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“I might not.”

“I know. Come back anyway.”

I kiss the top of his head. I go out through the shop, past the empty trial frame with the winch hanging off it, and I do not look at that either, and I walk the seven miles into Morlac in the grey with my hands in my apron, and the pocket where the token lived is empty the whole way.

The block is six steps up and the sixth one is loose.

I see it tip under the clerk’s heel.

I decide to remember it. This is generally the last useful thing I do before forgetting.

Morning in the market hall, which is a fish market again. They have hosed last night off the flags and thrown lye about, and under the lye it is all brine and guts and wet rope, and the cold comes up through my shoes. The lot list is chalked on a board by the door. Fifty-one of us.

The hall sounds completely different in daylight.

Empty of four hundred bodies the hall is a different instrument, hard and bright, all that stone with nothing soft in it, and the auctioneer knows what he has. He stands at the front corner and pitches low, and the roof carries him to the back wall without him lifting his voice past a conversation. He has been doing this a long time.

Lot forty-nine is the girl from last night.

She has her chin up and her arms loose, and when the bidding starts she keeps her teeth together, and I have to look at the rafters for a moment.

Two bidders. A man with rings who wants a wife, and a woman with a sharp, well-kept face who says in front of the hall that she wants somebody to run her accounts and will pay three hundred for a girl who can add.

The hammer goes down on the woman’s bid, and the auctioneer says the choice is the bride’s, and the girl looks at the two of them for a long moment and then says, “Her.”

Good girl. I say it in Corentin’s voice, in my head, twice. It could be so much worse.

Lot fifty has one bidder, something with too many joints, and ninety gold, and one bidder is no choice at all. When the clerk asks if she takes it she is crying too hard to answer, and he asks twice, and she nods.

“Fifty-one,” the auctioneer says.

I go up the six steps. The sixth tips under me, and the man behind me catches my elbow and sets me straight.

“Bell-founder’s apprentice. Numerate. Sound health. Twenty-six years.” He checks the sheet. “No family.”

Corentin is not my father and he is not my husband and the market does not have a word for what he is, so the sheet says I have no family, and I stand there in front of two hundred strangers and let it be true, because correcting it would cost me the sale.

“Two hundred,” someone says.

He is a man of fifty in a good coat that is not new, and a burn scar crosses the back of one hand, old and shiny. Glass, or a forge; every trade that works hot has men with that hand, and I have two smaller ones of my own.

“Perig Kerneau, glassmaker,” he says, when the auctioneer looks at him. “Two hundred. And I’ll say in front of everyone that the girl would have her own workshop room and Sundays to herself.”

Somebody at the back laughs. He does not turn round.

Four hundred, from the thing with the joints. Four fifty, from a merchant I cannot see. Perig goes to five hundred and his ears have gone red, and I do the sum I have been doing for six days.

The house takes its twelfth. I take my forty-nine. Half of what is left goes to the Order at thirty a month, and the other half keeps the foundry in peat and bacon. Five hundred buys six months of physicians. Corentin gets to see the spring.

Five hundred and fifty, from somebody bored.

And then the hall changes.

Nobody stops talking, but the talk drops, and under it a word comes along the hall ahead of him, said under people’s breath, as you say a thing you don’t want to be caught saying. I hear it four times before I see him.

Two hundred people move without anybody giving an order, everyone taking one step that puts a body between themselves and the aisle on the left.

He walks up it. Nobody has to get out of his way, because the aisle is already empty.