The Empty Pan

The assay house at Marsk keeps no fire. Heat swells the brass, and a swelled beam reads long, so the arms of the great scale hang over a slate floor cold enough to ache the teeth of anyone who works there past the third bell. I was sixteen the winter I was to be sworn, and I remember the cold better than I remember being afraid, though I was that too. Verrel had the even ear. Everyone in the guild said it the way you’d say a woman had one leg — a fact about her, a little pitiable, mostly useless. An assayer’s trade is the King’s Even: you take the merchant’s ell or the chandler’s drachm-weight, you set it against the crown standard sealed in wax in the cellar, and you stamp it true or you break it. Ninety weighings in ten, the standard is what you’re paid to protect. Nobody paid for the even ear. The even ear heard past the standard to the thing the standard was standing in for, and there was no coin in that, because the thing the standard stands in for cannot be bought or sold. I did…