Chapter 27 Yael
27
Yael
Yael’s first day with the company passes thusly:
They rise with the estate—or rather, with its masters—meeting their parents in the informal dining hall for a quick and silent breakfast of smoked fish, heavy dark bread, and watered wine. Dozens of servants have been busy since before dawn, cleaning and preparing meals and lighting fires in the grates of the many rooms that remain cool even in summertime, thanks to the slick gray stonework of the manor house. They always complete their chores early, then scatter until Baremon leaves for the office, as Yael’s father prefers that the staff remain largely unseen. When Yael lived here as a child, some days the sun would rise and set without them passing a single soul within the labyrinthine halls.
After breakfast, the family’s gold-crowned ebony carriage ferries them from the estate, up the Queens’ Road, and to the Copper Court to begin their workday. The center of industry in Harrow shines as though built from the very coins within the capital’s mint. Each office, shopfront, and merchant’s club is built of blush-colored stones topped with copper-tiled roofs. One has to shield one’s eyes to look up at them. The Clauneck Company is the tallest of them all, like a lighthouse presiding over an ocean of molten copper.
Yael is put on the fifth of ten levels (ten levels aboveground, that is) in the Hall of Exchange. It is a long, goldenwood-paneled chamber with Uncle Mikhil’s office stationed at the far end. His office has tall, narrow shelves of leather-bound tomes—purely for ornament—and tall, narrow windows with scarlet and gold glass panes. Yael occupies a desk in the outer chamber, acting as a sort of river lock in the channel between their uncle and the dozen number crunchers and errand runners pooled together at the front of the hall.
Hour after hour, Yael is brought records documenting the exchange of unminted silver ore and gold dust for the copper, silver, and gold denaris minted within Harrow, as well as the exchange of Harrow’s coinage for Perpignan’s knygar, or Yang’s guarani, and so on. Each record must be cross-checked with the Clauneck Company’s statements of account, allowing for fluctuations in the values of the coinage, to ensure that the totals match, that no spellwork has escaped detection, that no fraudulent pieces have slipped through. Compiling these reports is the job of the underlings down the hall, but it’s Yael’s job to cross-check them. When necessary, they pause long enough to run to the Records Library to grab some relevant file or ledger; only Claunecks and a select few highly ranked employees are trusted to enter, and Yael almost welcomes the task for an excuse to stretch their legs and rest their eyes before it’s back to the reports.
When work is done for the day, Yael rides to a nearby merchant’s club in the Golden Court with Baremon and Mikhil for a business dinner. Yael is seldom called upon to contribute, but as Baremon explained it in the carriage, their presence paints the picture of a family business—a boon for customers and for potential customers who consider themselves moral, family-loving folk. When Baremon does signal for them to speak, it’s to leave their dinner guests charmed and laughing over some recounted escapade from Yael’s time abroad in Perpignan or Locronan, or to do some pretty bit of magic for entertainment’s sake. They’re never asked to offer an opinion on anything important, which makes it easy for Yael not to have any opinions.
At the end of the day, lying in their old bedchambers, Yael can’t say that they’re happy on this estate, or in this city, or in this life. But they know it’s where they ought to be, and that this is the life they should be living. When they wonder why, and where that knowledge comes from, a deep pain flares up inside of them—as though the truth is lodged beneath their bones or buried in the meat of their heart, unreachable without sharper knives and stronger magic than they can wield, even having visited Clauneck’s altar this very morning.
So the next morning, they do it all again, and the morning after that.
Time passes. Bloomfield begins to feel like a memory from childhood—pleasant but faint, and ultimately lost to them forever now that they’ve finally grown up.