The Broken Thing

Sorrel came back from the Court with nothing, and carried it into the hollow as if it were heavy.

"They took it," she said, to Pettigrew, who had been on the stool since first light in the attitude of someone not waiting. "They took it, and they read it, and they didn't say anything." She thought about that. "They said it quite loudly."

Pettigrew received this with her head on one side and her collar entirely still, which in Pettigrew is a scream.

"The silence of the Court," she said, "is a well-known instrument of the Court's policy. I have deployed it myself on several occasions. It means nothing whatever."

"It felt like it meant something."

"It is meant to feel like that. That is how one can tell it means nothing." And she went and stood at the gate for the rest of the morning, ten feet from Mungo, looking out across the green in the one direction the Court is not, and Grizel wrote "settling in" for the second time, and underlined it.

Sorrel had brought something else back. It was in her fist, and she went with it to the shed.

It was a clasp: a small brass thing the size of her head, off a bag or a shoe of the Above's, with a bent hinge and a tongue that no longer met its catch. She had found it on the Court's wall on the way out, and carried it a whole day's flight home, for no reason she was prepared to give. She put it on Wick's bench. Wick looked at it through the jam-jar lids, and turned it over, and made the small noise he makes when a thing is broken in a way he understands, and took a tool out of his beard. In the time it took Sorrel to decide whether to leave, the clasp went click, and met itself, and was whole.

Now, among fliskies a gift obliges somebody to be thanked, at length and properly, with reference to the qualities of the gift and the discernment of the giver. Sorrel was not certain which of them had given what to whom. She was certain that somebody was owed a speech.

Among grumlins, a favour is a debt, a debt is an entry, and respect is silence. A thing well made speaks for itself and would be embarrassed by company. Wick put the clasp down on the bench and picked up the table leg he had been working on.

So Sorrel thanked him.

"Thank you for the mend," she said. "And for the speed of the mend, which was considerable. I mean that as a description. Not as a rank." Wick had gone red to the goggles. Sorrel, who had never made a speech in her life and had not known until now that they are easier to start than to stop, went on. "And for the tool. It's a good tool. It's pointed. At the end. And the bench, which is level, I noticed that. And the shed, which is a shed that..."

"Nearly," said Wick, to the table leg.

It was not a reply to anything. It was the only word he had on him. Sorrel stopped. She thought she had said too much, and he thought he had said too little, and she took the clasp and went, and both of them were quite certain it had gone badly.

He has set the small tools out in a row along the bench tonight, in order of size, in case anything else in the Anunder should happen to break.

Gnomesby's second letter of the appeal came at dusk by beetle. It proposes a hearing at the gate at midwinter on the question of who keeps the book. It is addressed, for the first time, to the keeper by name, and the Provost has spelled the name correctly, which Grizel regards as the most alarming thing he has done yet.