When Keshad worked, he did not have to think. Tallying accounts focused his mind. Scraping ink from stone and mixing it with water into a fluid state calmed his trembling. The firm tap tap tap of beads, flung one into another on his counting frame, soothed him with its impersonal pattern. The hiss of lamp flame eased the raging of his heart.

Would he ever see Bai again? Even if she did return, what was she now? Did he mean anything to her at all? Or would she natter on at him, trying to force him into an apprenticeship to one of the seven gods, when in truth the gods meant nothing.

He scratched tallies onto paper: rates for timber bought by the log, hire for carpenters who would bring their own tools, and hire for tools to be used by the gang of debt slaves recently sent to the Barrens.

Why had that bitch Mistress Bettia paraded in with Nasia in tow? Only to stab at him? But maybe she didn’t even know that he and Nasia, when slaves of Master Feden, had been lovers. She likely didn’t know how he had rejected Nasia out of hand the day he had bought himself free from Master Feden’s service. Why should Nasia have thought he would clear her debt, too? There was no way to prove that the pregnancy Feden had rid her of had grown from his seed. Surely Nasia understood that everything he had ever done, he had done to free Bai from the temple’s clutches? Not because he loved Nasia.

He dipped brush to ink. While he could not write, having not been trained among the hierophants of Sapanasu, he had learned the tally marks and basic ideograms necessary to do business, to account, to recall. Anyway, it impressed the mistress when he announced he had done the tallying himself. Yet her two older slaves could write, and so could Captain Anji. There was nothing special about him, nothing anyone would notice or care about.

Why think about the captain’s wife at all? Really, a man could bear her smooth expressions and pleasant smiles and doting looks for only so long. Her even-temperedness would become cursed tiresome.

Chisels and awls and files, on hire; straw bought for matting, and matmakers to do the work; extensive negotiations with the blacksmithing guild, since the captain hoped to entice a smithy to set up shop in the cursed forsaken Barrens. All dust, no markets. Keshad could think of few worse places of exile. Why would anyone want to live there?

He smiled, feeling the curl of irony in his gut. Anyone, that is, except a person who wanted to control the trade in oil of naya, now that it had been proven as useful in war as in healing and lighting.

More acquisitions for the house, coin drawn against the household treasury: a bronze alarm bell; breeding ewes and a pair of rams; homespun for the eventual bridal portions of twenty women who had agreed to travel to the Barrens and set up household shops there.