Reaven's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

The filed paper protected the lot, but not Reaven's face. The wolf had studied her that night in the rain. She knew the barons kept a portrait of every registrant. If an assessor came to match her against the clerks' file, he would see the same woman the wolf had seen guarding an unlicensed build. The forged stamp would fall apart under one hard look. She found the old debt-man at the tavern, gnawing a strip of smoked crow jerky. He set it down when she sat. "They logged your paper," he said. "Now they'll want to see who signed it." "The wolf saw my face," Reaven said. "The clerk saw it again. One assessor puts those together and I'm done." He chewed and thought. "Then don't be the face on the file. Be the mourner." She understood. The registration named her as filer, but not as builder. If she stood at the lot as a grieving woman, one name among the drowned, the assessor would see a memorial in use, not a forger caught. That night the assessor came. Reaven heard the wolf first, its steam trailing pale through the smog, its yellow eyes fixed on the brass skull arch where the families gathered. The mechanical cat sat still at the lot's edge, its gear-set eyes turning to mark him. Reaven did not run. She knelt at a stone plate and pressed her hand to a carved name. The assessor lifted his lantern. "You filed this memorial?" "My brother is on that stone," Reaven said. She did not lie about a brother. She let the grief in her voice do the work. Around her, eleven family members knelt at their own plates. The wolf's eyes swept the kneeling row and found no lone builder, only mourners. The assessor read the plates. Fourteen names. He read them slowly, and his jaw tightened. These were men his own masters had called runaways. He looked at the raven watch on Reaven's coat, then at her worn hands. He could not square the woman on the file with the woman at the stone. The two would not meet in his mind, because Reaven had made them separate. "It's registered," he said at last. "Keep it to a memorial's size." He turned the wolf and left. Reaven let out her breath when the steam faded. She had beaten the match. The file and the mourner would stay two women. But the assessor's warning stuck in her ears. Keep it to a memorial's size. He had counted the plates. He knew the exact scale the paper allowed. The old man joined her at the arch. "He'll come back," he said. "And he'll count again." Reaven looked up at the empty air where a hundred beams should rise. Every new beam would break the number he had just fixed in his memory. She had saved her face tonight. Now she had to hide the size.