What She Owes Her Own Creations

She did not write the rule that night, and then, somewhat to her surprise, she found she did not need to.

She had expected to. She had sat down at the kitchen table with the cold tea she had made and forgotten, and the notebook open to the model side, fully intending to set out, in careful sentences, what it was she owed the people she had made — to draw the line between writing a person down and writing a person through, to work the thing up into a principle she could keep. She got as far as I made them, and stopped, because the sentence that wanted to follow it was a sentence Tev had already said to her, that afternoon, in a small room that smelled of oil and brass and bread, with considerably more authority than she could bring to it at her own table. You may write me down. You may not write me through. There was, she decided, no improving on that by restating it in her own hand. A thing she had been taught by being told off for it did not need, also, to be filed.

So she wrote down, instead, only the practical things, which were the things that were actually new. The doors Tev had walked her to, of which there had been seven, and the four that carried, on the inside of the jamb, the small distinctive scratch he had called — with the courtesy of a man not wishing to alarm her — the visitor's mark. She copied their locations from his list onto the Lentar side of the notebook: the scrivener's on the third street, the green door at the south end she had thought was only a storeroom, the arch behind the fountain Sefra, and one she had not known was a door at all until he showed her the hinge. Four doors that opened, it seemed, for someone who was not her, and that had been opening, by the look of the scratches, for some time.

She sat with that, and found it was enough to be going on with. She did not, tonight, owe Lentar an essay about what she owed it; the essay would have been, she suspected, another version of the comfortable argument, the kind she had learned this year to be most suspicious of when it arrived sounding finished. What she owed it, tonight, was narrower and harder: to find out who had been letting themselves in through her city's doors while she stood on this side of the page deciding how to feel about it. She closed the notebook slightly before she wanted to, washed the cold tea down the sink, and stood for a moment in front of her own blue door, with its knocker that was a hand holding a pomegranate, the seeds showing at the split — a door, at least, whose every scratch she now knew the provenance of — and thought that on her next visit she had better start with the green one she had taken for a storeroom.