The list had eleven items on it, and by the third day of seventy-two Maren had run out of ways to avoid the fourth.

Fish-skin glue.

She had written it at the bottom of her page in charcoal, under *clean linen* and *lye (weak)* and *a second stone sink, if one can be got*, and she had looked at it every morning since. It was not an exotic request. Any decent conservator knew that the finest size for a sheet of handmade paper came from the skin of a cold-water fish, boiled down slow and clear, and every paper mill in her world that had ever cared about its work had once used it. It was only that the only person on Orrel's Rest who could possibly supply it was a woman who had looked at her across a line of white stones and told her to eat her bread for the leaving.

"I will go," said Tavian, when she told him. They were standing at the foot of the tower stair in the early light, and he had a roll of paper under his arm and an expression of mild alarm. "It is no trouble. I pass the quay at noon."

"No."

"Conservator."

"You said you'd ask," said Maren. "So ask."

He looked at her for a moment. She watched him decide to be a good sport about it. "May I fetch the fish-skin for you?"

"No, thank you. I want to go myself."

"May I ask why?"

"Because the people who sell me my materials are the people who'll be handling my work. I'd like to know their hands." She hesitated, and then, because he had asked, and because it was true: "And because I'd like to be looked at once, in daylight, while I'm standing on my own feet. Instead of being looked at from a distance every time I cross the path."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Odda Brask will have the best skins on the island," said Tavian, at last. "She will pretend she has none. Do not be put off."

"That's all? No warnings? No advice?"

"She will ask you questions." He looked at the roll of paper. "Answer them truly. She will know if you do not."

She started to ask what kind of questions, and found that he had already gone, up the stairs, one hand skimming the wall.

*

The harbor market of Orrel's Rest was held on the quay at the turn of the morning tide, and it was louder than anything she had heard since she arrived.

She came down to it from the shell path through a gap between two net-sheds, and the noise reached her first. Gulls, and a heavy chant of prices in a dialect she could half follow, and the thump of wet crates on wet stone; the slap of oars; somebody's goat. Then the smell, salt and tar and the green reek of kelp drying in the sun, and a thick, sweet undertone of woodsmoke and frying dough. Stalls ran the length of the quay in a crooked double row: trestles of smoked fish, baskets of mussels, coils of rope, bundles of dried weed, heaps of pale lumpy salt in woven trays. A boy went by with a tray of small hot pies balanced on his head. An old man was mending a net with a hook and his teeth. Above it all the grey tower stood up out of its rock, calm and enormous, like a punctuation mark at the end of a very long sentence.

The noise dropped as she walked in. It did not stop. It thinned, the way a pond thins around a dropped stone, and she felt the ripple go outward in her wake.

She kept walking. She had spent twelve years being looked at by clients who were deciding whether she could be trusted with the thing they loved best, and she had learned to carry it. Shoulders loose. Hands visible. A small, steady expression of not minding.

They sold to her, at least. She stopped at a stall of linen and bought a bolt of the clean unbleached kind she wanted, and the woman behind the board counted it out and named a price, and when Maren held out her coins the woman did not take them. She pointed instead to a small wooden board on the table's edge, worn pale with use. "Set them there, love."

Maren laid the coins on the board. The woman swept them into her apron without touching her palm, and handed over the linen at arm's length. It was done so smoothly, with such perfect courtesy, that she did not realize until she was three stalls farther along that she had been handled like a thing that might be hot.

She found that it did not hurt as much as she had expected.

It hurt exactly as much as she had been expecting, and then a little more, in a place she had not thought to guard.

Odda Brask's stall stood at the far end of the quay, where the stone met the sea. It was the biggest on the row. A long plank counter, scarred with a thousand knives, ran under a faded canvas awning, and on it, packed in crushed ice that had come from nowhere Maren could guess, lay the morning's catch in shining rows, silver and slate and a red so bright it looked wet. Odda herself stood behind it with her iron-grey braid over one shoulder and a knife in her fist, working through a pile of cod with the unhurried speed of a woman who had done the same thing every morning for fifty years.

She did not look up. "Conservator."

"Mistress Brask."

"Odda. Nobody here says Mistress, we're not that kind." The knife went in and out. A fillet slid free. "I wondered when you'd come."

"I needed some skins. Cod, if you have it, or any cold-water white fish. The skin only, no scales, no flesh. I'd like to boil them down."

"For what?"

"For size. For paper."

The knife stopped.

Odda looked up. She had small sharp grey eyes, set deep in a weathered face, and she turned them on Maren with a frankness that made the back of her neck prickle. Behind her, as though a bell had been rung, the neighbors had all become very interested in their own wares. A gutter's worth of fishwives had drifted closer to the counter. A man with a basket of eels had stopped, with one in each hand.

"You'll want to wait, then," said Odda. "Skins are dear. I don't give them away to every stranger who washes up, and I'm not going to start for one who's here for a season and gone by the spring. If you want skins, you'll stand at my board and answer some questions, and I'll decide."

Maren stood very still. She thought of the tower stairs. Answer them truly.

"All right," she said.

"One." Odda wiped the knife on her apron. "Do you mend, or do you make?"

It was such a clean question that Maren answered before she had finished hearing it. "Mend. I don't make things. I'm not very good at it. I take what's already there and I keep it from falling apart."

"Hm. Two. Have you ever thrown away a thing that could have been saved?"

She had to think about it. The market had gone quiet around her, the whole row of stalls leaning in. "No," she said at last. "Never. It's most of my trouble. I can't. I'll keep a ruined thing for years, in a box, because I think one day I'll find out how." She heard her own voice and almost stopped. "I'm told it's a character flaw."

"Three." Odda's eyes had not moved. "When the Warden eats his breakfast, does he finish it?"

There was a faint sound in the crowd, like a held breath released. Maren blinked. She had not expected that. She looked down at the ice, the silver fish, the blade of the knife, and thought of a spoon in the air, and a bowl with two mouthfuls gone, and a thick slice of bread eaten slowly to the last crumb.

"Not on his own," she said. "Not until recently."

"And now?"

"Now he finishes it if someone puts it in front of him and doesn't make a fuss."

Odda looked at her for a long time. Something in her face moved and settled. "Well," she said, very softly, so that only the nearest stalls could hear. "There's that."

The women around the counter began to murmur. Maren caught pieces of it. *Finished his plate. Never in nine years. Did you hear.* She felt the heat start in her ears and made herself stand still.

"Four," said Odda. The murmuring stopped. "When the Shallows open, will you go?"

It was the question under all the others. She had known it was coming from the moment the knife went in.

She could have said yes. It was the answer the whole quay was waiting for, the one she had given herself every night for ten days, the clean sensible answer of a woman with a lease and a landlord and a hymnal due on a Friday that had come and gone. She could see it, in a way, hanging in the air in front of her, as plain as a printed card.

"I don't know," said Maren.

Nobody breathed.

"I thought I did. Ten days ago I'd have told you I was out of here at the first chance. But I've started a thing I can't leave half done. I don't know what else I'd be leaving, if I went. And I don't know why that frightens me, because nothing here is mine." She swallowed. "That's the truth. I'm sorry. It isn't a very good answer."

Odda put down her knife.

"It's the first true thing anyone's said to me about it in thirty years," she said.

She turned away without another word, and went to the back of the stall, and rummaged in a barrel. She came back with a bundle wrapped in oiled cloth, tied with a twist of cord, so heavy that it thumped when she set it on the plank. "Skins. Cod, three dozen, cleaned and salted. Don't boil them hard. You'll make glue, you won't make size."

"I know." Maren heard her own voice crack. "Thank you. How much?"

"We'll settle that after." Odda reached again beneath the counter, and this time what she brought out was a fish: a plump, silver-skinned thing the length of a forearm, wet and cold, with a gold ring around one eye. She wrapped it in a sheet of kelp and laid it on top of the bundle. "That's one."

"One what?"

"Fish." Odda leaned across the board. Her voice dropped to something that was almost kind, and almost not. "Whoever eats three of my fish is of this island. It's been the rule since my mother's mother, and I don't suppose anyone's going to argue it. You've had my bread. That doesn't count. That was a courtesy. This is a fish."

"I haven't..."

"You will," said Odda. "Go and eat that. Come back and I'll give you the second."

Maren stood with her arms full and a lump the size of a plum in her throat. She had been given gifts before. She had never been given an island by the pound.

"He's let you into the old store," said Odda, quieter. "Nobody's set foot in that workshop in nineteen years. Not him, not Pell, not me. Not for want of asking."

Maren felt the color climb her face. "It was a contract. It's practical."

"Mm. I'm sure," said Odda, with unnerving mildness, and picked her knife up again.

*

The boy found her at the edge of the quay, where she had set down the bundle to shift her grip.

She heard him before she saw him: the slap of bare feet on wet stone, a crash, a muttered curse, a heartfelt apology to a woman with a barrel. Then a thin, tall, wild-haired figure came pelting round the corner of a net-shed and skidded to a stop three feet from her, dripping, one hand clutching a wooden frame to his chest as if it were a wounded bird.

"You're her," he said. "The Conservator."

He was perhaps fifteen. He was all elbows and shins, with a freckled, eager face and hair the color of wet straw, and his hands and forearms were stained a mottled grey-green to the elbow. The same green was spattered across his shirt and his chin and one ear. He smelled powerfully of kelp.

"Maren," said Maren. "Hello."

"I'm Pell. I'm a papermaker. Well, I make paper. Isk says I'm not a papermaker until I've made one hundred good sheets and I'm at forty-three, but the rest of them were *nearly* good." He drew breath. "Is it true you made tissue out of the Ledger's own pulp? Odda said you did. Odda said you made a sheet so thin you could see through it, and it was *alive*. I've been trying to get a sheet that thin for two years. It tears. It always tears. I lift it off the screen and it just comes apart like wet bread. How do you do it?"

She looked at him, at the grey-green arms and the breathless hope, and felt something in her chest unclench a notch.

"Show me your screen," she said.

He held out the frame. It was a decent one, linen stretched over a wooden hoop, a little baggy at one corner. She turned it over. "Your problem isn't the screen. It's the felt. If you couch it onto a dry felt it grabs the sheet and tears it on release. Wet the felt first. Wring it out, but leave it damp. And when you lift, don't pull straight up. Peel from one corner, slowly, at an angle, like taking a plaster off."

Pell stared at her.

"That's all?"

"That's all. It's the smallest thing. It's always the smallest thing."

He gave a little whoop that turned a dozen heads, and then recollected himself, and went crimson. "Sorry. It's only that nobody's explained it before. Isk just says to *feel* it. And I can't feel it, I only get angry." He looked up at her with a sudden shy intensity. "The Warden would have known. He knows everything about paper. He taught me what he could."

"Taught you?"

"I was his apprentice. For four months." He said it with a mixture of pride and loss that went straight to her ribs. "I came up to the tower when I was thirteen. I carried his lamp. I learned the three rules. I was going to be Warden after. He said I wasn't ready, and then one day he said it wasn't the right path, and he sent me to Isk instead. He said I was better with paper than with tides." Pell scuffed a foot. "I think he was lying. But I like paper, so I don't mind."

I have had an apprentice. She heard it again, the flat quick flicker in the dark on the bell-landing, the door of a face closing over something. She thought: so that's where he put him.

She reached into her apron to take out a handkerchief for the green on his chin, and the bone folder came with it. She had forgotten it was there. It slid out of the pocket and into her palm.

Pell went still.

"Can I?" he said.

She gave it to him. He turned it over in his stained hands with a kind of reverence. He ran a thumb down the bevel, and then to the corner, to the small notched step where the thumb would rest.

"He made this," said Pell.

"How do you know?"

"This little step. Nobody else cuts it like that. He made me a spoon with it, when I first came. He said everything should fit the hand that uses it." He looked up, and his eyes were suddenly very bright. "He doesn't make things. Not since..." He stopped. "He made you this?"

"He left it on my table," said Maren. "I didn't ask."

"No," said Pell. "He wouldn't have let you."

He gave it back, very carefully, in both hands. Then he wiped his nose on the one clean patch of his sleeve and said, in a rush, "You should meet Isk. He'll tell you you're wrong about everything. It means he likes you."

*

The pulping house stood at the north end of the quay, a long low shed of tarred planks with its doors thrown open to the sea. Inside it was dim and cool and smelled so strongly of green, wet, living fibre that she stopped on the threshold and breathed it like a woman coming up from underwater. Vats lined both walls, big wooden tubs of grey-green slurry. Wooden beaters hung from the rafters on chains. Along the back, on a rack of oak, hung forty or fifty drying sheets, each the color of weak tea and shimmering faintly where the light touched them.

An old man was sitting on a stool at the largest vat with his back to her.

He did not turn. He was enormous, even sitting, a heap of weathered bone and sinew in a leather apron, with white hair tied at his neck and a pair of hands laid across his knees that looked as though they had been carved from driftwood: huge, knotted, scarred, the fingers permanently crooked from a lifetime at the screen. He seemed to be dozing. The beater on its chain swung slowly at his shoulder.

"That's Isk Havren," Pell whispered. "Don't wake him. Actually do. He's only pretending."

"I am not pretending," said the old man, without turning round. "I am thinking. It is a different thing, and nobody on this quay has ever learned the difference." He had a voice like a keel scraping shingle. "Come in, girl. Don't stand there letting the damp out."

She went in.

He turned then, slowly, on the stool, and looked at her. He had a long face, folded like a sheet of old vellum, and eyes of such a pale washed blue that they seemed almost to have no color. He looked at her face. Then he looked at her hands.

He looked at them for a long time.

It was not the glance of a man assessing a stranger's trade. It was the slow, steady, unembarrassed look of a man reading a very old inscription. His eyes went to the fingertips, and the stain that had lived in them since she was sixteen, and stayed there. She felt, absurdly, the urge to hide them behind her back. She did not.

"Hold them out," said Isk.

"I'm sorry?"

"Out. Palms up. Come, I'll not bite."

She held them out. He did not touch them. He bent over them with his chin on his fist, the way a jeweler bends over a stone, and the shed was so quiet that she heard the soft drip of the nearest vat. She felt the tip of every finger go colder, and cold in a way that had nothing to do with the damp.

"Hm," said Isk Havren.

"What?"

"Nothing." He sat back. His face had closed over whatever it had held, as smoothly as water over a stone. "You've good hands. Steady. You use them like a woman who was taught by someone who never let her cut a corner."

"My binder. She was very strict."

"Hm," he said again, and said nothing else on the subject. "You'll want to learn the island way. Everyone does. They come in here with their clever ways and I show them how the sea makes paper, and after that they're no use for anything else." He pointed a crooked finger at the big vat. "Take the screen. Don't think. Dip it."

She took the screen from its peg. It was heavier than Pell's. She stood at the vat, and for the next hour, in the green dim of the shed, with the doors open to the sea, an old man who would not say her name taught her how to make a sheet of paper from kelp.

It was not like anything she had done. In her world you drew the mould through the vat in one long confident sweep, and shook it, and lifted. Here you did not sweep at all. You lowered the screen into the slurry on a slant, and let it rest, and *waited*. "Let the water tell you," said Isk, and she thought it was a figure of speech until the surface of the vat gave a long slow shudder, and the fibres, all together, turned and drifted toward the screen, and settled on it in a single even film. She lifted. The water ran off in one bright sheet. The thing on the screen was thin and pale and perfect, and quivered very faintly under her hands, like the flank of a sleeping animal.

"There," said the old man.

"I didn't do that," said Maren.

"No. You let it be done. It's the whole trick." He glanced at her sidelong. "Most people can't. They want to be the one who makes it."

"I'm usually the one who fixes it."

"Same thing," said Isk. "Backwards."

She looked down at the sheet shimmering on the screen. She found that her fingers, though cold, were steady. She found, to her surprise, that she was smiling, and that Pell, at the end of the vat, was watching her with a face of such naked happiness that she nearly laughed.

"You'll do," said Isk Havren, and turned back to his vat.

*

It was on the way back, at the very end of the quay, that she heard it.

She had her arms full again: Odda's bundle, the fish in its kelp, a roll of three dried sheets that Isk had pressed on her without comment. She was walking slowly, partly because of the weight and partly because she was happier than she had been in ten days, and did not want to hurry it. A broad, red-cheeked woman was packing up a salt stall by the sea wall, tipping a tray of pale lumps into a sack, and she looked up as Maren passed and smiled, a perfectly friendly smile.

"Morning, love. Been to Odda's? That's a fine fish. You'll be wanting some salt for it."

"Thank you, I have some at the workshop."

"Ah, well." The woman tied the sack. She was not looking at Maren now but at the sea, comfortably, the way a person looks at the weather. "Don't you mind us staring. We're not unkind. It's only we've seen it so often. You get fond, and then it's the Shallows again, and off they go. Tide-washed always go home."

She said it with such easy cheerfulness, with such total absence of malice, that it was a full second before it reached its mark.

Maren heard herself laugh. It was a small, polite, dreadful sound, like something dropped in a church. "I expect they do," she said.

She walked on. She walked past the sea wall, and the net-sheds, and the first whitewashed house with its turf roof, and the light on the water was exactly as bright as it had been a moment ago, and she found that her arms had gone very tired. The fish had begun to slip. She shifted her grip and it slid further.

Something hard and warm clapped down on her shoulder.

"Hold that," said Odda Brask, and hooked the bundle out of her arms in one movement, and tucked it against her own hip as if it weighed nothing.

She must have come after her at a run. She was breathing hard, and there was fish scale on her cheek. She was looking, not at Maren, but at the salt-wife, who had gone rather pink and begun to fiddle with her sack.

"Hilla Marsh," said Odda, not loudly. "You've a mouth on you."

"I only said..."

"I heard what you said. I heard it fifty years ago, when it was said to me." Odda drew herself up, a wall of a woman in a fish-stained apron, and when she spoke again it carried the whole length of the quay. "Anyone who eats three of my fish is of this island. That's the rule. She's had her first this morning, and she'll have her second by Friday. I'll not hear it said she's going anywhere until she's had the third, and by then I'll have thought of a fourth."

The quay was dead silent.

A gull wheeled overhead, and somewhere a rope creaked. Hilla Marsh opened her mouth, and shut it, and bent very hard over her sack.

"There," said Odda, in a normal voice. She put the bundle back into Maren's arms and squared the fish on top of it. "Go home and eat that. Don't let anyone put you off your supper."

Maren could not speak.

She stood with the weight of the skins against her chest and the cold silver fish against her chin and her eyes unaccountably blurred, and what she wanted to say was thank you, and what she wanted to say was no one has ever done this, and what she said, finally, in a cracked whisper, was, "I haven't eaten any of them yet."

"I know," said Odda, and her hard face gentled by a very small degree. "That's what the rule's for."

*

He was waiting at the workshop door.

She saw him from a long way off, a dark upright figure against the pale stone, with his coat blowing out behind him and his hands at his sides. He did not come to meet her. He stood where he was, with the sea behind him and the afternoon light on his face, and watched her come up the path with her arms full of fish.

She did not know how long he had been there. It occurred to her that it might have been since noon.

"You are carrying too much," said Tavian, when she was close enough, and held out his right hand for the bundle.

She gave it to him. He took it as he took everything, with total care, and for a moment their fingers overlapped on the oiled cloth, and neither of them moved.

"Skins," she said. "Cod. Three dozen. And a fish. It's the first of three."

"Of three?"

"It's an island thing. Odda explained." She felt her face go warm. "There was a lot explained."

"I see." He looked at the fish. He looked at the three dried sheets of kelp paper under her arm, and at the green smear on her sleeve where Pell had leaned against her, and at her face, which she knew was not entirely composed. His eyes stayed there, steady and grave, in the golden light. "What did they say to you?"

"Oh, a great deal."

"Conservator."

"They asked me if I mend or make. They asked if I've ever thrown away something I could have saved. They asked if you finish your breakfast." She watched his ears go faintly red. "Pell showed me his screen. Isk made me dip a sheet. A woman who sells salt told me that tide-washed always go home."

The smile went out of his eyes. It went without a flicker, as a lamp goes out in a closed room.

"And what did you say?"

"I laughed." She shrugged, and it was nearly convincing. "It's a fair thing to say. It's probably true. I don't know why I minded."

He did not answer at once.

He stood with the bundle in his one good hand and the sea wind moving in his dark hair, and looked at her for such a long time that she began to feel it in her skin, a quiet warm pressure, like the weight of a palm. She did not look away. She could not have said why. The light was on his face, and for the first time since the rocks she saw him plainly, without the stillness, without the shuttered lamp: a tired man of thirty-one with a scar on his knuckles and a glove on one hand, looking at her as if she had asked him a question to which the answer mattered more than anything he had ever said aloud.

"They are wrong," said Tavian.

Three words. He did not add anything to them. He did not touch her, or smile, or soften them with a joke. He set them down between the two of them in the gold light as plainly as he had once set down a cup of tea, and carried the fish inside.