Selene's Arithmetic

Selene Karst's calculation sheet had no names on it.

What it had instead were winter flour rations, the distance one cart could cover in a day, and the lodging costs of three auditors, all lined up in even columns. The calculation room attached to the council hall was narrow, and an old scale and a grain humidity chart hung on the wall. Lydia looked for the error first. If she found an error, she could argue.

“The auditors' travel costs are too high,” Lydia said.

Selene turned to the second page as though she had been waiting for it. “They are higher if you send them to the northwest interior. What I wrote down is the average for the four counties nearest the capital.”

“The premise that city auditors would be sent inland is wrong.”

“Then where is the guarantee that the audit the port receives will not be paid for out of inland grain tax?”

Lydia stopped the tip of her pen. The numbers themselves were correct. What was wrong was more likely the order the numbers had been set in. The audit system was needed to keep the North Gate loss tables on record, but the moment the cost was pushed inland first, another dinner table went empty.

Selene did not let Lydia's silence run long. “I am not taking issue with your marriage. I dislike politics that borrows royal blood, but today's item is smaller and more expensive than that. If port autonomy cannot pay even the cost of its own records, then that autonomy is being subsidized by the inland winter.”

Cassian stood at the door of the calculation room. He could have stepped in, and did not. Lydia was not comfortable with that silence. Because she was not comfortable, she needed it.

“Are you saying the amendment's implementation should be suspended?”

“I am saying the party who bears the cost should be corrected before it takes effect.”

“And if the North Gate loss tables disappear in the meantime?”

Selene's hand brushed past the end of the black ribbon. “The inland has lost people too, because of loss tables that disappeared. That is why I came holding numbers. I did not come to cover it over with feeling.”

The temporary hearing room had only six chairs. They were too low for a noble to sit in and too clean for a laborer. Lydia did not ask for the seating to be changed. Instead she arranged it so that the dockworkers' representative and the inland tenants' representative could look at the record desk rather than at each other. If the two of them began to fight, the two nobles could each hide behind their backs.

The dockworkers' representative had black grime left under his fingernails. He did not smile even after he saw Lydia's port crest.

“My lady, when a ship is held, we have no day's wage. So will the compensation come faster if an auditor is attached?”

Lydia swallowed the answer she had prepared. “I cannot guarantee yet that it will be faster.”

“Then for us it is only one more procedure that makes things later.”

Selene countered at once. “If the inland pays for that procedure, tenant households receive less flour in the winter rations.”

The inland tenants' representative had an old hat resting on his knees. “It is not merely receiving less. When it goes out as tax, the landlord's storehouse stays as it is and our share shrinks. It is the same on the duke's estate.”

Selene's face hardened, very slightly. Lydia did not miss the change. Selene had spoken of the inland's costs, but she was not fully prepared to defend the tenancy structure of her own estate.

“Will you submit the storehouse distribution rules of the Karst estate?” Lydia asked.

Selene looked at Lydia. It was the face of someone who had had an attack returned as an attack. “I will submit them. On the condition that you also submit the register of delayed dock wages in the Three Ports.”

The dockworkers' representative raised his head. “The register holds more ship numbers than names.”

Lydia's pen pressed into the paper. Those words stayed a long time. She wanted to believe the port remembered people by name, but ledgers were never that kind.

The hearing did not end in anyone's victory. The dockworkers gave Lydia no automatic support, and the tenants' representative did not thank Selene. Each of the two nobles had had the blanks in her own region exposed.

The draft agreement on the record desk was revised three times. Elias cut the sentences down, Selene divided the cost responsibility again, and Lydia moved the deadline for implementation.

“Immediate implementation of the audit amendment is suspended for seven days,” Lydia said. “In that time we open a joint rations hearing, and the register of delayed dock wages is submitted together with the inland storehouse distribution rules.”

Selene picked up her quill. “In exchange, I will not attack the temporary representative's seat itself for the duration of this emergency council. But if I judge that your amendment hides inland costs, I will attack again at the next session.”

“And I will not remove the tenancy structure of the Karst estate from the scope of the hearing.”

“If it is removed, I will be the first to object. No matter who removes it.”

The two of them did not shake hands. A handshake looked like too early a conclusion. Instead they signed different lines of the same page. Lydia's signature went beside the port crest, Selene's beside the grain crest. The two crests were close, but they did not overlap.

Before the agreement was complete, the people around the record desk changed places three times. The dockworkers' representative had stood by the wall at first, but when Elias asked about the format of the delayed wage register, he came forward.

“Ship numbers alone are not enough,” he said. “Three men work under the same number. One is injured, one is paying off a debt, and one has no name in the ledger.”

Lydia stopped her pen. “No name in the ledger means.”

“A replacement hand. He came in after the storm. If the ship is held before his name is entered, that man does not even get the delayed wage.”

Selene wrote the words down. “Then the port register counts fewer than the actual number of workers.”

“The inland tenant register is no different,” the tenants' representative said. He kept the hat on his knees the whole time. “If only the head of household is written down, the mouths that share the winter ration are cut in half. Tax is collected by household, and starving is done person by person.”

When the numbers she had studied in the calculation room came into the hearing room, their shape changed. Lydia found herself looking first at whose name had been left out, rather than at whether her amendment was right or wrong. It was not a pleasant thing to learn.

“In the joint hearing register I will record ship numbers together with the actual names,” Lydia said.

Selene added at once. “The inland will record the head of household together with the number of people drawing rations. But the public copy will mask the debt entries. If landlords use them to press for repayment, the hearing becomes a punishment ground.”

For the first time, the dockworkers' representative looked at Selene. “You know about that?”

“I learn late too,” Selene said. “That is why I write it down.”

Cassian did not step into that conversation. Instead he pressed a finger to the column for the wounded on the North Gate loss table. Lydia did not settle on what he was thinking. Only that the next loss table now had a chance of carrying fewer blanks.

Cassian stood one step back from the record desk. Lydia did not seek an answer from him. That he had not mediated went unrecorded as well. Choices that went unrecorded also became material for the next conversation.

“How does the grand duke see this agreement?” Elias asked.

Cassian folded the loss table. “Seven days is a long time at the North Gate.”

“Do you object?”

“Not yet. On the condition that the loss tables do not disappear.”

Selene heard that and tilted her head. “Soldiers usually dislike procedure.”

“I dislike starving soldiers more than procedure,” Cassian answered.

That brief exchange was neither intimacy nor hostility. Lydia confirmed that Selene was looking at the loss table and not at Cassian's face. That alone kept one unnecessary fight from starting.

Before she folded her copy of the agreement, Selene said to Lydia, “If you believe the port is automatically on your side, my lady, you will not last long.”

“I heard as much today.”

“Hearing it and reflecting it in the next table are not the same.”

“And you will not last long either, if you believe the inland is automatically on yours.”

The corner of Selene's mouth did not move. “I heard as much today.”

No laughter and no goodwill passed between the two of them. What remained instead was a record that they had each received the same sentence at a different cost. Lydia judged that this was the best that was possible now.

Oswin was waiting at the exit of the council hall. His hands were folded like those of a man who already knew about the agreement the two of them had signed.

“So the two duke's daughters have adjusted their arithmetic.”

“We have decided to open a hearing,” Lydia said.

“A hearing is a fine institution. In peacetime.” Oswin looked back into the hall. The crown princess's seat was empty, but the three shadows behind the chair remained. “Distributed power is always late because it is always listening. The North Gate waited today, and tomorrow it will not be able to wait.”

Selene asked first. “What item?”

Oswin set the fleet requisition bill down on the record desk. The word collateral was gone. This time it was requisition. Immediate, total, and lasting until the end of the king's incapacity.

Beatrice read the document from behind Oswin. She did not arrange a surprised expression. But the fan in her hand closed once. It was proof that the phrase the crown princess's safety did not carry the same weight even inside the royal house.

“Does Her Highness the crown princess know of this item?” Lydia asked.

Oswin answered gently. “Her Highness wants safety.”

“The question is not what she wants but how much she knows.”

“One cannot hand a young heir every line of the military supply accounts.”

“Then you are saying an item submitted in the heir's name has never been explained to the heir?”

The air by the hall exit thinned. Oswin did not rebuke Lydia. To rebuke her would only make the question larger.

“It will be explained. As much as is necessary.”

Lydia remembered the words exactly as they were. As much as is necessary. A sentence with the question of who decides the necessity left out.

“Tomorrow's first item will be a vote on the immediate requisition of the Avern fleet,” he said. “Tomorrow we vote on survival, not on arithmetic.”

Selene turned the first page of the requisition bill. “Do not use the word survival to fold up the cost table. It does not say which ships are held and which storehouses go empty.”

“Do you wish to finish your calculations before the inland grain reaches the capital, my lady?”

“I am not saying finish the calculations. I am saying do not attach the crown princess's name to an order that has not even started.”

Oswin seemed to have anticipated even Selene's rebuttal. “Her Highness's name is the lawful center that binds the kingdom together. If every region counts only its own costs first, the kingdom falls in the ledgers before it falls at the border.”

Those words came easily to the people gathered at the hall exit. Lydia worked to pick out the sentences that were dangerous precisely because they were easy. Both the port and the inland were counting their own costs first. But telling people not to count costs usually made someone's cost invisible.

Cassian looked at the last page of the requisition bill. “The number of ships needed for the North Gate detour supply route is missing.”

“Your Highness may submit the required quantity tomorrow.”

“Do you mean the grounds for claiming the entire fleet is needed will come into being tomorrow?”

Oswin stopped speaking for a moment. It was a very short gap. Lydia read that gap as a record.

“Even if Your Highness submits nothing, the royal house can judge what safety requires.”

“Being able to judge and having already judged are different things.” Cassian's voice was low. “Do not mix the two in tomorrow's minutes.”

Oswin did not argue further. As he straightened his papers he handed Lydia the last page. On that page was a short rider clause: if she cast a vote in favor, the review of the temporary seat would be handled first. Refusal did not mean only losing something. Something to gain had been prepared for consent as well.

Lydia folded that temptation too and slid it in among the pages of the contract. The ink of the original clause three showed through over the fleet requisition bill. Tomorrow she would have to record not only the refusal but also what price she was refusing.

Elias made a small mark beside the rider clause. “Consent makes the seat faster, refusal makes the grain later.”

“Which is why it looks like a good offer.”

“A good trap comes into the ledgers as a good offer too.”

Lydia did not erase the mark.

Lydia took the papers in her hands. Her hand went to the original contract first. Clause three stated that day to day command of the Three Ports fleet remained with Lydia. How long that sentence could hold in tomorrow's council hall, she could not yet know.

Cassian did not ask. Whether she would take a side, whether she would refuse, what answer she would give. He only spread the original clause three out over the fleet requisition bill. The ink of the two documents had dried in different directions.