POV: Serina
The petition office opens at the seventh bell.
Serina is there at sixth, sitting on the step with her hands in her lap, watching the sky go from black to the color of old ash. She has not slept. She does not feel tired the way she normally would. She feels scraped clean, like something went through her in the night and took the soft parts out, and what is left is just the part that keeps moving.
The clerk who opens the door is young. Maybe twenty. He has a rank mark on his wrist, a four, middle class, the kind of number that means his worst day is still better than her best one. He looks at her sitting on the step, and his expression does not change. People like her are furniture to people like him. She knows this. She stands up anyway.
"I need to file an emergency petition," she says. "Wrongful sentencing. My brother is nine years old."
He looks at her wrist. The blank skin. Looks back at her face.
"You need a ranked co-signer."
"I know. I am asking if there is any exception for."
"There is not."
He steps past her and goes inside. The door swings shut. Not slammed. That would have been something. It just closes, the way a book closes when the story is over, and she stands on the step looking at the grain of the wood and breathes.
She does not cry.
She has a list.
The advocacy guild is on Merchant Row, which is the kind of street that does not want people like her on it. She can feel it the moment she turns the corner, the way the vendors' eyes track her, the way the foot traffic splits slightly around her, as if blankness is catching.
The man behind the guild desk has very clean hands and the expression of someone who has said the same thing so many times it has stopped meaning anything.
"Standard representation for a capital case is twelve hundred imperial marks," he says.
She does not blink. Twelve hundred marks is what she earns in fourteen months, if nothing breaks, if Pip does not need medicine, if winter is short.
"Is there a reduced rate for"
"There is a charity register. The waitlist is eleven months."
She thanks him. She does not know why she thanks him. Her mother raised her with manners, and some things are just in the muscle now.
Outside, she crosses guild off her list.
Lady Orvaine's house is the farthest she walks all morning. Three neighborhoods up the hill, into the clean air, where the streets are paved, and there are no blank wrists to be seen. She has been washing this woman's linens for two years. Every week. Never late, never damaged, always the lavender rinse Lady Orvaine prefers without being asked twice.
She knocks on the servants' entrance.
A maid answers. Serina gives her name. The maid disappears. Serina waits on the step.
Two minutes. Five.
The maid comes back. "Lady Orvaine is not receiving."
"I know she is home," Serina says, very carefully. "I only need."
"She is not receiving."
The door closes.
This one she does feel. Not in her chest. In her hands, they curl at her sides without meaning to, fingernails pressing small crescents into her palms. She stands on the step until her hands are flat again.
Then she walks back down the hill.
The street clerk is the last name on her list. She found him through a washhouse woman who said he had signed petitions before, for a small fee. She tracks him down to a corner near the market, a wiry man with a six on his wrist and a coat that has been mended so many times it is more patch than coat.
She makes her case in three sentences.
He listens. Then he laughs.
"Sign for an unranked?" He waves a hand. "Girl, my rank's only a six. I sign for a blank and they'll audit my whole household. Not for any amount of coin you're carrying."
He walks away. He is not cruel about it. He is just honest, and honesty from strangers is its own kind of hurt.
She stands in the middle of the market with people flowing around her like water around a stone. Someone's cart clips her shoulder. She does not move. She is doing the math again, the same math she has been doing all day, hoping a different total will come out if she tries enough times.
It does not.
She gets home when the light is going gold.
Pip's cot is against the far wall. He has been in that cell for four days now, and she has been washing his blanket once a week, even so, keeping it ready, keeping the habit because letting the habit go would mean something she is not ready for it to mean.
She sits on the edge of it.
She has a list. It has had seven items on it since this morning. She crosses them off in her head, one by one. Petition office. Advocacy guild. Lady Orvaine. Street clerk. Two other small possibilities she chased before noon and buried before midday.
Seven lines. Seven crossed off.
She smooths the blanket under her hand.
Pip found this blanket in a rubbish pile when he was five and dragged it home like it was treasure. It had a hole in one corner and smelled like someone else's dog. She washed it four times and mended the hole with orange thread because that was the only color she had. He still asks her sometimes why it has an orange patch. She always tells him: Because orange is the
best color. He argues every time. He is never right. She has never told him he is not right.
She sits there until the gold goes out of the light.
Then she gets on her knees and pries up the third floorboard from the window.
The chisel is where she put it two years ago, wrapped in an old flour sack, the head of it still sharp. She stole it from a building site when she was fifteen, for no reason she could name at the time, only a feeling. The feeling that someday she might need to open something that was not meant to be opened.
She takes it out. Unwraps it. Runs her thumb along the edge.
Then she wraps it again, carefully, in the cleanest cloth she owns, and tucks it inside her coat against her ribs.
Two days left.
She goes out into the dark.