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Corentin does not open his eyes.

“You sold my bell to sell yourself.”

I look at the cup on the shelf, because I am about to cry and I will not do that in front of him.

“Don’t say it like that,” I say. “If you say it like that I’ll cry, and then neither of us will get through this.”

“Nora.”

“I’m selling myself to buy you a year.” I make myself look at him. “It’s the market or nothing. The foundry’s yours, not mine, and nobody buys a foundry with no founder in it. I asked the chapter house for an advance against the next bell, and they said there won’t be a next bell.”

Out on the road a cart goes past, and Anna catches it before I do and hums, faint, through the wall, which is unbearable, so I stand up.

“No,” Corentin says.

“Thirty days. That’s the rule at Morlac. If I say it’s ended inside the month, I keep my forty-nine and I come home, and the buyer gets the rest of his money back. The house holds it until the month is out.”

I sit back down. He has to hear this part looking at me, not up at me.

“So I won’t say it. Not unless he’s something I can’t live with. If I come home on day twenty, you’ll know it was that bad. And then we think of something else. We always have.”

“And if you’re still there on the thirty-first day?”

“Then I stayed.” I hear it come out of my mouth and I don’t like it. “Then I’ve got a husband with too many teeth, and I chose him, and you’ll have to live with it.”

“Enora.”

“Say it as much as you like, it’s a good name, you picked it.” My hands have gone cold. “You took in a child who wasn’t yours. You fed her, you taught her a trade, you never once made her feel like a debt. Physicians cost money, and I had one thing left to sell.”

“You are worth more than the foundry.”

“That’s sweet. The healers won’t take it.”

“I’m frightened,” he says, and he says it in the voice he keeps for true things, flat and unhurried, the one that used to tell me which crucibles were about to fail.

That stops me. This is the man who told me, with his forearm laid open to the bone, that it was fine, and would I pass the smaller tongs.

“I know,” I say.

“Not for me.”

“I know that too.” It is hard to say and I say it. “I’m frightened for you. That’s the only reason I’m doing any of it. I’d rather be frightened of a husband than of this chair.”

I take his bowl and put it on the shelf. I move it two inches to the left, which improves nothing at all. The cup stays in my other hand.

He doesn’t answer. I don’t look at him while he doesn’t answer.

The shop ticks as it cools, one small sound and then another, all around us, and the room gets quieter and quieter until I am standing in the middle of it with a cup in my hand and nothing to do with my body at all.

Katell is on the step when I go out to bank the furnace, shawl over her head, arms full of my washing, because she has decided that my sleeping and my eating are a village matter. The wind off the fen has turned and it smells of salt mud and somebody’s peat fire.

“You’re up,” she says.

“I’m always up.”

“There’s the ball tonight. At the market hall in Morlac.” She hitches the washing higher on her hip. “The night before every sale, the house throws one. Always has. Masks and wine, and the buyers walk about looking the lots over with everyone’s face covered, and they call that gracious.”

“Do they?”