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“They do. They expect the lots there, so the buyers can look.” Katell looks at me. “Not that you’d go. Not with the chapter house coming for the bell at dawn.”

I want it. I want one night with my face covered before I am a number in a book, and I want it so fast and so hard that my feet have turned toward the gate before I have had one thought I could be held responsible for.

Ten o’clock. A clerk, a ledger, my own name in it in my own hand.

“I’ll go,” I say.

Katell shifts the washing to the other hip. “Nora.”

“There’s wine,” I say, and go back inside to find something to wear, talking the whole way, to her, to the door, to Anna, to nobody, because if I stop talking I will have to hear how quiet this house is going to be without me in it.

ENORA

The dress was Katell’s sister’s. Katell brought it over the wall in a sheet an hour after I said I’d go. Her sister has been dead eleven years. It is gold, and twenty years old, and it does not fit me across the ribs. It gives me half a breath at a time.

Before I left, I moved the bronze disc from my work apron into the pocket of this dress. Corentin put my initial on it when he took me in. I have never gone anywhere important without it.

The market hall at Morlac is a great stone barn and it rings like a bucket. I know that before I am through the door. Every hall has a voice, and this one is all top and no body, so the sound flies up into the roof and comes back thin, and four hundred people talking sounds like a thousand people talking about something worse.

There is a gallery across the harbor end, with the old counting room over the door, and nothing up there to catch any of it.

Under it, always, the fish. They sell mackerel off these flags every morning of the world and no amount of wine and lamp oil covers it.

A girl at the door hands me a mask. Cheap gilt, the glue still sharp in my nose when I put it on.

“Lot number?” she says.

“Fifty-one.”

She marks a ledger and does not look at my face while she does it, which I suppose is the whole idea of the evening. The buyers get better masks. You can see it across the room: feathers, lacquer, long beaks, a silver thing with a hinged jaw. The lots get gilt, and everyone here has agreed to call the arrangement gracious.

There is wine. Katell was right about that.

I take a cup and go along the north wall, because the wall is where the sound is worst, so nobody stands there, and I need a minute before I can do this at volume. The stone is cold through the dress.

Under the noise, if you listen, the hall has a hum in it, low, the note the stone wants. Every room has one. Corentin made me learn them before he let me near a crucible.

A man in a beak mask walks past, slows, turns his head to look me over like a horse he is not going to buy, and keeps walking.

So that is how tonight is going to go.

Two lots along the wall, a girl who cannot be nineteen has arranged herself carefully, hands folded, chin up, as somebody taught her, and she is holding the pose so hard her arms have started to shake at the elbow.

I go and stand next to her, because I cannot help it.

“You’re going to lock up like that,” I say. “Shake them out.”

The girl stares at me.

“Your arms. Like this.” I shake mine out. I look like an idiot. The girl does it, fast, and puts them back, and lets out about a pint of held breath.

“Thank you.”

“When they come round, keep your teeth together. They ask to see them.”

“My aunt said to smile.”

“Your aunt isn’t standing here.” I drink some of the wine, which is warm and thin and tastes of the barrel. “Smile if you want. I’m planning to be rude.”