Day 13: A rival establishment has reduced its prices. Subject has responded with a tactical memorandum.

(Assessor's Report, Hearthpear Cafe, filed by O. Vael)

Pip came through the kitchen door at a quarter to six with a basket of eggs in one hand and the face of a messenger who has run the whole way from the front.

"They've done it," he said.

Mae did not look up from the dough. "Who has done what?"

"Quince's. The tea rooms. They've put a board out on the square. Everything's half price. Scones, tarts, the seed cake, the pot of tea. Half." He set the eggs on the table with enormous care, as if they might go off. "There's a queue, Mae. At six in the morning. They're queuing in the dark."

The kneading stopped.

It did not stop all at once. It slowed, the way a drum slows at the end of a march, and her floury hands lay still on the dough, and for the space of three breaths nobody in the kitchen said a word. At the east end of the table, Orrin Vael, who had been reading the same line of the Small Trade Fund agreement for some minutes with his pen lifted, discovered that he had stopped reading it.

"Half," said Mae.

"Half."

"On the whole menu."

"I counted the board twice."

"Then it is not a promotion," said Mae, and wiped her hands slowly on her apron, one finger at a time. "It is an assault."

She took down the slate from the wall, turned it over, and wiped the back of it clean with her sleeve. From the dresser drawer she took a stub of chalk and a bag of dried beans. Pip, who knew the signs, put down his spoon and said in a low voice, "Oh no. She's getting the beans."

*

The war council was convened at the long table at six, and it was conducted with a gravity that would not have disgraced a general staff.

The slate was the map. She had drawn the village of Dewmere on it in a few rapid strokes: the square with its stone pear fountain at the center, the lanes running out of it like the spokes of a wheel, and at the far end of Orchard Lane, at the very edge of the chalk, a small square that was the Hearthpear Cafe. Directly across the square from the fountain, in a position of unmistakable strategic advantage, she had drawn another. The beans were the forces. A black bean was the Quince Tea Rooms. A white bean was the Hearthpear.

"Observe," said Mae. "They hold the square. They hold the foot traffic from the market, the well, the church, and the road from Calder. We hold a lane that ends at an orchard."

"We hold a very nice orchard," said Pip.

"We hold a flank that no one passes." She set a second white bean at the end of the lane, and then, with a certain tenderness, a third. "Private Pip. You are the scout."

"I'm the scout."

"You will go to the square at ten, and you will count heads. Not the queue. The seats. How many are filled, and for how long, and what each customer orders. You will be a boy buying bread."

"I am a boy buying bread."

"You are unremarkable."

"I'm very good at unremarkable," said Pip, with some pride. "Nobody looks at me. It's my best feature."

Mae's hand paused on the chalk. She did not say what she wanted to say. She said instead, rather abruptly, "Sir Crumble will hold the home guard," and Pip, who understood perfectly, grinned into his collar.

It was at this moment that a dry voice said from the east end of the table, "If I may."

They turned. The Assessor had not moved. He sat with his pen in his hand and his eyes fixed upon the Fund papers with the fierce, unseeing concentration of a man who is not listening.

"You may not," said Mae. "You are not at this council."

"I am in the room."

"You are working."

"I am," said Orrin, "working. I have been working for the past twenty minutes, and I have had no choice but to observe that your northern flank is a hedge."

"It is a hedge of considerable density."

"It is a hedge," said Orrin, turning a page, "and the Quince premises are not the butcher's, whom you have placed upon the chalk as a black bean and who is in fact selling sausages two doors from the church. I should not mention it. It is no concern of the Guild's. I am only noting that if one is going to conduct a siege, it is as well to know the name of the enemy."

There was a silence.

"He's right," said Pip. "That's Old Corrick's. Quince's is the one with the pear on the sign."

"They both have pears on the sign."

"Quince's pear is smug," said Pip.

Mae looked at the slate. She looked at the Assessor's bent head. She had the strongest and most irrational wish to throw the chalk at it, and, underneath that, a slow, warm, unwelcome feeling that she had not been so well attended in her campaigns since she left a certain vault at Harrow Ford, a thing she could not have explained, because she did not know why it had come into her head.

She wiped the butcher's bean off the slate with her thumb.

"Noted," said Mae.

"Thank you," said Orrin, to the Fund papers, and did not look up. But the corner of his mouth had moved, and on the stool by the oven, the Captain of the Gate, who had been admitted to the kitchen on a temporary pass, turned one gold eye upon the Assessor and gave a short, approving cluck.

*

She went to reconnoiter herself, in the end, because she did not trust anyone else to do it properly.

She did not go in her apron. She went in the gray skirt and the clean blouse, with her braid pinned flat and her hands empty, and she walked into the square at ten in the morning like a woman with no business there at all. It was market day. The cobbles were thick with carts and baskets, and the stone pear in the middle of the fountain had a wreath of late marigolds round its neck. And across the way, under a faded blue awning, with its door propped wide and a line out of it and round the corner, stood the Quince Tea Rooms.

It was a pretty place. She had to grant it that. The windows were hung with white curtains, and in each one stood a row of mismatched teapots in every color of the rainbow, and over the door a painted board showed a golden quince, round and cheerful, with a smile on it that was undeniably smug. Through the glass she could see tables packed shoulder to shoulder and girls moving between them with trays held high. The air smelled of lemon and warm sugar. A boy on the step was shouting, in the voice of a man who has been shouting for four hours, "Half price! Half price on everything! Come in, come in, there's a seat at the back!"

Mae stood at the corner of the fountain with her arms folded and began to count.

She had reached forty-three when a voice said, quite close to her ear, "You look like you're about to arrest my scones."

She turned. A woman stood beside her with a wooden spoon in one hand and a cloth over her shoulder, a woman of perhaps thirty, short and round and quick, with a great mass of auburn curls pinned up with what appeared to be a pencil and a sprinkle of flour across the bridge of her nose. She was grinning. It was the broadest, friendliest grin Mae had ever been directed at, and it threw her more completely than any sword.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You've been standing there for six minutes with your arms crossed, looking at my queue like it owes you money." The woman stuck out a floury hand. "Tilda Quince. I'm the smug one on the sign."

"Mae Thornwick," said Mae, and took the hand because she could not think what else to do with it. "I am conducting an observation."

"I know. I've been watching you do it from the window. Come in."

"I could not possibly..."

"You can, because I've got a pot of tea going that nobody's going to drink, and if you don't help me with it I'll have to cry into it." And Tilda Quince took her by the sleeve, as a mother takes a child at a fair, and towed her across the cobbles and through the crowded door.

*

It was warm inside, and loud, and Mae was seated at a tiny table in the back corner with a cup in front of her before she had decided to sit.

"Drink," said Tilda. "It's the good stuff. Not the half-price stuff. The half-price stuff is the cheap leaf and it tastes like a wet hat." She dropped into the chair opposite, and the grin fell off her face all at once, like a mask let slip, and what was underneath was tired and pale and rather frightened. "I'm going to tell you something, and then you're going to be kind about it, because you look like the kind of woman who can be kind when she's cornered."

"I do not know that I am."

"You gave Pip a bed. Gladys told everyone." Tilda wrapped both hands round her own cup. "I've lost money on every scone I've sold since six this morning."

Mae stared at her.

"The cost of the flour and the butter and the sugar is more than I'm charging. I'm selling them below the price I paid, and I'm doing it on purpose." She laughed, a small shaky laugh. "I'm bleeding to look healthy. I've got seven weeks of rent owing on this building, and six on the ovens, and the landlord is the Guild, which is a thing I did not know when I signed, because it was a small paper at the back and I trusted the man. I need to put enough coins in the till by the end of the month to make it look like a going concern. I need bodies in seats. I need a queue. It does not matter if each body costs me money, so long as there are enough of them that the Guild man sees a full room."

"That is a feint."

"It's a stupid feint."

"It is a feint with no reserves," said Mae slowly. She was looking at the long queue through the window, and her mind, which had been trained for ten years upon exactly this, had begun to run the figures without her. "You will be out of flour in nine days."

Tilda opened her mouth. Then she shut it, and her eyes went very round.

"Eleven," she said.

"Nine."

"I've got a sack in the cellar."

"You have the sack that you have not counted, and it is damp." Mae set down her cup. "You will run dry on the ninth or tenth day, and the queue will see the empty shelves, and you will be worse off than before."

There was a pause. Then Tilda Quince put her face in her hands and began to laugh, helplessly, until her shoulders shook and the pencil fell out of her hair. "Oh, you're horrible," she said, muffled. "You're horrible. I've been terrified of you for a fortnight."

"Of me?"

"Everyone says you've gone strange. Military. They say you drilled Hobb Larkin in the lane. They say there's a sign over your till that says no loitering without pie."

"It is a statement of policy."

"I thought you'd come to ruin me." Tilda lifted her head and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. "I thought you'd cut your prices to nothing, and I'd have to close by Friday, and I decided I'd go first. I'd get the first shot in. And then I stood at the window and watched you come into the square with that look on your face, like a woman come to count the dead, and I thought, no. Oh no. She's not a general. She's just frightened too."

Mae sat very still.

She had been called a great many things in two lives. Hero. Butcher. The Iron Warden, in the old days, by soldiers who had meant it as a compliment and had half feared her. No one, in either life, had ever looked her in the face and called her frightened as a plain fact, as one might remark that it was raining. It went into her with a small clean shock, like cold water, and for a moment she could not speak.

"I am not frightened," she said at last.

"All right."

"I am concerned."

"That's much better."

"I have a sixty-day..." She caught herself. "I have a Guild inspection."

"I know. The man with the ink. Hobb says he's cold as a fishmonger's slab." Tilda made a face. "They sent me a notice last week, too. A tenancy review. Nobody has told me what it's for, only that an Overseer has called for the lease and the account books and that I'm to expect a visit at the Guild's convenience. It came by rider at midnight. I haven't slept since."

"The Assessor is exact," said Mae. She had not intended to say it. It came out sharp and quick, and surprised them both. "He is not cold. Exact is not the same as cold."

Tilda's eyebrows rose slowly toward her curls. She said nothing. She picked up her cup, and drank, and watched Mae over the rim of it with the beginnings of an expression that Mae did not at all like.

"Is it," said Tilda mildly. "Well. I'll take your word."

*

Orrin Vael had not intended to look at the prices.

He had been quite firm with himself on the subject. The audit concerned the books, the stock, the loan, and the premises, and a competitor's board in a village square was not among its items. Mistress Thornwick was a subject of assessment, and an assessor who advised his subject on the conduct of trade was in violation of Section Nine and a number of other sections besides. He had told himself all this at a quarter to seven, and again at half past, and a third time at eight, when Pip had gone out to the square with a basket on his arm and an air of terrible secrecy, and the kitchen had fallen quiet.

By a quarter past eight he was reading the price book.

It was Item Four on the Schedule, he reminded himself: verification of pricing. It was a perfectly legitimate item, and the price book lay open on the dresser, and it was a small, wretched, beautiful thing, in Maelis's round hand, with every price entered in pencil and rubbed out and entered again. A pie at six coppers. A pot of tea at one. A hand pie at three. He ran his finger down the column, and then turned to the receipts, and then to the Calder merchant's bills, and a line formed between his brows.

He took a sheet of paper. He did not decide to. His hand simply drew a margin, ruled a column, and began.

The butter was the first thing. Maelis had bought it from a merchant at Calder Road at nine coppers the pound, because it was what she had always done, and the merchant had always been kind to her. Three streets from the cafe, in the dairy at Pell's farm, Gladys sold the same butter, better, for six. The saving, over a month's baking, was thirty-one coppers. The flour from the mill was fairly priced, but it was bought in sacks too small to earn the discount, and Maelis had bought them weekly because she had never had the coin to buy more. Honey was fair. Sugar was a robbery. The pot of tea at one copper was a pure loss. She was giving away the leaf and the honey and the fire for less than any of them cost, and no customer in the world would notice if it were one and a half.

He worked for an hour. The columns filled. The figures steadied, and began, as figures do under a patient hand, to take on a shape, and the shape was an extraordinary one. Not a rescue. A rescue was beyond the power of arithmetic. But there was a margin in it, a narrow bright line of margin, about two and a half coppers on every pie, which a woman might live on, if she were careful, and if she were not made to race a rival who was losing money on purpose.

He sat looking at it with his chin on his fist.

"Seventy-seven days," said Orrin, to the empty kitchen.

He had no business with the sheet. He folded it in half. He tucked it under the corner of the ledger. Then he heard a step in the yard, quick and decided, and took it out again, and laid it flat in the middle of the table where a person coming in would see it at once, and put his pen beside it, uncapped, in a manner that suggested he had left it there by accident, and went to the other end of the table and picked up the loan.

He was aware that it was the clumsiest piece of deception he had ever practiced. He was aware that a child could have seen through it. He sat very upright and did not turn his head.

*

"I require," said Mae, "a technical consultation."

She had come in like a gale, with her cheeks red from the wind and a dozen flecks of chalk dust on her sleeve, and she had stopped at the table, and looked down. Then she looked at him. She had not taken off her shawl.

"I am not authorized," said Orrin, "to advise the proprietor in the conduct of her trade."

"I am not asking for advice. I am asking you to look at a number."

"Which number?"

"This one." She put her finger on the sheet he had left on the table, with great precision, without having asked who had written it. "The one that says two and a half coppers on a pie."

Orrin's ears went slowly pink. "That is a working calculation," he said. "It was left out by accident."

"Yes," said Mae. "Pip said you would say that."

"Pip is not in the room."

"He is under the table."

"I am not," said a voice, and Pip's head came up from behind the oven, scarlet. "I am next to the table. It's a different thing."

Mae drew out the chair beside Orrin's. She sat. She did not appear to notice that it was beside him, and not across, and that in order to read the figures she must lean in until her shoulder was an inch from his sleeve. She read the sheet from top to bottom in silence. Then she read it again. He saw her lips move over the butter, and over the flour, and over the sum at the foot of the page, and he saw the line deepen between her brows, and then, quite slowly, ease.

"This is not a rescue," she said.

"No."

"It is a margin."

"It is the margin that exists," said Orrin, "if the price is held and the costs are cut. It does not require a reduction. It does not require you to match Mistress Quince at all. She is selling below cost, which cannot be sustained, and you need not do anything to outlast her but remain exactly as you are."

"That is a siege."

"It is arithmetic."

"It is the same thing with better manners." She tapped the page. "But she will not outlast herself. She told me so. She is bleeding for the Guild's benefit, and she has seven weeks owing, and she has been sent a tenancy review by an Overseer who has called for her accounts. Is that yours?"

He went entirely still.

"No," said Orrin. "It is not on my schedule. The Quince premises are not in my district list." He drew a slow breath. "I did not know of it. I do not know who issued it."

She was watching his face, and he let her. It was easier than he had expected. "I believe you," said Mae, after a long moment, and he had not known until she said it that he had wanted to hear it. "Then someone else is out in the valley with a pen."

"It would appear so."

"I do not like that."

"No," said Orrin. "Nor I."

They sat for a moment in a silence that was not hostile. Then Mae, rather abruptly, picked up his pen, and he let her, and she began to write on the back of his own sheet, in her heavy capital letters, which ran straight across the neat columns without the least regard for the margin.

"We cannot win on price," she said. "Not by being cheaper, and not by being the same. She has the square. She has the queue. I will not fight for the square."

"What will you fight for?"

"For what she cannot cut." Mae wrote a word, and underlined it twice. "We compete on joy."

Orrin looked at the word. "That is not a competitive strategy."

"It is the only one that cannot be undercut." She sat back, and her eyes were very bright. "Friday. Every Friday, at dusk. One long table, down the middle of the dining room, and every chair we own. One price, a fair one, for everyone. A pie, a bowl of something hot, a pot of tea. Nobody sits alone. Nobody sits at a little table in the corner counting coppers. Everyone eats together, whether they know each other or not. Bram, and Gladys, and the miller, and the boy who shouts on Quince's step."

"A common table," said Orrin.

"A long table."

He was silent for some time. Then, because he was a man who could not leave a figure unworked, he drew the sheet toward him, and took back the pen, and began very quickly to calculate. "Twenty seats at six coppers a head. Allowing for the cost of the stew. The tea, at the new price, would..." His pen slowed. His voice changed. "It would work."

"It would work?"

"If the room is full. If the cost of the stew is held below two coppers. If the butter is bought from Mistress Pell." He looked up, and found her face very near. "It would work, Mistress Thornwick. It is an absurd idea. It would work."

She did not say anything. She looked at him, and then she looked at the sheet, and the long untidy columns, her capitals trampling over his careful hand and his careful hand running in the gaps between her capitals. Her shoulder was warm against his. It had been warm for several minutes. He had not moved away, and neither had she, and he did not choose, at that moment, to examine why.

"Write it," said Mae softly. "In your fair hand. Properly."

He wrote it.

*

Tilda Quince arrived at dusk with a basket of scones on her arm and a speech prepared, and abandoned the speech on the threshold.

She had come up Orchard Lane in the long amber light, past the hedges of blackberry and the Captain of the Gate, who had let her through with a single look of cold assessment, and she had meant to knock. The kitchen door stood open. Inside, in the glow of a single lamp, two people sat at the long table with their heads bent over a single sheet of paper.

They had not heard her. They were arguing, in low, swift, absorbed voices, over the cost of a pot of tea. There was ink on both their hands. There was flour on his sleeve, and a long smear of ink along her jaw, and between them on the table lay the paper, covered in two kinds of writing, one neat and one enormous, that ran into and over each other like two rivers meeting. She had her chin on her fist. He was explaining something with the end of a pen. Their shoulders were pressed together from the elbow to the collar, and neither of them seemed to have noticed.

Tilda stood in the doorway with a basket of diplomatic scones, and for some time said nothing.

It was Pip who saw her. He was sitting on his stool by the oven, apparently asleep, and one eye came open. He raised a finger to his lips with the solemnity of a priest. Tilda nodded gravely. She stood for another half minute, drinking it in. Then she cleared her throat.

They sprang apart like two people caught stealing.

"Tilda," said Mae, rising so quickly that her chair went over. "You are... you have come."

"I have brought scones." She held up the basket. "As a gesture of peace. They're half price. I mean, they're free. I mean, they're a gift, I'm not a bribe, I know about the man."

The man had risen too. He stood very straight at the end of the table with his hand at his side, and the ink on his fingers, and a face that had gone through, in the space of a breath, three separate expressions and settled on formal courtesy. He bowed. "Orrin Vael, Senior Assessor."

"Tilda Quince." She did not curtsy. She looked him up and down with her head on one side. "You are very tall, aren't you."

"I have been told so."

"I'd been told you were short and had a limp."

"I do not know who has been telling you that."

"Oh, everyone." She swallowed. Her smile had gone a little brittle. "I should say, Master Vael, I know you're here on business, and I hope I'm not in the way. I know my premises are... that is, I have been sent a notice, and I don't know what I've done..."

"Your premises are not on my schedule," said Orrin.

"That's not as comforting as you think."

"It was not meant to be comforting. It was meant to be accurate."

Tilda stared at him. Then, quite unexpectedly, she laughed, a great bubbling gust of a laugh that she could not control, and put a hand over her mouth. "Oh," she said. "Oh, I see. She's right. You're exact."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all." She set the basket on the table. "Mistress Thornwick, may I speak with you at the gate? Only for a moment. About flour."

*

The dusk had turned blue. The Captain of the Gate stood on his stump with his chest out, and the first star stood over the orchard, and the two women leaned side by side against the fence and watched it with the air of conspirators.

"He's not cold," said Tilda.

"I said that."

"He's not cold at all. He's like a kettle with a lid on it." She was biting her lip. "I could see it from the door. The two of you. It was like walking into a room where somebody's just stopped singing."

"We were discussing the price of tea."

"I'm sure."

"It is a legal requirement that he reside here."

"So Hobb says." Tilda slipped a chestnut from her apron pocket and held it out to the rooster with great ceremony. He considered it. He took it. He did not crow, which Mae regarded as a significant concession. "Do you know, I came here to ask about flour and tell you I'd never meant you any harm. And I find that I'm going to ask something quite different."

"You may ask."

"So how long has the Guild man been living in your kitchen?"

"Nine days," said Mae.

She said it at once, without thinking, the way one gives the time. Tilda turned her head very slowly. She looked at Mae, and Mae looked at the star, and the silence went on a good deal longer than it should have.

"Nine days," said Tilda.

"It is a legal requirement."

"You counted."

"I... did not count. It is simply a number."

"It's a very exact number," said Tilda Quince. And she put her head down on her folded arms on the top rail of the fence, and laughed, and laughed, and went on laughing until the Captain of the Gate turned his back on her in disgust, and a light went up in the attic window, and somewhere inside the cottage, very faintly, a pen began to scratch.

Mae stood perfectly still with her hands in her apron. Behind her the orchard breathed in the dark. And she tried to think of a single reason why she should have known, without once looking at a calendar, to the very day.