I’m standing on tiptoes to hang the latest sheet over the rafters to dry when Rat starts barking. Lark lunges from her place at the table, swathed in a drift of wood shavings, and unearths the crossbow from a pile of papers. By the time she has it free of wood shavings and the crank wound, the door has swung open, and Soe stands on the threshold, her arms full of parcels.
Her gaze sweeps the kitchen. Her lips part.
“What,” she says, “are you doing?”
Iano and Veran crowd behind her, their attention flickering between Lark—filmed in sawdust, with the crossbow in one hand and a carving knife in the other, a bloody rag bound hastily around the base of her thumb—and me, standing on my highest tiptoes to reach the rafters, my hands, dress, and probably face smudged with ink.
I don’t blame them for staring. We’ve turned Soe’s kitchen into a cross between a mad chemist’s lab and some kind of library catastrophe. Ink boils heartily on the hearth, thickening down to the stickiness we need for the stamps. Next to it, resin melts in a pan, filling the room with the scent of burning pine. Paper and parchment litter the table and floor, all stamped with meandering lines of letters, many nonsensical or overlapping. In the center of the table stands a bowl packed with damp sand. Wood shavings coat the floor, and in a walnut basket sit piles of thumb-size wooden blocks.
This is nothing, though—she’s going to have a fit when she sees the workroom.
Veran looks around. “Had fun, did you?”
“Tamsin! Be careful!” Iano leaps forward, stretching out his hand to help me off the chair.
I don’t take it, though—I reach up and pull down one of the dry sheets and hold it outward, grinning.
“Ha!” I exclaim.
His gaze flicks over it. “‘Rain cannot soak dry ground’—what does that mean?”
I shake the paper and then look at Lark. I tip my finger toward my chin, and then at Iano, in the motion she showed me this morning.
Tell him, I sign.
“We’re printing,” Lark says. “Putting words onto pages.”
“Stamping labels?” Iano asks, looking around at the wreck of the kitchen, bemused.
“No—stamping sentences.” She gestures at me. “Tamsin’s sentences.”
He looks again at the sheet I’m holding out. “Why?”
I pretend that he’s asked how instead of why. I point to Lark and start to sign all the relevant words we’ve worked on today, fingerspelling the ones I can’t remember—letters, sand, resin, blocks, ink, paper, press . . .
“What are you doing?” Iano asks, looking at my fingers.
“I teach Tamsin some hand signs,” Lark says.
Veran swivels his head to her. “You taught Tamsin sign language? You know sign language?”
She rubs the back of her neck and answers in Eastern, explaining about her deaf friend. She nods back at me. “I am not remembering all of them, though.”
“I don’t understand,” Soe says, looking at the nearest scrap of paper, with a crisp line of Es stamped out like a written screech. “How are you printing sentences? I only have two sets of each letter.”
“Yes, we—we are pushing the stamps into the sand.” She points to the bowl of damp sand on the table. “To make . . . holes. Lu’tuw—itsk,” she says to Veran.
“Imprints.”
“Uah, the shapes of the letters in the sand, then we pour in the resin.” She points to the pan full of bubbling sap by the fire. “They get hard and make the letter shapes. Then we put them on blocks, so—new stamps.”
That was your idea, I sign to her.
“Uah, that part is my idea,” she agrees hesitantly. “It is how, uh, how the rustlers are forging their brands.” She switches back into Eastern again, explaining what she already described to me—that the rustlers would build a bootleg kiln, melt pig iron inside, get drunk around it all night, and then cast the melted metal into shapes in the sand. It meant they could forge new, unregistered brands on the go without the bother of finding a blacksmith.
Veran is listening to her with a mixture of surprise and awe on his face. Iano is still watching me worriedly. I finally step down from the chair.
Soe picks up one of our new resin stamps. “So . . . are you just stamping a few words at a time? Wouldn’t writing be faster?”
I lift my hands, then hesitate. I still don’t know enough signs to explain, and Lark would have to translate my words anyway. Instead, I beckon them to the workroom. Silently, they follow me from the trashed kitchen into the equally trashed workroom, where the big press sits in the middle of the floor, surrounded by inky leather pads, dishes strewn with stamps, and drifts of crumpled paper. I urge Iano and Soe closer, so they can look into the basin of the big press, where the big wooden block sits, carved with ten rows of grooves, plus a splash of blood from where Lark’s knife slipped while she was carving them. Filling the top two rows are tight lines of letter stamps, facing up.
Iano starts to speak, but I hold up a finger and pick up a leather pad. I smear it in a blob of tacky ink, then pat it over the letters. Soe and Iano watch as I hunt for a scrap of paper that still has some clear space, then set it carefully over the letters. When it’s in place, I pick up the long wooden arm, fit it into the screw, and haul it down. Lark has been doing this bit for most of the day, but I’m determined to do it now, pulling the clamp tight until my arms tremble with the effort. When I can’t pull it anymore, I reverse it, lifting the screw until I can slide my hand underneath and pull out the paper, stamped perfectly with two lines of crisp, uniform text.
Iano takes the page, the sentence identical to the one he already saw. Soe looks at it, too, then at her press, the sides now smeared with sticky black ink. Veran and Lark watch from the doorway. I catch Lark’s eye—she leans against the doorframe and gives me a tired but satisfied half smile. She’s been an absolute machine today, hauling and carving and teaching me good Eastern curses and adding every sign she knows to her speech. There’s no doubt in my mind that this beast we’ve created would never have come about without her.
It’s not perfect yet. We’re still finessing the ink—too wet and it runs off the resin, too sticky and it pulls them off their wooden backs. The resin takes a long time to harden, and many of the letters are misshapen or fuzzy with sand. And the wooden backs aren’t right either—they tend to splinter after a few presses. Metal—something soft like lead—would be ideal. A letter and block cast entirely in metal. With the right equipment, I don’t see why it can’t be done.
Iano looks up at me, back at the page, then up to me again. He doesn’t seem to know what to say.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he begins. “This is . . . clever. Very inventive, to make rows of stamps. But . . . I still don’t understand. This is all so much work. If you want to write out a sentence, why wouldn’t you just . . . write it?”
A spark of indignation flares in my chest. I face him fully and give him a series of three signs that should be obvious even to someone who doesn’t know them.
My. Wrist. Hurts, I sign, adding what sounds I can make with my mouth.
“I know,” he says, taking my right hand. “I know your wrist gives you trouble, but . . . surely you can write a few sentences, take a break, and write some more later? And if you want to make several copies, why not commission a woodblock?”
The spark turns into a flurry at his questions. How am I to dictate a woodblock, Iano? Why should I be content with scratching out just a few sentences at a time, while the rest tumble and wheel inside me? What if my thoughts go beyond one block? What if a different word strikes me halfway through? Don’t you see what movable letters can do? Don’t you see what we’ve done?
“Oh!” Veran says from the door. “That reminds me—the notice we saw in town.”
“Right.” Iano digs in his pocket and pulls out a folded sheet. He opens it and hands it to me, worry creasing his face. “Kimela Novarni has been officially instated as the ashoki. I don’t know how, or why—perhaps she threatened my mother, the way she threatened me. It would have been easy after I’d already named her to the court.”
I jerk my gaze up to him, my brow furrowed.
“Tamsin said a few days ago she didn’t think Kimela was behind it all,” Soe says. She’s right, but my irritation builds again despite her good intentions—I’m tired of people having my conversations for me. I pull my index finger across my chest.
“We,” Lark says from the doorway. She’s leaning against the frame and watching me. “Don’t,” she continues as I splice the air with my palms. “Do that.”
“Just because you wouldn’t do these things as ashoki doesn’t mean others wouldn’t,” Iano says.
Veran shifts in the doorway. “Either way, if we can confront her, this could be a perfect opportunity to either get a confession out of her, or see if she has any better sense of who’s behind the blackmail.”
Get a confession?
“How?” I ask.
“Well, she’ll be traveling by coach on the circuit there on the page.” Veran’s face takes on a kind of wry excitement. “And it just so happens that we have a professional bandit in our midst.”
Behind him, Lark furrows her brow. “What?”
He half-turns to her. “Think about it, Lark—we stop the coach just like you stopped all those others, somewhere outside Giantess. You and Tamsin could get in and confront her, like you did me. Stuck in that little space, facing both the Sunshield Bandit—who she framed—and Tamsin—who she had attacked . . . don’t you see? She’ll have to confess, or give us the information we need.”
I raise my eyebrows at the optimism—or, more bluntly, naiveté—of his conviction. Lark looks past him to where Iano is nodding his head. Her gaze slides to me. I frown and give her two quick signs, the opposite of what we’ve been telling each other all day.
Bad idea.
Soe catches my movement and watches me complete it. The boys are watching Lark. She stays quiet a moment longer, and then says something to Veran in Eastern, jerking her head for the front door. He hesitates, then hurries after her. We hear the door open and close, followed by the murmur of voices on the porch.
Iano turns back to me. “I know you don’t think it’s Kimela. Veran isn’t entirely convinced it’s her, either—he’s more suspicious of Kobok. But even if it’s not her, we may still be able to get some answers. And—you may be able to share your ideas about policy. If she’s not guilty, then there’s no other option—she’s Moquoia’s ashoki for the rest of her life.”
“Tamsin isn’t dead,” Soe points out. “Ashoki is a lifetime position, and she’s still alive.”
A flash of trepidation crosses Iano’s face, and then he meets my gaze and the expression is replaced with guilt. “I know, but . . .”
I make a flowery, agitated gesture to my lips to show that my thoughts are the same as his. Dead or not, I’m hardly going to sit onstage and silently strum my dulcimer for perplexed audiences.
“I’m not saying we can’t work something out,” Iano says quickly. “You’ll always have a place in court, Tamsin, whether you’re onstage or not. Perhaps you can serve alongside Kimela, compose music that she performs. Maybe she can be convinced to adopt our ideas.”
Kimela Novarni would sooner ally with an Utzibor bat than me, I expect, and even if she did, my professional hubris balks at the thought of writing lyrics for her to sing.
My thoughts must show on my face, because Iano waves at the workshop, the press, the paper in my hand. “At any rate, we have a few days to strategize. You can use what you’ve started here today . . . write something that might sway her. It could be the best chance we have.”
I look away, in part to avoid his searching gaze. I stare at the press, the stamps, the ink, the half-formed thoughts pressed into paper.
“Maybe we can still print it, whatever you come up with,” Soe says, clearly trying to find some compromise. “We can keep making the stamps if you’d rather write it out that way. But . . .” She nods apologetically. “I am going to need my press back. I have orders from town I have to fill.”
I sigh. Then I point to one of the scraps of paper, and, looking between the two of them, bring my fingertips together.
“More,” I say.
“More paper?” Soe asks. “I can get you more. I’ll have to run back to town in a day or two for deliveries. I can get more from the ragpickers then.”
I nod, trying to force myself to look on the bright side. I don’t think Kimela set up my attack. But chances are good she’ll have more current information than any we’ve been able to glean so far. If she’s the ashoki now, she’ll have already started her scrutiny of the court. Surely chaos this big has to have left some trail.
I look back to Iano. He gives me a placating smile.
“I know you want to aim bigger,” he says. “But I think it’s best to stay within our means. Stay small. That makes sense, right? Kimela first.”
I force everything I have into returning a half-formed smile.
He nods and gets up to help Soe with their parcels. I stare absently at the cluttered tabletop.
Stay small.
For whatever reason, instead of the piles of paper and ink and words teetering around me, I get a vision of that empty room in Utzibor where I was locked for six weeks. Four walls and a bucket, with only a tiny airhole to the world outside.
Stay small.