed and lower over Nia's; Mara had claimed the higher side when they moved in and had been calling it seniority ever since. A kettle sat on the hob. Their table had been scrubbed clean. A heel of bread waited beneath a cloth, beside a bowl of lentils and a small plate of sugared almonds.

Sugared almonds.

Mara stopped in the doorway.

Nia stood by the window in her good blue dress, the one with the cuffs Mara had mended twice and Nia had embroidered with yellow thread to hide the second mending. She had done her hair up with pins that did not match. Her cheeks were bright.

On the table lay an envelope of thick cream paper.

Mara knew before she read the crest. Some knowledge did not have the courtesy to wait for evidence.

"You're late," Nia said.

"The rain made a violin philosophical."

"Was it rich?"

"Appallingly."

"Then it deserved philosophy."

Nia smiled, and Mara's first feeling was love so sudden it was almost anger. There she was: sixteen, too thin in the wrists, too proud of the almonds, too lit from inside by something that had not yet learned to check whether the room could afford it.

Mara set down her satchel slowly.

"What is this?" she asked.

Nia's smile faltered by one thread. "You know what it is."

"I was giving you room to say it before I started being unbearable."

"Mara."

Mara crossed to the table and picked up the envelope. The crest had been pressed so deeply into the flap that the paper rose around it, white on white: a house, a lyre, seven small stars. Edran House. Even the name seemed to stand straighter than other names.

She unfolded the letter.

The handwriting was not handwriting. It was wizard print, each line clean as cut glass. The ink held a faint blue shimmer where the lamplight touched it.

To Miss Nia Vey, in recognition of demonstrated musical aptitude and uncommon receptive clarity...

Mara read the first paragraph twice. Not because she failed to understand it. Because the words kept arranging themselves into the same shape no matter how she looked.

"I was recommended," Nia said. "Mrs. Tallow sent my name after one of the winter evenings. And Master Orrel signed something. I didn't know he would. I didn't ask him."

Of course he had. Powerful men did enjoy discovering organs.

"There was an audition?" Mara asked.

"An assessment."

"Without telling me."

"It was preliminary."

"That is a word people use when they want the real thing halfway done before anyone objects."

"It was on washday," Nia said. "Mrs. Tallow sent me to deliver a basket and told me to use the side door. I thought she was being cheap. She was, but with ambition."

Mara had been on the roof that morning, arguing with wet sheets and a clothesline knot that had taken the dispute personally.

"I wanted to tell you after I knew whether I had made a fool of myself," Nia said.

"And did you?"

The joy went out of Nia's face so quickly Mara felt the room tilt.

"I mean," Mara said, too late, "what did they ask you to do?"

"Sing. Listen. Repeat tones. Stand in a room while a woman with silver teeth asked whether our parents were dead in a way that would interfere with my studies."

"What?"

"She said it more politely."

Mara looked back at the letter because it was safer than looking at Nia. Full scholarship. Resident training. Board included. Initial term of three years, subject to review. Family visitation at appointed intervals. Withdrawal permitted before formal induction, contingent upon evaluation of sponsor investment and preparatory expenditure.

There it was.

Mara hated herself a little for looking for it.

"Nia," Mara said.

"No."

"I haven't said anything."

"You breathed like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I brought home a dead rat and asked to keep it."

Mara put the letter down. "This is not a rat."

"How kind."

"This is a contract."

"It is an acceptance."

"It is an acceptance attached to a contract, which is the traditional method by which people make gratitude enforceable."

Nia laughed once. It was not a happy sound. "Could you be glad for one minute? One minute, Mara. I counted. You made it almost twelve seconds before you started looking for the trapdoor."

"Because trapdoors rarely announce themselves as trapdoors. They say things like full scholarship and uncommon receptive clarity."

"Maybe I am uncommon."

"You are."

"No, don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like being uncommon is another problem to manage."

The kettle began to fuss on the hob. Mara moved to lift it because doing something with her hands was better than standing still while Nia looked at her with that bright, betrayed face.

"Did they explain the induction?" Mara asked.

"They explained enough."

"Did they explain sponsor investment?"

"They said the house covers everything."

"That is not an explanation. That is packaging."

"It's a future."

Mara turned. Steam blurred the air between them.

"A future owned by people who hide terms in compliments."

Nia's mouth tightened. "Our future now is owned by rent, coal, your wages, and whether Mrs. Tallow decides my voice suits her guests this week. Forgive me if I prefer terms. At least terms are written down."

It hit exactly where it meant to. Mara felt it land and hated, for one ugly second, that Nia had learned accuracy from her.

"You don't know what they will take," Mara said.

"Neither do you."

"I know houses like that."

"You know their back doors. Their ledgers. Their cracked violins. You know what they let you fix." Nia's voice shook now, but she did not lower it. "You don't know what it is to be invited in."

The kettle hissed. Rain ticked at the window. Somewhere below, Mrs. Pell dropped something heavy and cursed with admirable structure.

Mara opened her mouth.

What came out was, "I can find the money."

Nia stared.

Mara stared back, equally appalled.

"Not all of it," Mara said. "Not now. But if it is lessons you want, or dresses, or introductions, or if they made you feel—if you thought I would not—"

"Mara."

"I could ask Pel for advance wages. There are winter repairs. I could take evening copywork. I could—"

"Stop."

The word landed harder because Nia did not shout it.

Mara's hands were wet from the kettle. She wiped them on her skirt and reached for the letter again.

"We need to take this to someone who reads house contracts. Not Pel. Someone outside Orrel's circle. If the sponsor line starts before induction, if withdrawal means a debt, we need—"

"We."

Mara stopped.

Nia's eyes had gone wet, which was unfair. Nia almost never cried during fights. She saved it for later, behind the curtain, where Mara would still hear and still pretend not to.

"It says my name," Nia said. "Not ours. Mine."

"You are sixteen."

"And you are not my mother."

The kettle ticked once on the iron. Downstairs, Mrs. Pell's cupboard slammed, then did not slam again.

Their mother had been dead eight years. Long enough that some days Mara could remember her hands better than her face. Long enough that Nia had grown taller than the mark their mother had once scratched into the doorframe with a kitchen knife. Not long enough for either of them to stop picking her absence up by the sharp end.

Mara folded the letter along its original crease. Her fingers had become careful. That was never a good sign.

"No," she said. "I'm not."

Nia looked as if she wanted to take the words back and throw something after them too.

"Mara—"

"The lentils will burn."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Turn into a cupboard."

Mara almost laughed. It came up sharp and painful. "A cupboard would have handled this better. More storage, less opinion."

Nia wiped at her cheek with the heel of her hand, furious at the evidence of herself.

"I wanted you to be happy," she said.

Not Edran House. Not clauses. Not Master Orrel with his dry cloak and useful signature. Nia had bought almonds. She had worn the blue dress. She had stood by the window waiting.

Mara had read the letter like a wound.

"I am," Mara said.

Nia stared at her.

The lie embarrassed both of them.

Mara tried again. "I want to be."

"That is somehow worse."

"Yes," Mara said. "I know. That was awful."

For one second, Nia's mouth trembled toward a smile. It was there and gone.

Mara could have stepped toward it. She knew that, too.

Instead she said, "Let me read it properly tonight. Please. No decisions until tomorrow."

"I already decided."

"Nia."

"No. You can inspect it. You can make a list of dangers. You can underline things until the paper gives up. But you don't get to decide whether I am allowed to want it."

She took the letter from Mara's hand. Not roughly. Worse: carefully.

"The almonds were for you," Nia said. "I thought you'd make the face about them being too dear, but eat half anyway."

Mara looked at the little plate on the table. Sugared almonds, unevenly glazed, probably from the stall near Tallow Lane that charged extra for the ones not burnt. Nia must have spent two days' singing money on them. Maybe three, if Mrs. Tallow had remembered to be cheap.

"Thank you," Mara started.

"Don't make them polite now."

Nia folded the letter and went behind the hanging curtain that divided the sleeping space from the rest of the room. A moment later Mara heard the small wooden box under Nia's bed scrape open, then shut.

The kettle steamed itself hoarse. The lentils had caught on the bottom of the pot; not burned through, only enough to leave a bitter skin that would come up in flakes if Mara scraped too hard.

Mara stood in the main room with the lentils, the almonds, the rent due in nine days, and the place where her sister's joy had been.

Outside, the late bell reached their street in a frayed, uncertain note. It trembled against the windowpane. For half a breath, the damp walls, the table, the curtain, and Mara's clenched hands all seemed to loosen at the edges. Some old part of her, buried under wages and warnings, reached instinctively toward a tune she had not sung in years.

A river tune. Sefa's tune, almost.

Mara shut her mouth before the first note could form.

The bell faded.

Behind the curtain, Nia sniffed once and went still.

Mara picked up one sugared almond. A little glaze came off on her thumb.

She put it back.