The Damage Assessment ran to three pages, with an appendix.

Lloyd wrote it at the one table that had survived, a small round thing in the corner by the window, with the morning sun coming in through the stripped glass and a mug of tea going cold at his elbow. He wrote it in his best hand, in ink, on the good paper, and he took exactly as long as it deserved. He did not hurry. He did not allow himself to feel anything in particular. He measured, and sketched, and tallied, and the more precisely he worked, the more the knot in his chest loosened, like a fist unclenching one finger at a time.

It was, he reflected, the first honest task he had done since the Final Notice. It was something he knew how to do.

DAMAGE ASSESSMENT: FRONT ROOM, NORTH STAR INN Date of incident: the fifth of Hearthmonth, approximately six-fifteen in the morning Assessor: L. Vane, Proprietor Second opinion: Pico (Core Interface Entity, Class Four)

1. Table, dining, oak, six feet, hand-built by D. Dorrin. Broken in four pieces. Replacement: 80 silver.

2. Chairs, ladder-back, three. Reduced to kindling. 15 silver each: 45 silver.

3. Curtain, east window, wool. Torn, trampled. 12 silver.

4. Kettle, copper, large. Deformed beyond repair. 60 silver.

5. Cups, earthenware, eleven. Shattered. 2 silver each: 22 silver.

6. Shelf, hearthside, oak. Detached from wall, damaged bracket. Repair: 30 silver.

7. Hearth screen, wrought iron. Bent. 25 silver.

8. Floor, pine planking, approximately six board feet. Sword gouge, diagonal. 40 silver.

9. Plaster, ceiling and walls, dust and fracture. 18 silver.

10. Labor, assessment and cleanup, four hours at two silver per hour: 8 silver.

He added the figures twice. He ran his finger down the column, and added them again, and wrote the total at the bottom in a clean firm line, and underlined it.

340 silver.

He sat back, and looked at the page.

It was a very good document. It had a sketch of the table, in four pieces, with arrows. It had a diagram of the sword gouge, to scale. At the bottom of the second page, after some consideration, he had added a small note in the margin, in a smaller hand: Kettle: no replacement value can be assigned to the loss of the first kettle I ever bought for myself. Value for purposes of this assessment: as stated.

He looked at the note for some time.

Then he crossed it out, so thoroughly that the paper tore, and copied the document out again.

"This unit's estimate," said Pico, who had been watching from the windowsill with its legs dangling, "was three hundred and forty silver."

"Yes."

"The Operator's total is three hundred and forty silver."

"I noticed."

"Variance: zero point zero zero percent." The golden light in its chest brightened, very slightly. "This unit finds this outcome extremely gratifying."

"So do I," said Lloyd.

"It suggests that this unit and the Operator remain well matched."

"It suggests," said Lloyd, "that we both know how much a table costs."

"This unit will accept the former interpretation."

---

He called them in at ten.

They came separately, as people do to a disciplinary hearing, and stood in the ruins of the front room, on opposite sides of the cleared floor. They had both washed. Elena had put on a clean shirt. Malina had changed her tunic, and tied back her hair, and had rebuilt in the space of an hour that crisp upright composure that he had known for so long. She stood with her hands clasped behind her back, her chin level, and her gaze fixed on the middle distance.

Her horns were quite dark. He noted it with a small, absurd twinge of something that might have been regret.

"I'll be brief," said Lloyd.

He cleared his throat. He had a pencil behind his ear and the assessment in his hand, and he had arranged himself, without quite meaning to, in the posture he had used in the Operations Wing for six years: feet planted, spine straight, eyes on the page. It was the stance of a man presenting findings to a committee.

"The total damage is three hundred and forty silver. I've broken it down in the attached schedule. I've divided responsibility by the following method." He turned the page. "Each party's share is proportional to the degree of provocation, the degree of escalation, and the relative damage caused by the party's actions. I have also factored in," he paused, "mitigating circumstances."

"What mitigating circumstances?" said Malina.

"Neither party struck me."

There was a short silence.

"That is a relevant consideration?" said Elena.

"It's a consideration I weighed," said Lloyd, "very heavily."

He did not look up. He did not see the look that passed between them. But he felt the air in the room move.

"The allocation is forty percent to Elena, and sixty percent to the General."

"Sixty," said Malina.

"She struck first."

"She drew a sword."

"You were sitting in her chair."

"It was not her chair."

"It had been her chair," said Lloyd, "for seven weeks, and I'd ask you to consider the principle."

Malina opened her mouth. She closed it. Her jaw worked, once.

"Elena's share is one hundred and thirty-six silver," said Lloyd. "The General's is two hundred and four."

---

Elena was the first to speak.

She had been standing very straight, with her big scarred hands folded in front of her, and her broad plain face had gone through a number of expressions in the course of the last minute, but it had settled, at the end, into a look of calm and rueful acceptance. She nodded, slowly.

"That is fair," she said.

"Thank you."

"I will pay it from my wages. Section Eight of my contract provides for deductions in the event of property damage. Two silver per day. It will take sixty-eight days."

"That's correct."

"I would like to apologize." She said it with a plain, direct, unforced dignity. "I drew a weapon in a public room, in the presence of a civilian, over a matter of seating. I was provoked. But I did not have to respond. I am a Champion of the Order, and I am held to a higher standard. It was a failure of discipline."

"Elena," said Lloyd, "it's all right."

"It is not. But it is mine." She looked at him. "Thank you for the clarity."

"I'm glad you found it useful."

"It is very useful. I did not know that one could be told exactly how much one has done wrong, and then simply... pay it." She shook her head, with a faint wondering smile. "In the Order, there is only penance. You are told that you have sinned, and you are told to kneel, and you are never told when it will be enough."

"It's enough when it's paid," said Lloyd.

"Yes," said Elena. "I think I like that better."

She turned her head, and looked across the room at the other woman. Something shifted in her face. It was not a smile. It was something much quieter, much more thoughtful, as of a soldier who has been fighting a long time and has just caught sight of an unexpected flag.

"I should add," she said, "that you fight very well, General."

Malina blinked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That poker. I did not think it would hold. You are extremely quick."

"I... " said Malina. Her horns, very faintly, began to tint. "Your sweep is acceptable."

"It is the third form."

"I am aware."

"It took me nine years."

"Hm," said Malina, and turned her face toward the window.

---

"The General's share," said Lloyd, "is two hundred and four silver."

"I will settle the account."

She said it at once, with a quick, clipped, decisive snap, and she took a step forward, and reached into the breast of her tunic, and drew out the heavy black purse. She opened it. She took out two thick, dark, dully gleaming disks of iron, each stamped with a skull, and set them down on the little round table, one on top of the other, with a faint solid clack.

"Two iron crowns," said Malina. "At the rate of the Realm, three hundred silver. It exceeds the sum. You may keep the difference."

Lloyd looked at the crowns.

"General," he said, gently. "We went over this last night."

"The rate is fixed by the Treasury of the Deep."

"It isn't fixed in Thornwick."

"It is the standard tender."

"It's a slug of iron," said Lloyd. "It's a very handsome slug. It has a nice stamp. But there's no money-changer within two days' ride, and I can't send you to Marle for a week, and in the meantime I have to repair a table."

"Then you will accept it as a pledge."

"I'll accept it as collateral. I'd like to know what it's worth first."

She stared at him.

He turned his head, and called over his shoulder, in a pleasant voice.

"Dorrin!"

The door of the kitchen creaked, and the dwarf stumped in.

He had been there, it appeared, for some time. He had a hammer in one hand and a mug of tea in the other and the vague, benevolent, faintly smoky air of a man who has been enjoying himself. He took one look at the table, in four pieces, and made a low sound of grief, like a man seeing the corpse of a well-loved horse. He took a long look at the General. He took a longer one at the crowns.

"What've we got?" he said.

"A valuation," said Lloyd. "If you wouldn't mind."

Dorrin picked up the first crown.

He turned it over. He bit it. He held it up to the light, and rubbed it on his sleeve, and weighed it in his palm, with his eyebrows slowly climbing. Then he took out a small brass balance from his apron, which he carried at all times for reasons of his own, and put the coin in one pan.

"That's a poor iron," he said. "Soft. Heavy on the carbon. Whoever poured this had a bad furnace."

"It is the standard issue of the Treasury of the Deep," said Malina, in a voice like frozen steel.

"It's got slag in it."

"It has the stamp of the Demon King."

"It's got a bubble on the back the size of a pea." He sniffed. "As scrap, I'd give you a silver and sixty copper. For the pair, three silver and twenty. That's a fair price. I wouldn't pay more for the one I use on my anvil."

There was a very long pause.

"Scrap," said Malina.

"Aye."

"You propose to value the currency of the Realm as scrap iron."

"It's a decent iron, if you melt it down. You'd make a fair door-hinge."

"A door-hinge."

"Two," said Dorrin.

He weighed the second crown, and nodded, and dropped them both back on the table with a clink. He took up his tea. Malina stood quite motionless, with her eyes fixed on the little black disks, and a slow, rigid, painfully dignified flush spreading up her neck to her jaw.

"I have seven," she said, at last, in a very small voice.

"Aye, well," said Dorrin. "Eleven silver. Call it twelve, if you throw in the purse."

"The purse," said Malina, "is the gift of my mother."

"Then keep the purse," said Dorrin kindly, and took himself off, in some haste, to see about the table.

---

Lloyd did not speak for a while.

He stood by the little table, with the assessment in his hand, and gave her the time. He was, he found, quite unable to enjoy it. He had expected some small, mean, unworthy flicker of satisfaction, the sort of thing that comes of watching an old tyrant brought down. It did not come. What came instead was a thin, hollow ache, like the feeling of having stepped on something small in the dark.

She was looking at the crowns.

She was standing very upright. Her hands were clasped behind her back, and her face was perfectly composed. But her eyes were fixed on the two dark disks on the table, and he saw her swallow, once, and he saw the glint of something that was not quite wetness at the corner of her eye, and was gone.

"Then I will offer a lien," said Malina.

"A lien?"

"On the Operator's future pension." Her voice was level, and clear, and quite unnatural. "The Legion's obligation to its retired officers is considerable. It is a standing charge on the Treasury. I will assign my claim on the pension of Lloyd Vane, in an amount equal to two hundred and four silver, to the account of the establishment. It is a secured instrument. It is entirely legal."

She was looking at a point on the wall, six inches above his head.

Lloyd put down the assessment.

"General," he said. "I resigned."

"Yes."

"I haven't got a pension."

"You were entitled to one on the completion of ten years of service. You have completed six. But the Legion has discretion to..."

"I gave up the pension." He said it quietly. "When I filed. It's in the standard resignation form. Appendix C, Section Four. The forfeiture of all retirement benefits, in the event of voluntary departure before the tenth year. I initialed it."

"I know."

"I knew when I did it."

"I... " said Malina.

She stopped.

For a moment, she seemed to be about to say something else. Her mouth opened. Her lips shaped a word, and it died. She stood there in the sun, with her hands clasped behind her, and a look came over her face that he had never seen before and would not have known how to name.

It was the look of someone who has just been shown a thing that she knew, and has never until this instant understood.

"You gave it up," she said, slowly.

"Yes."

"You had six years. You were to receive a stipend, at the age of fifty. A house in the Upper Quarter. A seat at the Table of Retired Officers." Her voice had gone very faint. "You would have been provided for."

"Yes."

"And you gave it away."

"It seemed a fair price," said Lloyd, "for leaving."

She did not say anything.

She stood quite still, with her eyes on his face, for a very long time. He had the strange impression that she was seeing him for the first time. Not the Operator. Not the subordinate with the neat hands and the tidy reports. A man. A man of thirty, in a stained apron, standing in a ruined room in a house at the edge of a forest, who had walked away from forty years of security because he had been tired.

He saw it go through her like a blade through water.

He saw her understand, for the first time, what it had cost.

---

"Here is what I propose," said Lloyd.

He had put down the assessment, and taken up a second sheet, which he had drafted in the early hours and set aside. It was four pages long, with an appendix. It was headed SHORT-TERM EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT. He laid it on the table beside the two iron crowns.

"The General's debt stands at two hundred and four silver, less the scrap value of the collateral, which I will credit at eleven." He did not look at her. "That leaves a balance of one hundred and ninety-three. I'm prepared to offer a contract of service to discharge it."

"A contract."

"Labor, in lieu of payment. The same arrangement I made with Elena. Two silver per day, credited directly to the debt. Eight hours' work. A midday break. One day off per week." He paused. "At that rate, I calculate it would take ninety-seven days."

Malina did not move.

"You wish," she said, with extreme care, "to employ a General of the Deep Defense Legion as a laborer."

"I wish you to pay your debt."

"I am the Commander of an army of forty thousand."

"At the moment you're a person who owes me a table."

"I have never," said Malina, "been so insulted."

"I'm sorry. It isn't meant as an insult."

"It is a gross and wanton..."

"General," said Lloyd.

He said it very quietly.

She stopped.

"It's a fair offer. It's the best I can do. If you'd rather leave, I won't stop you. I'll write off the balance. You can take your crowns and ride back to Pandemonium, and I'll consider the matter closed." He looked at her, then, directly. "But I don't think you came four hundred miles to leave."

Her face did not change.

But she did not go.

She stood there, in the bar of morning sun, with the dust turning slowly in the air around her, and the little sheet of paper lay on the table between them. After a long, long moment, she took a step forward, and picked it up.

---

She read it the way she read everything.

She read it standing, and upright, and without moving her lips, as a person might read a treaty or a death sentence. She read the heading. She read the first clause, and the second. Her eyes moved down the page, line by line, and every now and then she paused, and he saw a small muscle jump in her cheek.

She read Section Four, on duties. She read Section Five, on compensation.

She reached Section Six.

She stopped.

He watched her read it. He had written it with great care, in plain language. The Employee shall be entitled to a daily rest period of no fewer than one hour, to be taken at a time and place of the Employee's choosing, during which no duties shall be assigned. He had written it, at one in the morning, in the pale light of a single candle, for a different person.

She read it again.

Her lips moved, very slightly. He saw the words form. He saw her eyes go back to the beginning of the clause, and travel to the end, and linger there, as one lingers over a word in a foreign language that one has just been told means home.

"You wrote this," said Malina, "for her."

"I'm sorry?"

"The Champion." She did not look up. Her voice was very low. "You devised this clause for the Champion. It is her contract. She told me so, at breakfast. She said you had given her a rule about rest."

"I wrote it for anyone."

"Did you?"

"It's a standard provision."

"It is not standard." She raised her head. Her gold eyes met his, wide and bright and fierce, and in them was something so bare, so unguarded, so close to pain, that he nearly took a step back. "I have drafted four hundred and twelve employment contracts in my career. I have never included a clause for rest."

"No," said Lloyd.

"I did not know that one could."

"No."

"You did not write it for her," said Malina. "You wrote it for yourself."

The room was very still.

He did not know what to say. His mouth had gone dry. He stood there, with the pencil still behind his ear, and the whole of the long gray winter of the last six years rose up in front of him, and he saw a young man in an office, at two in the morning, with a stack of reports, and no clause at all.

"Yes," he said, at last, very quietly. "Perhaps I did."

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then, without a word, she took up the pen from the table, and bent, and signed.

---

She wrote slowly.

He saw the pen move, in her sharp black slanting hand, and he saw her sign her name at the bottom of the fourth page. Malina. Just that. No rank. No title. No seal.

But she did not stop.

She lifted the pen. She hesitated. And then, in the margin beneath the signature, in letters so small that he had to lean forward to read them, she added a single line.

Retroactive acknowledgment of overtime owed: Operator L. Vane, 1,847 hours.

She set down the pen.

Lloyd stood quite still.

He read it once. He read it a second time. The ink was wet and black, glistening on the page, and the numbers stood out as sharp as nails. One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven. He felt the blood go out of his face. He felt his ears begin to ring. For a moment, the whole room tilted, like a ship in a swell, and he put out a hand and caught the edge of the table.

"How," he said.

His voice came out thin and strange.

"How do you know that number?"

"I signed the timesheets," said Malina.

"I never submitted them."

"No." She was looking at the page, not at him. "You did not submit them. You never claimed it. But every Friday, for six years, a sheet came across my desk with your hours for the week, in your hand. Forty. Forty-one. Forty. They were always the contracted hours. They were always in order."

"They were correct."

"They were not." She drew a long breath. "I knew they were not. I could see the lights in the Operations Wing at three in the morning. I could count the pages of your reports. I knew you had worked sixty hours, and seventy, and that you had put forty on the sheet, because it was the number that would not be questioned." Her voice was perfectly steady. "I signed it anyway."

"General..."

"I signed it every week. For three hundred and eleven weeks." She lifted her eyes at last, and they were fierce and bright and very clear. "I kept a second ledger."

He stared at her.

"It is in the bottom drawer of my desk. Under the maps. I have kept it since the second month. I wrote down, every night, what I thought you had worked, and in the morning I would compare it against the lights." She swallowed. "It came to one thousand eight hundred and forty-seven hours. It was the figure I arrived at on the night of the fourteenth day. It was the night you gave me the manual. I added it up."

There was a ringing silence.

"I did not know," said Malina, in a low, rough, desperate voice, "what else to do with it."

---

He did not say anything.

There was nothing in the world that he could have said. He stood in the middle of the ruined room, with the pencil behind his ear and his hand clamped on the edge of the table, and every nerve in his body felt as though it had been laid bare. He thought of a small cracked ledger in his breast pocket. He thought of a column of figures, and a line drawn under them, and a number written at the bottom in his own hand.

1,847.

They had been counting the same thing.

For six years, in two separate rooms, in the dark, she in her tower and he in his, they had each kept a private tally of the same hours. And neither of them had said one word. Neither of them had known. And now it lay there between them, in black ink, on a sheet of cheap paper, like a coin that two people have each been secretly carrying, and have each just discovered to be half of one.

"I am not," said Malina, "good at this."

Her voice was almost inaudible.

She had stepped back. She had put her hands behind her again, in the old stiff soldier's grip, and she was standing very straight, with her chin up and her eyes fixed on the far wall. Her face was white. Her horns were glowing, steadily, a deep clear rose, like banked coals. She was shaking, a fine fierce tremor, from her shoulders to her heels.

"I have never been good at it," she said. "I do not know the... the form. I do not know what one says. I have only ever known how to give an order." She drew a harsh, uneven breath. "I thought if I gave enough of them, you would understand."

"General," said Lloyd.

"I beg your pardon. I will see to the stable."

She turned.

She walked out. She did not hurry. She went through the door, and across the porch, and down the steps, in the same straight, deliberate, unbending stride, and he heard the boards creak under her boots, and the latch of the gate, and then nothing.

He stood where he was.

After a long time, the room began to come back into focus. He saw the sunlight on the floor. He saw the four pieces of the table, stacked against the wall. He saw the little round table by the window, with its two dark crowns and its four-page contract, and the signature at the bottom, black and angular and quite unmistakable, and the line beneath it.

On his arm, he felt a small cool weight.

Pico had come down from the sill. It had wrapped itself, quietly, around his wrist, and was resting there with its head against his sleeve. The golden light in its chest was pulsing, in a soft slow rhythm, against the beat of his own heart.

"Operator," said Pico.

"Yes."

"Your heart rate is elevated."

"I'm aware," said Lloyd.

He did not say anything else. He stood in the wreck of the front room, in the clean cold morning light, with a small blue spirit on his arm, and he looked at a sheet of paper, and did not, for a very long time, trust himself to move.