The recovery party came into the vestry in the order they had been told to: a clerk first, with a tablet, then two porters with a handcart, then a woman in a hard hat carrying a clipboard whose purpose, as far as Sefa could tell, was to be seen.

They stopped when they saw the counter.

The clerk was a neat, dark, anxious man of about thirty in a grey guild blazer, with a blue drop on the pocket and a lanyard that said TAVISH NAIDOO, RECOVERY. He looked at the tarp, the folded jacket, the open jars, the salt-dusted people standing with their backs to the steel counter in an unconvincing line, and he did what a decent clerk does when confronted with something he has not been briefed on. He checked his tablet.

"I was told seventy kilograms," he said.

"It's a hot day," said Bunmi. "Things shrink."

"Madam, I don't think salt shrinks."

"Then you've never left a pickle in the sun."

Tavish Naidoo's brow creased. A little of the counter's white drift remained in the shape of a man's lower legs and a hand, and he reached out, uncertainly, as though to measure it with his thumb. Teodor, without any apparent movement, was suddenly in front of the hand.

"Mr Naidoo. Teodor Ilves-Nakamura, Orlei customs. May I see the order?"

"Oh. Yes. Of course." The clerk turned the tablet around. "It's from the Brine-Master's office. Clause Fourteen. All saline deposit found upon leased ground."

Teodor read it. His lips moved. It took him eleven seconds, and in that time the vestry held its breath, and the porters shifted from foot to foot, and the woman in the hard hat took a very slow interest in the ceiling.

"It appears valid," said Teodor.

Nobody had expected him to say anything else. Sefa heard Pico draw a sharp breath. Bunmi's jaw set. She saw Teodor's hand tighten on the glass pen, and his eyes flick, once, over his shoulder, to a point just left of her, and she had a clear and sudden sense of being looked for.

"It appears valid," he repeated, with difficulty, "and I cannot say it isn't. I would only ask for a moment to confirm the particulars of the lease."

"We're on a schedule," the clerk said apologetically. "The Brine-Master specifically said—"

"It's tithe-salt," said Ansgar.

It came out in a squeak. Everyone turned. The monk had been sitting on the floor with a jar in his lap, and now he scrambled to his feet, knocking over the jar, which rolled across the tiles and fetched up against the porters' handcart with a small musical clunk. His glasses were crooked. His round face was white. His hands were shaking so badly that the brass scale on his belt rattled like a tambourine.

"I beg your pardon, Brother?" said Tavish Naidoo.

"It's, it's tithe-salt. It was given to the chapel. By the deceased. At ten to four." He swallowed. His voice cracked, and rose, and found a new level, the high, quick, breathless pitch of a man who has been frightened all day and has just run out of room. "He was lying in a chapel of record. A, a, a man of faith, or no faith, I don't know, but under the old Salt Tithe Act any person lying in the chapel who gives up their salt at the point of death, which he did, I watched him, it took a minute, it's a tithe. A tithe is a gift. A gift to the chapel. And it belongs to the chapel, and I weighed it, I wrote it in the book, and it's older than your lease. It's older than your guild. It's older than the river."

He stopped. He was gasping.

Sefa realised that her own mouth was open.

"That," said Teodor, very quietly, "is a point of law."

"I know it's a point of law! I've been saying it in my head all day!" Ansgar flung out both hands. "I'm a coward, Mr Naidoo, I'm a dreadful coward, I'm afraid of the Brine-Master and the Captain and the dark and my own bishop, but I know my tithe law. I know it. I know it better than anything in my life, because there's nothing else that I've ever been brave about."

The vestry was silent.

Then Teodor drew out his tablet with a trembling hand, thumbed to the lease, scrolled down, and began to read again. This time his lips did not move. His eyes went to the foot of the page. They stopped. They went back. His face took on a look of slow, bitter, magnificent comprehension.

"Clause Fourteen," he said. "Subsection three."

"What does it say?" said Sefa.

"'Except such salt as shall have been tithed to the chapel of record or to any religious body of the first rank, in accordance with the Salt Tithe Act, which shall remain the property of the chapel.'" He lowered the tablet. "I stopped at the first full stop. I have been reading legal documents since I was nineteen and I stopped at the first full stop." He turned to Ansgar, and there was something like awe in his face. "Brother, I owe you an apology of such magnitude that I have no precedent for it."

"Oh," said Ansgar faintly. "Oh, goodness. Please don't."

"I shall draft it in writing."

The clerk was looking from one to the other. He was a conscientious man and plainly hated this. "I'll have to call the Brine-Master," he said. "I'm very sorry. I'll have to ask her to come."

"That," said Bunmi, "would be a pleasure."

She came in nine minutes.

Sefa heard the footsteps first, soft, unhurried, a woman who had never in her life had to hurry for a door. Haldis Orrefors-Kumalo came through the nave in her mustard headscarf and her long dun coat, with her ringed hands folded and the silver rake at her wrist glinting, and when she stopped at the vestry curtain and looked in, her face held an expression of such warm, resigned tenderness that Sefa wanted to hit something.

"Brother Ansgar," she said. "Oh, my dear. How clever."

He made a noise like a punctured cushion.

"No, no, don't be upset. I have been Brine-Master for twenty-two years and I should never have forgotten subsection three. I helped to write it." She laughed softly. "The tithe is yours. Of course it is. Tavish, take the cart away, please. Thank you, Marit. Thank you both." Her eyes passed over the open jars, the salt on the tiles, the biscuit tin, and touched on Sefa's coat, dragged out of shape by the weight in its pockets, and on Sefa's face, and stayed there. There was nothing in them but kindness.

"I shall have to ask you to forgive me," she said. "I did try to do this the gentle way."

"Did you," said Sefa.

"I did. I asked you this morning, and again at noon. I would have preferred it if we could have been friends." The ringed fingers touched the vial at her throat. "But I have always known you were your mother's daughter. She never could be talked out of anything either."

The porters were already turning the cart round. The clerk gave an apologetic little bow. At the curtain Haldis paused, with one hand on the green velvet, and turned back to Pico, who was standing behind Bunmi's leg with the biscuit tin held to his chest like a shield.

"Dear," she said, in her warmest voice, "I wonder if you'd like to know what happens next."

Pico said nothing.

"The guild has filed a petition with the Orlei court in Karabel. A very simple one. It concerns a minor of eleven, with no living parent, no recorded guardian, and a history of petty theft and unsupervised work on the pans." She smiled at him. "I have asked the court to appoint the guild as his legal guardian. It will be heard on Friday, in this very town. Mr Salo has all the papers. I am so sorry, Pico. It's for the best."

Bunmi stepped forward. Sefa caught her by the sleeve.

"You can't," said Bunmi, in a voice that shook.

"I can, my dear. It's perfectly legal." Haldis let the curtain fall, and her voice came through it, gentle and clear and almost regretful. "And I should be so grateful if Sefa would come to the hearing. She would be a very important witness. In whichever direction she chooses to speak."

Nobody moved until the sound of the handcart had gone out of the nave, one rattling wheel at a time, and the great door had thudded to.

Then Bunmi sat down on the vestry floor, in the salt, all at once, as though somebody had cut a string. She did not weep. She put the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathed, in and out, in the long even rhythm of a woman holding a ship's head into the wind, and Ansgar, who had just done the bravest thing of his life and did not seem to have noticed, knelt beside her and awkwardly patted her shoulder with a hand that still held the horn spoon.

Teodor was folding his jacket. He did it with great concentration, sleeve by sleeve, as if the folds might hold a secret.

"I should like to say," he said, without looking up, "that I do not know what a guardianship hearing is likely to turn on. I have not read the statute. I will read it tonight. I should also like to say that it is six minutes to five, and that at six o'clock I am, in the absence of a better answer, still required to file a report with the garrison."

"I know."

"I raise it only because I find I would rather not." He put the jacket over his arm. His voice was perfectly dry, but he had gone red to the collar. "I should prefer, if it is possible, to give you the better answer instead."

"Tonight," Sefa said. "After the shop shuts. I'll tell you everything. All of it. I promise."

"You are sure?"

"I'm not sure of anything. That's why I'd like someone to hear it."

He nodded, once, and she watched his shoulders come down by about a centimetre.

She went to the counter. Of the man on the steel, only a thin pale smear remained, and a little hollow in the shape of a heart, in which lay a wedding ring. She picked it up. It was warm. She turned it in her fingers and saw, on the inside of the band, a line of tiny engraving, worn nearly smooth: *R + I. Till the pans run dry.* She closed her hand on it, and slipped it, very carefully, into the pocket over her heart, where she kept the notes.

Behind her, a small voice said, "Chief Forger?"

Pico had come out from behind Bunmi's leg. He still held the biscuit tin. His face was blotched, and his chin was up, and he had that look he got when he was about to make an offer and knew it was a bad one.

"If I go," he said, "I'll go quietly. I won't make a fuss. I won't steal anything. I could be very good. I've been practising." His lip wobbled. "I just want to know if it's going to be me or the tin."

Sefa knelt in the salt. She took the tin from him gently and set it on the floor. She put both hands on his narrow shoulders and looked into his eyes.

"You're not going anywhere," she said.

"That's what they all say."

"I'm not all. I'm your Chief Forger." She did not smile. "Listen. I'm going to say this once, in front of three witnesses and a monk, and none of them is going to let me take it back. Nobody takes you. Not the guild. Not the court. Not the Brine-Master. If it takes every grain of ink I've got, you stay."

It was a stupid promise. She knew, as she made it, that it was the stupidest thing she had ever said, and that it would cost her more than she had. Beside her, she heard Teodor draw a short breath; she did not look at him.

Pico looked at her for a long time. Then he nodded, once, as if concluding a deal.

"Four coins," he said hoarsely. "For the witnesses."

Bunmi laughed, a wet cracked sound, and then they were all laughing, in a salty vestry, with a dead man's ring over her heart.