Point of Hopes

“Your stock in trade,” Rathe murmured.

“Exactly.” LaSier squinted, as though trying to remember, then shook her head. “That’s about all, Nico. He’s a bright boy, but not memorable looking.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Rathe answered, and scrawled the last note on the face of the tablet, stylus digging into the wax. He was ru

LaSier smiled again, wry this time. “He’s a boy, fourteen. Maybe not.”

“I’ll get descriptions, too,” Rathe said.

“Thanks,” LaSier said. “And, Nico: I–and Estel–we’ll take this as a favor.”

Rathe nodded, oddly touched by the offer. Besides, this was the kind of fee that he didn’t refuse, the trade of favor for favor within the law. “I’ll bear that in mind, Cassia, thanks. But let’s see what I find out, first.”

“Agreed,” LaSier said, and turned away. She called over her shoulder, “See you at the fair!”

“You’d better hope not,” Rathe answered, and started back toward Point of Hopes.

Monteia was waiting for him, the youngest of the ru

“Rathe. I need to talk to you.”

Rathe suppressed a sigh–it was very like Monteia to make one feel guilty even when one had been doing one’s duty–but shrugged out of his jerkin, hanging it on the wall pegs as he passed behind Ranazy’s desk. “And I need to talk to you, too,” he said, and followed Monteia into the narrow room.

It was dark, the one narrow window looking onto the rear yard’s shadiest corner, and crowded with the chief point’s work table and a brace of battered chairs. The walls were lined with shelves that held station’s daybooks and a once‑handsome set of the city lawbooks, as well as a stack of the slates everyone used for notes and a selection of unlicensed broadsides stacked on a lower shelf. The latest of those, Rathe saw, with some relief, was over a moon‑month old: hardly current business.

“Have a seat,” Monteia said, and waved vaguely at the chairs on the far side of her table.

Rathe took the darker of the two–the other had been salvaged from someone’s house, and mended, not reliably–and settled himself.

“I hear you had another runaway today,” Monteia went on. She was a tall woman, with a face like a mournful horse and dark brown eyes that looked almost black in the dim light. Her clothes hung loose on her thin frame, utterly unmemorable, if one didn’t see the truncheon that swung at her belt.

Rathe nodded. “Only I don’t think it was a runaway. The girl seemed happy in her work.”

“Oh?” It was hard to tell, sometimes, if Monteia was being skeptical, or merely tired. Quickly, Rathe ran through the story, starting with the butcher’s arrival, and ending with his visit to the ’Serry and the Quentiers’ missing boy. When he had finished, Monteia leaned back in her chair, arms folded, long legs stretched out beneath the table. Looking down, Rathe could see the tip of her shoe protruding from beneath the table, could see, too, the string of cheap braid that hid the mark where the hem had been lengthened for her. Monteia might be chief point, but she was honest enough, in her way, and had children and a household of her own to keep.

“How many runaways is that so far this season?” she asked, after a moment.

“I could check the daybook to be sure,” Rathe answered, “but I’m pretty sure we’ve had eight reported. Nine if you count Herisse, but I want to treat that as an abduction. And of course the Cordiere boy, but that’s not our jurisdiction.”

Monteia nodded.

“Of the eight, then, two were apprentices, both brewers, and the rest ordinary labor,” Rathe continued. “That’s a lot for so early–the first of the Silklands caravans are only just in, and the trading ships haven’t really started yet.”

Monteia said, “We had the points’ di

Rathe blinked, unsure where this was leading–the chief points of the twelve point stations that policed Astreiant dined together once every solar month, ostensibly to exchange information, but more to help establish the points’ legitimacy by behaving like any other guild. The points were relatively new, at least in their present form; it had been the queen’s grandmother who’d given them the authority to enforce the laws, and not everyone was happy with the new system.

Monteia smiled as though she’d guessed the thought, showing her crooked teeth. “We’re not the only station to be seeing too many runaways, too early. I went pla

Rathe nodded. He could imagine the scene, the long table and the polished paneling of a high‑priced i

“Everyone’s got an unusual number of runaways this year,” Monteia said. “What’s more to the point, there are as many, or nearly so, missing from City Point as there are from Fairs’ Point.”

Rathe looked up sharply at that. City Point was one of the old districts, second in precedence only to Temple Point itself; children born in City Point were among the least likely to be lured away by the romance of the longdistance traders–or, if they were, they had mothers who could afford to apprentice them properly. Fairs’ Point children, on the other hand, had not only the proximity of New Fair and Little Fair to tempt them, but good cause to want to better themselves.

Monteia nodded. “Aize Lissinain, she’s chief at City Point since the begi

“Trust northriver to think of that,” Rathe said, sourly.

“She was also asking Huyser how the workhouses were doing,” Monteia went on, and Rathe made a face that stopped short of apology. Huyser was chief of Manufactory Point; as the name implied, most of the city’s workhouses and manufactories lay in his district, and there were always complaints about the way the merchant‑makers treated their day‑workers. It was a good question–as was the one about the brothels, he admitted–so maybe Lissinain would be better than her predecessor.

“What did Huyser say?” he asked. “I was thinking that myself. Children are cheap.”

“But I wouldn’t want them working with machinery,” Monteia answered. “Too much chance of them breaking something. Anyway, Huyser said he was having as much of a problem with runaways as anyone, though not from the manufactories proper. He hadn’t heard of any of the makers letting workers go, or hiring new, for that matter, but he said he’d look into it.” She smiled, wry this time. “And Hearts and Dreams and I said we’d take a look round the brothels, just to be sure.”