Serena Found Only the Glove Repair Line Left Blank

Serena saw that only the glove repair line was left blank on the bathhouse footboard test sheet. There were people to carry planks and hammer nails, but no one to dry and stitch six pairs of wet gloves before the next night shift. Cassian took off his own right glove and set it over the blank line. The seam across the palm had split open.

On the evening of the twenty ninth day, the walking footboard passed its load test.

Two of Doran's apprentices loaded sandbags onto two joined planks and made three round trips. Mara, Teo, and Yoren, who handled the bathhouse fires, each tested the footboard at the times they normally used it. Mara went after lessons, Teo when the dining hall's water ration line formed, and Yoren when he checked the shutter furnace after dark.

On the first test, the plank ends sank a finger's width into the mud. Doran did not mark it as a pass and added more roof tile supports. On the second, Mara's wet boots slipped at the edge. There was no room to widen the planks, so they attached two rope handholds instead. Only on the third did all three cross within the stop line.

The one hour set aside for installing the footboard ended on schedule, but work remained behind it. Washing the mud off the ropes, restocking four nails, oiling the plank edges, drying wet gloves and sleeves. On the test sheet, all of this was bundled under one line: cleanup.

Mari tapped that line with her fingernail.

"Cleanup isn't a person."

Serena struck the word cleanup and split it into four lines. The ropes were washed by the two apprentices within their own work hours. Doran checked the nail stock. Oiling was set for one paid hour the next day. Gloves and sleeves went home with each worker, but anything needing repair before the night shift was set aside separately.

Six pairs of gloves were gathered. Two with torn palms, three with split thumb seams, one with a wet lining. Mari said she couldn't take on night repair work because of the laundry and hygiene schedule. Nadi was in water quality training. Eda was organizing the next day's lesson materials. The repair line stood empty again.

Serena looked back through the last ten days of work sheets for the word cleanup. It appeared thirteen times. Emptying furnace ash pans, collecting shutter nails, untangling wet rope, scraping mud off cart wheels, drying gloves. Only four of those entries had a name attached. The rest had been handled as something someone did before the next shift started.

Mari brought over a shortened stub of waxed thread from the nail box behind the laundry room.

"Do you know who used this?"

Serena didn't.

"Jina turned the wet gloves inside out every night and closed up the thumb seams a stitch or two at a time. If she wrote it down as repair, it counted as new work, so she logged it as laundry closeout."

Jina was home on a rest token. Serena did not fill in the name from guesswork. She wrote instead: Jina's account needed, paid confirmation after rest.

Doran brought his own guild sheet as well. The apprentices' work ended around sunset, but oiling tools and shaking off sawdust ran half an hour past that, every time. Over ten days, that came to eleven combined hours across five people. It had never been included in the repair wages.

"Why wasn't it in the contract?" Serena asked.

"It's always been said that a craftsman caring for his own tools is part of the price of his skill."

"Does that apply to apprentices too?"

Doran didn't answer right away. It was the moment hidden hours had surfaced in his own field of expertise.

"No. Apprentice wages only counted finished pieces of work."

He wrote that starting the next day, tool maintenance would move to the last half hour before work ended, and that the eleven hours already owed would be paid retroactively from the guild's own ledger. He did not pass the cost onto the manor's budget.

Behind the six pairs of gloves stood thirteen nameless cleanups and eleven hours of apprentice tool care. Serena neither filled in the repair line by herself nor wrote that she would personally repay the whole backlog. She wrote out a deadline for confirmation and who was responsible for payment, as two separate lines.

"Who's taking tonight's?" Serena asked.

"Just issue new gloves," Cassian said.

Orsen, who managed supplies, shook his head. "There are four dry spare pairs. Two are already claimed by the ward's firewood carriers, two by the north gate night shift."

Cassian set his own glove over the blank line.

"Put mine off until tomorrow, and just cover the other five."

"Whose is the other one?" Serena asked.

"Mine."

"You're checking the west snow bridge starting at midnight."

"One gloved hand is enough."

"That's not the same as agreeing to keep within your work limits."

Cassian didn't take the glove back. It was a habit of his, offering up his own body like spare material whenever he was pressed. Serena pointed out the habit, but her own hand still reached to write her name on the repair line.

Cassian got to the chalk first.

"The auditor needs to check the dawn sample results and the royal report."

"I can read documents while I sew."

"So you're going to stitch with your right hand and copy figures with the same hand?"

"I don't want a lecture on efficiency from someone planning to patrol without gloves."

Both their voices dropped at the same time. Mari pulled the repair basket out from between them.

"If you two are going to put one of yourselves in that blank line again, the gloves go out tomorrow."

"There's a night shift," Serena said.

"Then decide: cut the shift, buy repair time, or borrow gloves. Wages come before you ask whether it's love or duty."

Mari tossed the last line out flatly and went back to the laundry room. Serena didn't look at Cassian. The word love was too large for this moment, and the word duty was too convenient.

Doran opened the guild's repair kit. Four needles, two spools of waxed thread, three scraps of leather.

"I'll take the rental fee and responsibility for any broken needles. But I won't assign a person. My two apprentices need their rest."

Orsen unfolded the night shift roster again. The west snow bridge check happened twice, at midnight and at dawn. The bridge itself had been sealed off after the recent thaw, and the point of the check was to look for detour marks and the state of the signage.

"I'll take midnight," Orsen said. "Sir Cassian takes dawn. The refusal condition stays as it is."

Cassian objected.

"You still need to finish collecting the north gate medicine."

"That's done before sunset. Even after taking on supply authority, patrol shifts were still my original job."

"And your rest?" Serena asked.

"I'll clear two hours this evening. In exchange, tomorrow morning's first supply check goes to the deputy's assistant."

Orsen wrote out his own substitution and his own rest himself. Cassian had no grounds to take it from him.

What remained wasn't five pairs to repair but three. The midnight shift glove was Orsen's own dry personal pair, and the two ward firewood carriers used the two spare pairs. Only Cassian's dawn pair and the two shutter checkers' gloves still needed night repair.

"One person, three pairs, that's an hour and a half," Mari said from across the room. "Two people, forty five minutes each. Only from those who finish their own work first and volunteer."

Serena opened the repair spot for anyone willing. No one raised a hand. Everyone who had spent the day on drainage, laundry, and water carrying had already finished their own shift. The blank line wasn't proof of laziness, it was proof that there was no time left.

Cassian spoke.

"I know how to stitch leather."

Serena looked at him.

"A supply officer did this himself, during the war?"

"The army wasn't so well provided that it could wait for a seamster while men got frostbite."

"Then take one pair. Your own. I'll take one."

"And the third?"

"Leave it blank, and ask the site lead whether the shutter check can go from two people to one."

Yoren refused to do the check alone. He couldn't watch the furnace and the water barrel at the same time. Instead, he offered to split the night shutter hours into two segments, with Ilma taking the first and himself the second. The two of them agreed to share a single pair of gloves by swapping the lining cloth. The third repair was no longer needed.

Serena and Cassian spread the two remaining pairs of gloves out at the end table in the shared dining hall. The rental time on Doran's repair kit was limited to one hourglass. After use, they had to record the needle count and the remaining thread length.

Cassian set a leather scrap under the split palm and pulled the waxed thread through. His fingers weren't clumsy. Serena turned the thumb seam of Yoren's glove inside out. The first two stitches were too tight and the leather puckered.

"The spacing's too narrow," Cassian said.

"Narrower than a report revision margin?"

"A report can tear and hands still won't freeze."

Serena undid one stitch. Cassian didn't reach over to fix it for her. He kept stitching his own glove instead.

In the dining hall, all that was left was the sound of the boiled water pot cooling and the small friction of needles piercing leather. They said little, but each knew when the other's next shift began. Cassian remembered that Serena had to read the dawn sample results, and Serena remembered that he had to check the dawn snow bridge signage.

"What about your right hand?" Serena asked.

"It's not fire work lasting over ten minutes."

"Sewing is still hand work."

Cassian looked at the hourglass. "I'll switch off in five minutes."

"Switch with who?"

"Not with you. I mean I'll stop."

He set the needle down exactly five minutes later. He put off the remaining two stitches to paid repair time the next day and decided to borrow one of Orsen's spare over gloves for the dawn patrol. He didn't push himself to finish it on his own.

Serena finished one pair of Yoren's gloves. As she went to cut the last knot, she noticed a small black mark on the inside of Cassian's glove cuff. It was one of the old supply markings that used to distinguish midnight, dawn, ward, and north gate.

"When did you write this?"

"During the first night shift."

It was the night he had watched over Noah's door without locking it. Serena didn't ask anything more. Cassian had also seen that she'd already written the dawn sample bottle numbers in the margin of her report, but he didn't ask why.

Each finished glove had a name and a time attached. Yoren's, Serena, forty minutes. Cassian's, Cassian, twenty minutes, two stitches unfinished, next handler needed. The guild's four needles and two leather scraps were also confirmed as returned.

Cassian brought Yoren's gloves over to the shutter shift roster. Serena didn't pick up his unfinished pair. Instead, she assigned one and a half paid hours to tomorrow's daytime repair line and posted a revocable call for volunteers.

"Serena."

Cassian said her name for the first time. He didn't skip asking permission first.

"Outside of official settings, is it all right to call you that?"

Serena checked the glove sheet once more.

"In this dining hall, tonight."

She decided nothing beyond that. Cassian didn't ask about the relationship between an auditor and a regent, and Serena didn't say aloud the comparison that they had stitched up each other's wounds.

Outside, the new footboard's rope creaked once in the wind. The midnight shift glove and the dawn shift glove sat in separate slots. The two of them, remembering only when the other needed to be awake, put out the dining hall lights.