Day 0 of record: no assessor present. Premises remain unexamined.

(Assessor's Report, Hearthpear Cafe, appended retroactively)

At four in the morning, Mae woke without being woken.

No bugle had sounded. No sentry had called the watch, no drum had rolled along the line. The cafe was dark and silent except for a hen muttering in her sleep somewhere beyond the wall. But her body had been trained for too many years to the hour before dawn, and it opened its eyes on the dot, swung its feet to the floor, and waited for orders.

None came.

She dressed in the dark, in Maelis's plain gray skirt and a linen blouse with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and bound her hair by feel into the tight, flat braid she had worn every morning of her life, in this body or the last. She washed her face in the basin and went down to the kitchen, where the embers in the stove glowed a dull orange behind the grate. She fed them. She swept the already-swept floor. She scrubbed three pots that were already clean, rearranged the jars on the shelf from tallest to shortest, and counted the spoons in the drawer twice, arriving at forty-one both times, which struck her as a number a person ought to be able to do something with.

It was ten minutes past five.

Mae stood in the middle of the kitchen with a dish towel in her hands and understood that she had finished the day. The whole day, every task she could find, and the sun had not yet risen. The morning stretched out before her like a trench she had never been shown how to cross. Nothing was attacking. Nothing needed holding. There was only the long gray silence, and her own two hands, and the strange, dizzy sense that the ground might give way if she stopped moving.

She picked up the towel again and began to wipe down the counter.

*

By eight she had given up on the counter and gone to market, partly because the larder demanded it and partly because standing still in that kitchen had begun to feel like a trap.

Dewmere woke early, and loudly. The village square was a bowl of old cobbles around a fountain with a stone pear at its center, and every morning the farmers brought their carts in and the whole place filled with the sounds of commerce: wheels, bleating, the thump of cabbages being weighed, a great deal of argument conducted at the affectionate volume of people who had known each other all their lives. Mae walked into it with Maelis's market basket on her arm and seven coppers in her apron pocket, and felt the noise drop around her like a curtain being lowered, one stall at a time.

They were not unfriendly. That was almost the worst of it. A woman selling eggs gave her a small, careful smile. A man loading a barrow of turnips nodded and then looked at his feet. Two women at the baker's stall stopped talking when she passed, and resumed, lower, as soon as she was a step beyond.

"...going to wear herself to the bone, that one, just like her gran..."

"...she used to hum, you know. When she baked. You could hear her from the lane. Haven't heard it in months..."

"...Guild's been busy this year. Poor lamb. That cafe's not going to last till the harvest..."

Mae kept walking, her face smooth, her back straight. She had once marched through a town whose people had every reason to resent her, and she had learned how to carry a stare. But this was different. They were not looking at her. They were looking at Maelis, at the girl who had hummed, who had worked herself thin, who had collapsed under a tree. She felt like a soldier wearing a dead man's coat: everyone looked at the coat, and no one saw the one inside it.

"Well, look at you, upright and everything!"

The voice belonged to a woman of the approximate size and shape of a small barn, standing behind a cheese stall with her sleeves rolled over forearms like fence posts. Mae knew the shoulders from somewhere: the person who had carried a collapsed girl home on her back. Gladys Pell, Hobb had said.

"Mistress Pell," said Mae, and, because it seemed called for, inclined her head. "I am told I owe you a debt."

"Don't be daft. It's Gladys. I'd have carried a goat home if I'd found one down in the dirt like that." Gladys leaned over the counter and studied her face with frank, kindly shrewdness. "You look different, love. You've a different way of standing. Like you've been somewhere very far off and only just got back."

"I have been unwell," said Mae, which was the answer she had settled on.

"Hm." Gladys cut a large wedge from a wheel of pale cheese, wrapped it in paper, and pushed it across the counter. "On the house."

"I cannot accept that."

"You can and you will."

"Then I will return it," said Mae, with the grave, immovable air of a woman signing a treaty. "With interest. Within the month."

Gladys stared at her. Then she threw back her head and laughed, a big warm bark of a laugh that turned heads all over the square, and Mae walked away with her cheese and a face she suspected was red, and with the odd, disorienting feeling of having been, for the length of that laugh, seen.

*

She was halfway back along Orchard Lane when she noticed that the back door of the cafe was ajar.

She had closed it. She had closed it, bolted it, and checked it twice, because she had been checking doors for most of her life. Mae set the basket down without a sound. She picked up the nearest weapon, which was a broom, and went in on the balls of her feet, through the scullery and along the passage, toward a small, stealthy scraping noise from the pantry.

The pantry door stood open a hand's width. Through the gap she could see the flour bin, the lid pried half off, and a figure crouched in front of it with its back to her: thin, sandy-haired, wrapped in a ragged coat three sizes too big. One arm was elbow-deep in the bin. The other held a half-eaten pie crust, and from the sounds coming from the region of its face, it was eating as fast as it could swallow.

Mae dropped the broom and moved.

Her body was slow. Her body was, in fact, a disgrace. But the technique lived in the bones and not in the muscle, and it did not need to be fast; it only needed to be exact. She closed the distance in three steps, caught the thief's wrist, turned it, folded the arm up and behind, and pinned the whole sorry bundle gently against the pantry shelf, all in a single movement that her muscles complained about for the next hour.

"Name," she said. "Rank. Unit."

"Pip!" The thief squeaked. "I'm Pip! I'm nobody! I wasn't doing anything!"

"You have flour on your face and a pie crust in your hand."

"It's an old crust!"

"It is my crust." But she was already looking at what she held, and something in her voice faltered. The wrist in her fist was as thin as a broom handle. The face that twisted around to glare at her was grubby, sharp-chinned and enormous-eyed, and it might have belonged to a boy of twelve, though he would claim, in a moment, to be sixteen. The coat was patched at both elbows. His boots were held shut with string. And he did not struggle. He did something she had seen far too often in the field: he went still, braced his shoulders, and shut his eyes, waiting for the blow.

Mae let go.

She let go completely, and stepped back, and raised both empty hands. Pip opened one eye. He did not bolt for the door, though she saw him measure the distance to it, twice.

"Pip what?" she asked, more quietly.

"Just Pip."

His eyes flicked sideways as he said it, the way a man's do when the next question is one he does not mean to answer. Mae knew that look. She had worn it herself. She did not push.

*

"When did you last have a proper meal?" she said.

Pip shrugged, an enormous eloquent shrug. "Yesterday. Sort of."

"Sort of."

"There was a bit of bread."

Mae looked at the half-eaten crust in his hand. It was not a clumsy theft, she realized. He had taken the crust and left the filling, which was the harder thing to make and the easier thing to sell; he had laid the lattice strips flat before he bit them, like a person who knew pastry and loved it. A thief would have grabbed the whole pie. Whoever had taught this boy to treat a crust with respect had also taught him to be hungry in silence.

She straightened to her full height, which in Maelis's body was not impressive, and said in her best command voice, "Private Pip. You are hired."

Pip's mouth fell open, crumbs and all. "I'm what?"

"Kitchen duty. Three meals a day, a cot in the storeroom, and a wage when the quarter turns. You will rise at five, you will scrub what I tell you to scrub, and you will not touch the flour bin without leave."

"Why?" He backed up a step. His voice had gone flat and careful. "What d'you want? What's the catch?"

Fair question, thought Mae. She had no good answer; it had come out of her mouth before it came out of her head. "You took the crust and left the filling," she said at last. "That tells me you know what matters. And I am short-handed."

"That's not a catch."

"The catch is that you obey orders and sit when I tell you to."

Pip considered this for a long, suspicious moment, the way a cat considers an open door. Then, slowly, he held out his hand, flour-dusted, black beneath the nails, as though they had just agreed a price at market. Mae took it solemnly and shook it. Then, because she could not help herself, she snapped off a salute.

Pip copied it, badly, with the wrong hand. "Nobody's ever said hired to me before," he muttered, scrubbing at his nose with his sleeve. "Usually it's shoo."

Mae said nothing, because the thing in her chest was too tight for words, and instead handed him a clean apron.

*

The tour of the yard was Pip's idea. He conducted it with the swagger of a boy who has just been promoted and is determined that no one should notice how pleased he is: here was the well, here the woodpile, here the henhouse, here the rain barrels that leaked, and here, by the back gate, on the stump of an old fence post, was the Captain.

The Captain was a rooster. He was russet and black and about the size of a small dog, with a comb like a scarlet crest, spurs like scimitars, and the swagger of a veteran who has seen everything twice and been unimpressed both times.

"That's Sir Crumble," said Pip, in the tone of a man introducing a minor deity. "He guards the yard. He hates everyone. He bit the Guild courier last spring and the courier cried."

Sir Crumble regarded Mae with one round gold eye. Then he came off his stump like a thrown dagger.

She had faced cavalry with less alarm. The rooster hit her ankle at a dead run, and before she could cry out he had wheeled, flanked her, and struck the other. She tried a feint. He ignored it. She tried a retreat, and he cut off her line of withdrawal with horrifying tactical intelligence, wings spread, neck forward, a small feathered engine of malice. Mae hopped. Pip, who was supposed to be helping, was wheezing with laughter against the henhouse wall.

"Parley!" she said, which made Pip laugh harder. "I call parley!"

Crumble, naturally, did not recognize the convention. She edged backward to the pantry door, snatched a handful of dried chestnuts from the open sack, and went down on one knee in the dirt. Slowly, with great formality, she laid the chestnuts on the ground between them and held her open hands out to either side.

"Terms," she said, very seriously, "of a ceasefire."

The rooster looked at her. He looked at the chestnuts. He took one step forward, tilted his head, and, with immense dignity, ate.

Then he turned his back on her, hopped onto his stump, and settled there facing the gate with his chest out, a sentry returned to his post.

"Huh," said Pip, wiping his eyes. "He's never done that. He goes for anyone who's scared of him. You weren't scared, were you? You were just annoyed."

"I was tactically concerned," said Mae, brushing off her knees. She looked at the Captain of the Gate, who did not look back. "Sir Crumble. Captain of the Gate. It suits him."

*

They spent the rest of the day putting the kitchen to rights, and it was the first day since she had woken that Mae felt something like ground beneath her.

It helped that Pip could work. Whatever had happened to him before, he scrubbed a pot as though the pot had wronged him personally, and he knew the old oven's moods the way a groom knows a horse: how to feed the fire from the left, which damper to open and which to leave shut, where the hot spot sat at the back that burned the third row of loaves. Mae polished the copper until it threw back the shape of the window. She hung the dried herbs in order. She swept the cobwebs from the beams and took stock of the pantry, line by line, in her head, as she had once taken stock of arrows.

Flour for three days, if they were careful. Eggs, a dozen. Butter on the edge of turning. Apples in the barrel, which muttered when she moved them. And a stack of ledgers that she opened again out of a stern sense that one should look at the enemy's strength, and then closed after a glance at the bottom line, with her palm flat on the cover, as though holding down something that wished to rise.

She did not look at it again. She chose, with a general's practiced ruthlessness, to deal with what could be done today. That was a menu: apple hand pies, which could be made with what they had; honey bread, which could be sold cheap; and plain tea, which took nothing at all. Three items. A small front. A front she could hold.

At noon she cut Pip a wedge of Gladys's cheese and a thick slice of bread and put it in front of him. He took it with both hands and ate with his shoulders hunched and one arm curled around the plate, quick and furtive, the way a boy eats who has learned that a plate can be taken away. She turned her back and busied herself at the counter so he would not feel watched. She ate her own bread standing at the board, in four bites, without tasting any of it.

*

Late in the afternoon, when the kitchen gleamed and the shadows had stretched across the yard, Pip sat on an upturned crate, scraping the last crumbs of pastry from a bowl with one finger, and said without looking at her, "Why do you never sit down?"

Mae was wiping the counter. "I sit."

"You don't. Not at breakfast. Not at noon. You ate that bread standing up, like you were about to be called away." He licked his finger. "You haven't stopped moving since I met you."

"There is a great deal to do."

"There's always a great deal to do. That's not what I asked."

Insolent, thought Mae, and found that she was oddly pleased. She put down the cloth, pulled out a chair from the table, and sat.

It was a plain wooden chair with a straw seat, entirely comfortable. It felt like wearing someone else's armor. Her hands lay on her thighs with nothing to hold. Her back did not know what to do with itself. The kitchen was quiet, and in the quiet something began to tick in her head, a long list of things she was not doing, and then another list underneath it, of things that could go wrong while she was not doing them, and then a dull, curdled something beneath both that she did not wish to meet.

She lasted eleven seconds. She counted. Then she was on her feet again, reaching for the cloth, and the counter, which was clean, was wiped a second time.

Pip watched her with his chin on his fist. He was not laughing now. "You look like you're waiting for something to jump out at you."

"Something usually does."

"Not here."

"Not yet," said Mae, and the word hung in the kitchen like a coat on a peg.

When the light turned amber and the hens had gone to roost, Pip lingered at the back door with his hands jammed in his too-big pockets, working up to a goodbye. His eyes slid to the dark lane and away. He did not say where he would be sleeping. He did not say anything.

"Storeroom cot is made up," said Mae to the pot she was drying, in an even voice. "Rations at five. You will be on time."

A very long pause.

"Yes, ma'am," said Pip, in a small, gruff voice, and went in. She heard the creak of the cot. A little later she carried a folded blanket as far as the storeroom door, set it on the floor, and walked away before anyone could thank her.

*

That night she could not sleep, so she did not try. She sat at the window of her little room with the curtain pulled back, which was the nearest she could get to sitting still, and watched the orchard breathe beneath a sky of low stars.

The old apple tree stood at the heart of the dark, a black shape against dark blue. It was as bare and still as it had been that morning. She was looking at it without really seeing it, thinking about Pip's thin wrist and Gladys's laugh and the long, blank, frightening morning, when she saw it.

Right at the very top of the highest branch, a tiny pale point of white.

It was a bud. A single small bud, glowing faintly, as though it had swallowed a scrap of moon. It was entirely out of season; the other trees had fruit, and this one should have been resting. As she watched, it quivered, and began, very slowly, to open. One petal curled back. Then another. A blossom the size of a coin, trembling, white as snow with the faintest flush at its heart, on a night when no blossom had any right to be.

Mae leaned forward, breath held.

And the blossom, as if it had noticed it was being watched, snapped shut. Folded in on itself like a startled hand. It hung there, tight and pale and ashamed, among the dark branches.

She waited. It did not open again.

"Shy," she whispered, and, to her own astonishment, laughed, a short, startled breath of a laugh that she had not planned and could not tell whether it belonged to her or to the girl whose body she wore. It was the first time since she had woken that anything in her had been simply amused.

"Good night, then," she said to the tree, feeling absurd.

Out in the dark the bud stayed shut. But the whole orchard seemed to hold its breath, and she had the clear, unreasonable impression that something old and patient had been waiting, all this time, only to be told good night.