The Low Streets Market opened at the second bell and by the third it had swallowed them whole.

It was not a market on land. Suzu understood that the moment the flat-bottomed ferry bumped against the stone steps and Sael held out a hand to help them ashore, and then withdrew the hand, as if he had remembered a rule about it, and stepped back to let them find their own footing. The market was a district of canals. Every lane was water, every stall a boat, and every boat was lashed to its neighbor with rope and rolled sailcloth until the whole thing made a great floating carpet, striped in rust and blue and cream, that rocked gently under the feet and smelled of salt, hot oil, and some sweet unnamed fruit.

"Oh," said Haruto, in the tone of a man who has seen God. "Oh, there is so much."

"We are not to buy anything," said Ren.

"We are to look."

"Looking is a form of wanting."

"Looking," said Haruto, "is a form of looking." He stepped onto the nearest plank and nearly fell in, and was rescued by Miyu, who grabbed the back of his tunic without taking her eyes off a stall of brass instruments. "Thank you. You're a hero. Please keep holding me."

"Let go of me when I've finished the gauge," said Miyu.

"I would hold you for as long as the gauge takes," said Haruto, with dignity, and then heard himself and went red up to the ears. Miyu, who never missed a thing, said nothing at all. She did not let go of the tunic either.

Suzu pretended to be counting heads.

It had been Sael's decision to bring them. He had announced it on the tenth morning at the lodging house, with the air of a man presenting a minor administrative change: outsiders in registration were entitled to a provisioning visit once per cycle, under the personal effects provision, to replenish consumables. He had not said that it was a kindness. He had said, quite flatly, that the party had been in the district for ten days with no leave, that three of them were beginning to show signs of low spirits, and that it would be inefficient to allow them to deteriorate. He had looked at no one in particular when he said it. But Suzu had seen him look, very briefly, at Nana.

"We can't trade," she had said. "It's in the rules."

"You cannot trade. I can. I am permitted to purchase on behalf of a ward." He had paused. "You will point. I will pay."

It was the most ridiculous system she had ever heard of, and it worked beautifully. The Kethari stallkeepers never spoke to the outsiders, never even seemed to look at them. They looked at Sael. They named a price by moving beads along a string, and Sael looked at what Suzu or Haruto had pointed to and slid his own beads in reply, and the exchange went off in total silence, like a very polite fencing match, while the party hovered in a clump behind him saying, "No, the blue one. No, the other blue one."

He never made a mistake. She watched him, with a small sort of wonder. He knew the going price of every item in the market. He knew which merchants shaved the beads. He knew the names of six of them. And he did all of it with the same level, careful, faintly reluctant courtesy, as though even here, in a floating bazaar full of noise, he was working to a procedure.

---

They split up, as everyone had known they would.

Haruto dragged Miyu to the food stalls, where she stood with her arms folded and said she was not hungry and then ate six skewers of something smoked and sticky, one after another, without comment. Haruto bought a seventh and held it out. She took it. She looked at it. And then she ate it very slowly, looking at him over the top of the stick, and Suzu, watching from a plank away, had to turn aside and study a rack of rope.

Ren and Nana drifted toward the small-goods boats. This was a surprise. Ren had been in a foul mood for ten days, short and tight and cold, and Suzu had begun to think it was permanent. But he walked at Nana's elbow, a half-step behind, in the unmistakable posture of an older brother who does not intend to be noticed. Nana held her shell card in both hands. She was reading the signs, and she was moving her lips.

"That one says Fine Combs," she told him. "That one says, Tide Charms. That one says, something about eels."

"Don't touch the eels."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking about it."

"I was only reading."

"Reading," said Ren, with the first thing Suzu had ever seen resemble a smile on his face, "is a form of wanting."

Nana laughed, and he looked startled that he had caused it.

Suzu stood very still on the bobbing planks for a moment, in the middle of all that color, with the sun on her face. She could hear Haruto's voice from the food stalls, high and carrying and happy. She could hear the tinny chime of a hundred brass charms. Her chest felt strange and light, as though someone had cut a cord she had been wearing for years.

She looked round for him.

Sael had retired to the edge of the market, to a mooring post at the end of a narrow plank, and was standing beside it with his hands behind him, looking at nothing. He stood as far from the crowd as one could stand without leaving it. His coat was spotless. His expression was the expression of a man waiting for an appointment. The Kethari going past him in the lane did not so much as glance his way, and it struck her, with a small surprise, that this might be what his whole life was like: standing at the edge of every room, watching other people be happy.

She did not decide to cross the planks. She only found, after a minute, that she had.

"Auditor."

"Arimura."

"You've been standing there for twenty minutes."

"Twenty-three. I am on duty."

"The others are fine. They're all fine. I'm counting. You don't have to be on duty."

"It is a feature of a guardianship that I am on duty continuously."

"That sounds exhausting."

The lid slid, and slid back. "You have said that before," said Sael.

"I meant it before."

He looked at her. In the light of the market, striped with moving shadows, the pearl of his skin took on a faint tinge of rose, and she caught herself wondering whether the Kethari blushed, and then wondering whether he was blushing now, and then deciding firmly to think about something else.

"There is a tea stall," she said, "two boats down. I'd like some. I'd like you to have some. It's allowed, isn't it? It's a provisioning item."

"It is a consumable."

"Then it's a requisition."

The corner of his mouth moved. It was the smallest movement. She would not have seen it, a week ago. "I will accompany you," said Sael. "For the purposes of supervision."

---

The tea stall was a cramped little boat with a green awning, tended by an old Kethari woman whose face had folded in on itself like a dried fruit. She sat on an upturned crate in the midst of a great clutter of kettles, dishes and bundled leaves, and she did not so much as glance at Suzu. Her eyes went to Sael. She said something in a low, rattling voice that Suzu could not follow, and then, with a start, did: the shell card in her pocket had warmed against her hip, and the words arrived in her mind a half-second late, like a translation read off a subtitle.

"Two," said the old woman. "Salt and honey, I suppose. Everybody takes them."

"No sugar," said Suzu, before she could think.

The woman did not look at her. She looked at Sael, eyebrows raised, and Sael looked back at her, and then, in the same neutral voice he used for the beads, said, "The ward takes it without."

"And you?"

"Salt. No honey."

"Hm." The old woman began to move among her kettles. She spoke as she worked, in the rambling, half-private tone of a person who has been talking to herself for sixty years and sees no reason to stop on account of an audience. "Wife has opinions. That's good. I had a husband with none, and I tell you, it wears. You can't get a day out of a man with no opinions. Is she always so quick?"

"I beg your pardon?" said Sael.

"Your wife. Does she always speak up so?"

There was a very short pause.

"She is not my wife," said Sael.

"We are not," said Suzu, at the same instant, "we're not, we're not a, I'm his ward."

"I am her guardian."

"It is a legal arrangement."

"Entirely procedural."

"It does not constitute a, an attachment of any kind."

"It is a custody."

The old woman handed two cups across the plank without looking at either of them. "Mm," she said. "That's what we all said."

Suzu took her cup. Her face was burning. Beside her, Sael accepted his with great precision, and neither of them looked at the other, and it was the longest silence of the morning.

The tea was very bitter. It was dark and hot and tasted of burned leaves and the sea, with something green and clean running under it like a pulse. She blew on it. She waited. She blew again. She did not look up, because she could feel him looking, not at her face but at her mouth, at the small stream of her breath over the dark surface.

"Fourteen seconds," said Sael.

"I'm sorry?"

"You blow on it for fourteen seconds. And then you wait for approximately nine. You do not like it hot." He turned the cup in his own hands, exactly a quarter turn. "You take it without sugar. I have noted this."

She lifted her eyes.

He was looking at the surface of his tea. His voice was perfectly even, and the tips of his ears were an extraordinary shade of silver-rose. "It is a useful datum. For provisioning purposes. If I am required to prepare it."

"Are you going to be required to prepare it?"

"It is possible." A pause. "I observe that your preferences are inconsistent with the regional norm. It would be inefficient to provide you with the wrong thing."

"That's very thorough."

"It is the minimum."

She drank. It was still too hot. She drank it anyway, and let the bitterness coat her tongue, and discovered that she was smiling into the cup like an idiot.

"You do not like it," said Sael.

"I love it."

"You are making a face."

"It's a very good face." She lowered the cup. "It's the best tea I've had in Kethari."

He studied her. He seemed to be waiting for some kind of qualification, some footnote, some retraction. When none came, he looked down at his own cup, and then, with enormous gravity, he took a sip of it, and she saw his eyes close, briefly, in an expression of unmistakable and entirely private contentment.

She looked away at once. She knew, with the terrible certainty of long practice, that she had seen something she was not supposed to see.

---

The lanes had grown crowded by the time they finished, and the heat of the noon bell had come up off the water. They made their way back along the plank, between the stalls, with the cups empty in their hands and an unspoken agreement not to discuss the old woman. Sael walked on the side nearest the water. She noticed it only after several minutes. It was probably an Auditor's habit. It was probably a safety measure.

A small hand slammed into her thigh.

It was a child, a Kethari child of perhaps five or six, in a tunic too big for him and with a bun of pale wet hair coming loose. He had been running down the plank from the opposite direction, glancing back over his shoulder, and he did not see her until he had hit her at full tilt. He bounced off, squeaked, and shot away like a cork from a bottle. It would have been nothing. It would have been a bump. But the plank was wet, and the boat shifted under the sudden weight, and Suzu's foot went out from under her.

She did not fall.

A hand had closed around her upper arm, swift and sure and impossibly dry, and another had caught the cup before it hit the water. For a second she hung there, tilted, with the whole bright bobbing market wheeling past her eyes, and then she was upright again, braced against his chest, with his fingers locked just above her elbow and her free hand flat against the front of his coat.

She could feel his heart.

It was beating very fast. It was the first thing she thought, absurdly: that it was fast, that it was much faster than a heartbeat ought to be when someone had merely steadied a clumsy girl on a wet plank. It was hammering against her palm like something trying to get out. She stayed exactly where she was for perhaps one full second.

Sael's eyes, an inch from hers, were wide. The inner lid had slid across them and stopped, half-closed, as though he could not decide whether to retract it.

Then they both stepped back, at the same instant.

He released her arm as though it had burned him. She snatched her hand from his coat. The cup, which was still in his other fist, clinked against his buckle. The child had vanished into the crowd. A fishmonger three boats down was shouting a price. Somewhere, in the blue distance, Haruto's laugh rose up over everything like a flag.

"You are unharmed," said Sael.

"Yes."

"The plank is slippery."

"Yes. I noticed."

"I should have warned you."

"It's not your fault."

"It is within my responsibility to anticipate." He was staring somewhere over her left shoulder. "I will take the water side."

"You're already on the water side."

"Then I will, remain on it."

They walked back along the plank, a full arm's length apart, in total silence.

---

They took the ferry home in the long gold afternoon, loaded down with parcels. Haruto had acquired a brass charm for Miyu, a small cog on a thread, and was pretending he hadn't given it to her. Miyu was pretending not to be wearing it. Ren had bought Nana a hairpin shaped like a sea-snail, and neither of them was talking about that either. Suzu sat in the stern with her chin on her fist and watched the green water go by, and tried not to think about the speed of a heartbeat.

Sael was on the other side of the boat. He had taken the seat farthest from her. He sat very upright, facing the bow, and she did not catch him looking back.

She found the cup on her bed at the fourth bell.

She had gone up to the guest room alone, to put down her parcels. The ferry had dropped the party at the east quay and she and Sael had crossed the stepping stones in a silence so complete that she could hear his boots on every stone. He had left her at the tower door with a stiff nod, and said that he had reports, and gone up the stair at a pace that was very nearly a walk.

The room was warm with the late light. The shutters were open. And on the table, beside the inventory book, stood a small cup of thick dark glaze that she had not seen before, with a thread of steam still rising from it.

She stopped in the doorway.

There was a slip of paper tucked under the saucer. It was a narrow strip of the cream-colored stuff that the Office used for receipts, and the handwriting was small, compact and uniform, and had never in its life been crossed out. She picked it up. It said:

Fourth bell. Steeped four minutes. Warm, not hot (the interval is fourteen seconds at your usual rate; I have subtracted it). No sugar.

Below it, a line had been added, in a slightly less even hand, as though written after some deliberation:

Requisition item. No acknowledgment is required.

Suzu stood there for a long while with the strip of paper in her fingers.

She thought of the ferry. She thought of the old woman and her kettles. She thought of the way he had said I have noted this, with his ears shaded silver and the tea going cold in his hands. She thought of a heart hammering against her palm.

The tea had been poured at exactly the right moment. He had counted the interval, she realized. He had counted four minutes, and subtracted fourteen seconds, and brought it up four flights of stairs, and set it down in a room he did not enter, and left before she came. He had done it while she was still on the ferry. He had done it in advance, because he knew how long the crossing took, and the exact hour she would arrive.

She picked up the cup. It was warm in her hands, warm all the way through, not hot enough to burn.

It was perfect.

She drank it standing in the window, in the gold light, and did not write anything down.