Payable in Full

"I administer the debt," Nan Ainsworth said, "which means I administer you, which is not a sentence I've ever said before, and I want you to know I've heard it."

The court's van was already going back up the fell road, and the sound of it over the top grid arrived a second behind it. He had been on the human side of the barrier about ten minutes, and he was standing where the officer had left him, with nothing in his hands.

"Iolan," he said. His voice was quiet, level and courteous, and it had been finished the same way the rest of him had. "Of the house of Anwyl-Sarre."

"The docket says duke."

"The docket is very old."

The mail had come up the hill at twenty past eight with the duty sheets, the district's circular about glycol wash, a seed catalogue addressed to a man who had not worked at Kesteven Gate since 1998, and the surety order.

Nan had read it standing at the records-room table with her coat still on, because if she sat down to it she would have to admit it was going to take a while. It was two sheets and a docket, stamped twice at the district and once at Carlisle, and the stamps were the part that mattered. Anything could be written. Only some of it got stamped.

She read the first sheet through — the arrears — the sums standing to the house of Anwyl-Sarre in respect of thaw-water taken off the Anwyl-Sarre fell and charged by the gallon under the schedule, unpaid in whole or in part since — and she stopped there, because the date at the end of that sentence was forty years back and she had been alive for thirty-four of them. Forty years of water that had been ice, charged by the gallon, because the Merrow Act's schedule taxed water that had been ice and did not tax water that had not. That was the whole absurdity in one line, and nobody in this building had written it. A city three hundred miles south had written it, and Kesteven Gate had been correctly charging against it ever since.

She read the second sheet, and then she read the fourth paragraph of the second sheet again.

The principal pledged shall be lodged with the officer administering the debt, for the term of the surety, at the said officer's place of residence.

It was the same as it had been in April, when it had come as a notice rather than an order. She had appealed it in April. She had appealed it in writing, in her own dry sentences, on the grounds that an auditor of record was not a landlady and that there was no provision in the Act's schedule for a spare bedroom; and she had a photocopy of the appeal in the third drawer and a photocopy of the refusal on top of it, four lines long, neither rude nor interested. She had known the answer for six weeks. She read the paragraph twice anyway. That was not disbelief. It was the same thing she did with a figure she did not like: read it, read it again, and then work out what followed from it, because what followed from it did not care how she felt.

What followed from it was that the back bedroom would want the boxes out of it.

She turned the docket over last. It was a printed form of a kind she had seen perhaps three times in nine years, and the wording on it had not been revised since the Act.

One duke of the autumn court, house of Anwyl-Sarre, delivered as living security against the arrears standing to that house; to be lodged with the officer administering the debt; term ending at the spring quarter-day.

Duke. Nobody at this crossing had said duke about a fae in living memory; the courts had lords and stewards and the rest were men in the queue with permits. But the schedule said duke, because whoever drafted the schedule had a picture in his head, and the schedule had never been amended, so a duke was what the form would go on saying until the paper ran out.

Nan put the docket down, squared it against the edge of the table with the flat of her hand, and went out into the yard, because it was the summer quarter-day and the autumn court was due at ten.

The yard smelled of hot tar and bracken. Four hundred metres up, and it was still the kind of June morning that made the fell look close enough to touch — the whins out, the heat standing in a shimmer over the deck plates, a curlew going on and on somewhere above the cutting, and midges in the shade under the shed gutter waiting for anybody who stood still. The barrier's red and white had gone chalky at the top edge where the sun got at it. In February you could not feel your hands out here. Today the counterweight plates were too warm to lean on and the queue at the permits window had six in it, all of them standing along the wall out of habit, in the strip of shade that in winter was the strip out of the wind.

The court came down the fell road at four minutes to ten, which she noted, because the fae kept time the way they kept their word: exactly, and never once in a way that helped you.

It was a van. Not horses and not a procession — a plain grey panel van with a fell-road crust of dust up the sides, and the Bewley lad walking out to the lever with his sleeves rolled and putting the boom up in the three jerks and the long complaining rise it had gone up in since before he was born. The van came over the top grid, down past the barrier and onto the weighbridge to be weighed like a load of anything, because everything that crossed was weighed, and because the courts had learned in six hundred years that arguing with the counter cost more than driving over it.

Wynn Ardwick had her boot on the kerb rail and her palm flat on the housing, and she read the plates without looking up at all.

"Two ton four," she said. "That's light for the size of it. He's carrying nowt but himself."

She wrote it in the book and stepped back off the rail, and that was that. Wynn did not look at the van again. She had twelve winters on the crossing and a settled policy of minding the weighbridge, and Nan had never heard her offer an opinion on what came over it.

Two got out of the van. The one on the driver's side was a court officer in the autumn greys, sallow and long-jawed and not bothering with a face, and he came round the front of the van with a wallet of papers held out in front of him at the exact distance of a man who intended to hand them over and leave.

The other one made the queue go quiet.

He came out of the passenger side and shut the door behind him with the small care of somebody who has been told a hundred times not to slam it, and he straightened up, and six people along the shed wall stopped talking at more or less the same moment. Nan heard it happen. It was not a gasp and it was nothing so dramatic; it was a conversation about a turbo going out on the Rennochside road that simply did not get to the end of its sentence.

He was tall. Dark-haired, thirty-five or thereabouts, in a coat that was wrong for the weather and right for everything else, and he was beautiful in a way that was not accidental and was not, Nan thought, even really aimed at anybody. It was the standard of finish you got on a thing made to be looked at by strangers: the mouth, the line of the jaw, the set of the eyes, all of it decided by somebody. She had a butcher's shop and two generations of hauliers behind her and no illusions at all about how a person came to look like that. Nothing came out of a mould that hadn't been put in one.

The ears were plain and pointed: the only thing on him that had not been softened for the human side, and she understood, looking at it, that it had been left on purpose, because a lie a court could be caught in was worth less than the truth it could point at.

"Auditor of record," said the court officer.

"Ainsworth," said Nan.

He handed the wallet across. He did not look at the man he had brought, and the man he had brought did not look at him. Whatever had been said between them on the fell road had been said and finished with.

The papers were in order. The counter-signature was on the second sheet, the seal was the autumn court's, and there was a schedule of the pledge in a small clerk's hand, listing what was pledged along with the principal — his rank, his claim, his name — as if those were three items on a manifest, which, for the purposes of the form, they were.

"That's the delivery," the officer said. "That's you."

"That's me," Nan agreed, and signed.

She signed it in the same hand she signed a tare weight or a nil return or a condemned pallet of worked bone: her name, the date, 24 June, the time to the nearest five minutes, because the district asked for the time and she had never in nine years seen why not. The biro dragged on the paper where the sun had warmed it. When she had done it she checked the term against the schedule, out loud, the way she checked everything, because the quarter-days were the only dates the Act recognised and she was not going to be the one who took them on trust.

"Delivered summer quarter-day," she said. "Term ends spring quarter-day. Twenty-fifth of March." She counted it off, and it came to nine months, and she found she had no feeling about the number at all yet, which she recognised as the sort of thing that arrives later.

The officer said nothing further, because there was nothing further. He got back in the van and took it forward off the plates and round in the yard and up the fell road, and it went over the top grid with a rattle, and then Kesteven Gate was as it had been earlier that morning except that there was a man standing at the near edge of the weighbridge with no luggage and nowhere to go.

Nan folded the wallet closed and looked at him properly for the first time, and that was where she gave him her name and her office and the sentence about administering him got said, and answered, and the docket got called very old.

"So's the schedule it came off," said Nan. "You'll find that's most of what's wrong here." She put the wallet under her arm. "Right. This is where I tell you what happens, and it's going to be a disappointment. Nothing happens. You're security, not a prisoner; you don't get locked anywhere and there's nothing for you to do. You'll be lodged at my house because the order says lodged with the officer administering the debt and I appealed that and lost, which I'd rather you heard from me than off somebody at the post office."

Something moved behind his eyes, and she could not read it, and set that down as one more thing she would have to learn.

"You appealed it," he said.

"I appealed the clause. It's a bad clause. It's still the clause." She nodded at the yard behind her, the shed, the stone corridor, the queue that had started talking again and was now not talking about turbos. "I'd have had you up here in the permits office if there'd been any provision for it. There isn't. The Act's got a lot to say about your fell water and nothing at all about where you sleep, so where you sleep is my back bedroom, and I'll be shifting six boxes of day books out of it tonight."

"I can carry boxes."

"I know you can," said Nan. "You'd be surprised how little that helps."

She took the van keys off the hook inside the shed door — the crossing's own van, twelve years old, a wheel arch you did not lean on — and stood a moment in the doorway with the heat coming off the yard at her and the smell of ink and cold brick at her back, and did the thing she always did, which was say it out loud so she could hear whether it held.

"Forty years of arrears, one pledged principal, term of nine months, schedule of repayment to be opened this quarter." She turned the keys over in her hand. "Aye. That's what it comes to."

Then she took him down the hill in the van, because there was no provision for anything else.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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