The Brewer's Price

*Hey there. This one came from a weird little thought about debts and what we think we owe people. I wanted to write something where the 'confession' isn't about feelings so much as a simple want finally said aloud. Hope you like it. Feedback always welcome.*

Megan Potts counted the day's takings the way she always did, sitting on the upturned keg behind the bar with the strongbox open on her knees. Copper first, then silver, then the rare gold piece that clinked down like it was sorry to be there. It was a Wednesday in late autumn and the rain had kept the carters off the road, so the pile was thin. She counted it twice anyway, because counting twice was a habit and habits were free.

Forty-one silver. Twelve copper. One gold, from old Father Wick, who tipped like a man trying to buy his way out of a sin nobody had witnessed.

She wrote the number in the ledger and looked at the running total the way you look at a bad tooth. Still red. It was always still red, or nearly always, and on the rare nights it came up black the profit vanished down the same hole it had been going down for five years. The hole had a name. The name was Lewis Steiger.

She thought about that name a lot, more than was comfortable. Five years back the brewery had been dying. The tax assessors had burned a spellfire levy through her fermentation cellar, a legal trick that was legal the way a knife in the back is legal, and every vat in the place had gone sour inside a week. Three hundred years of brewing in her family and she had stood in the cellar smelling the ruin of it and thought, well, that's that then.

Lewis Steiger had walked in off the copper road two days later. He was a big man, big through the shoulders and the hands, and people said he was part golem himself, or had been, once, in the wars. He looked at the ruined vats, looked at her, and said he could build her one that no spellfire would ever crack. She had laughed at him. He had not laughed back. He built it, and it worked, and it was still working, and she had been paying for it ever since.

The debt was like that. It was honest. She had signed the contract, she had read the terms, and she paid every month on the day. But the interest was set so that the payments never quite caught the total. Every twelve months the ledger said the same thing, which was that she owed slightly more than she had owed at the start of the year, and every twelve months she swore she would sit down with the figures and find the trick of it, and every twelve months she got busy brewing and never did.

Deep down, in the part of herself she did not visit often, Megan suspected there was no trick. She suspected Lewis Steiger had built the contract so that she could never finish paying, and she did not know what that meant, and she was afraid to find out. A man who wanted his money would ask for his money. A man who never asked for anything wanted something else, and she could not imagine what a golem-smith and a war veteran would want from a brewer with red ledgers and grey coming in at her temples.

She was forty-four years old and she owned the Broken Stave, the best alehouse in Hearthbend if you asked her and the second best if you asked anyone else, and she was tired in the bones.

She put the coins in the floor safe, wiped her hands on her apron, and went out front to see about the evening crowd. There were four of them, all carters sheltering from the rain, which meant four ales and no food and a long quiet night ahead.

Alexander Wu came in just after the sixth bell.

She saw him through the doorway to the back room before he saw her, or let on that he had. He stood dripping at the bar in a good wool coat, a magistrate's satchel under his arm, and he was looking around the room with the mild expression of a man taking inventory. He was fifty-one and he had been a quartermaster in the same wars Lewis had fought in, and he had the quartermaster's gift of making you feel that whatever you had, he had already counted it.

"Magistrate Wu," Megan said, coming out and pulling a mug without being asked. "You're wet. Sit down by the fire and I'll get you something better than the carters are drinking."

"Megan." He sat, which she noted, because Wu always sat on his own schedule and this looked like his schedule. "Thank you. Yes, something better. It's a foul evening and I have foul news, and I'd rather deliver it warm than cold."

That, she thought, was not a promising way to begin.

She drew him the black stout she kept for herself and the magistrates and nobody else, and set it down, and he drank a third of it in silence, which was unlike him. Wu talked for a living. Then he set the mug on the bar, opened the satchel, and took out a paper that had an official seal at the bottom and a ribbon through the seal and everything else that meant the paper was not a joke.

"Megan, I want you to understand that I argued against this."

"When a magistrate opens with that, I know I'm not going to like what follows."

"No," he said. "You're not." He laid the paper on the bar and turned it so she could read it, because he was courteous that way, even when he was ruining you.

She read it. She read it twice, the way she counted coins.

Notice of arrearage. It was a phrase she knew from other people's troubles, and now here it was with her own name in it. Three years of back taxes, levied at the commercial rate, assessed on the full value of the brewery and the enchanted fixtures, and the total at the bottom had a number in front of it that she could not make sense of at first because her eye kept sliding off it.

"That's triple," she said. "The tax on this place is eleven silver a quarter. I've paid every quarter. I have the receipts."

"You do, and I've seen them, and that's why I argued against it." Wu rubbed his forehead. "There was a clerical error, three years back. A clerk in the assessor's office entered the Stave under the wrong classification. Instead of the market brewer's rate you were filed as a bonded trade house, which carries a triple levy, and because the error was in the filing and not in the collection, the office has ruled that the shortfall accrued whether anyone noticed it or not."

"Whether anyone noticed it."

"Yes."

"So a clerk made a mistake, I paid what I was asked to pay, and now I owe three years of a tax I never owed, on top of the tax I did pay, because the office says so."

"That is a fair summary," Wu said, and he had the grace to look at his stout while he said it.

Megan picked up the paper again. The number had not changed. She had known it wouldn't, but she checked, the way you check a lock you've already thrown.

Thirty days. The notice gave her thirty days to pay in full or the brewery would be taken into town custody and sold at auction to settle the arrears. There was a clause about payment in installments, and she read that clause, and it required a guarantor of standing and a bond, and she had neither, unless you counted Lewis Steiger, and she did not know what she counted him as.

"Wu," she said, "you drink my ale. You've drunk my ale for twenty years. Your office has fined me twice and I paid without a word. Is there nothing you can do?"

"I've done what I could. I got the window extended from fourteen days to thirty. I got the auction postponed rather than scheduled, which means if the money appears in the window, you keep the keys." He finished the stout and stood, and put his coat back on, dripping and all. "I'm sorry, Megan. I called in every old favor I had to get you the thirty days. I have no more favors. The assessors want the revenue before year's end and the new tally-master has been looking at the Stave's books since spring, and I think he wanted this finding. I think he was looking for it."

"Why would he want it?"

"Because the copper road runs through your front door, and there are men who would like that door. That's all I'll say, and I've already said too much." He paused at the doorway with the rain behind him. "Thirty days, Megan. I'd start tonight if I were you."

She stood behind the bar for a long time after he left, with the notice lying there where he had turned it toward her, and the carters asked her twice for refills before she heard them. Then she took the paper back to the counting room and set it on the ledger, next to the red total, and the two numbers sat together on the desk like they had been introduced.

She owed Lewis Steiger more every year than the year before. She owed the town three years of triple tax in thirty days. She did some rough figuring on the back of a slate and the figures came out the same way the figures always came out, which was short.

It was raining harder now, and the fire needed wood, and the carters were getting loud, and Megan Potts sat on her keg and did none of it for a while, because there was one thought in her head and it would not leave. Lewis had never asked her for anything. Maybe now, at last, she understood what he had been waiting for.

She did not like the way the thought made her feel. The trouble was that underneath the fear of it, somewhere she wasn't proud of, it did not make her feel only fear.

The rain let up near midnight, and Megan sat in the taproom with the last of the carters gone and the lamps down to one, and she heard the wagon before she saw it. A slow, heavy rolling sound, the kind a laden wagon makes on wet cobbles, and then it stopped outside and the door opened without a knock.

Lewis Steiger came in dripping like Wu had, except he did not seem to mind it. He was a big man, forty-six years old and built like the golems he made, and his hands were wrong for a man's hands, broad and gray at the knuckles, the clay showing through where the skin had worn thin over the years. He'd been a sentinel in the wars before she ever met him. He never talked about that either.

"You've been drinking," she said. "I can smell the ale on you."

"One tankard. At the Bell, where I could think." He did not sit. He stood there with the rain running off his coat onto her floorboards, and she was too tired to be angry about the floorboards. "I heard about the notice."

"Of course you heard. Half the town heard before I did, I'd wager."

"Megan." He said her name the way he said everything, once, and then waited. "I'll pay it."

She looked at him. The number was not a small number. Three years of triple levy was most of what the Stave cleared in a good year, and the last two years had not been good years. "No," she said. "Absolutely not. I'm not taking more from you. I'm forty-four years old, Lewis, and I have been in your debt since the vat, and I will not..." She stopped, because he had raised one of those gray hands, just slightly, the way you'd calm a horse.

"Let me finish. I'll pay it. All of it, tonight, tomorrow, whatever the window allows. And in return, you take my service. One year. Not wages. Not obligation. My service, as I choose to give it, and you accept it."

"That's not a trade. That's you buying my brewery out from under me by degrees."

"It isn't. You keep the keys. You keep the books. You brew your ale and you pour it and you set your own hours. What I'm buying is the right to be here. To lift what needs lifting and ward what needs warding and be in the room when you're in the room." He paused, and for a moment he looked almost embarrassed, which was not a face she had ever seen on him. "I've watched you drown in that debt for five years because I was a coward about saying what I wanted. So I'm saying it now, plainly, before the auction men do it for me."

"And what is it you want, Lewis? Say it plainly, since we're being plain."

He was quiet for a long time. Rain ticked on the shutters. "Service," he said finally. "One year of it. The contract is only this. The rest is mine to work out and yours to refuse, and you can refuse any part of anything, any day, and the debt is still settled and I'll still go. That's my offer. There's no trick in it. I know you'll look for one, so I'm telling you there's none."

And the maddening thing, the thing she chewed on for two days afterward, was that she believed him. She turned it over all night and half the next morning, and she had Lindsey Donovan in the taproom giving her the evil eye over the breakfast barrels, and Wu's notice on the desk with thirty days becoming twenty-nine, and in the end she walked down to the smithy in the drizzle and stood in the doorway while Lindsey worked the bellows and glared.

"He's not here," Lindsey said. Twenty-nine years old and quick as a whippet, that girl. "And whatever you're selling, he's not buying."

"He's buying. That's rather the problem. Where is he?"

"The yard." Lindsey pumped the bellows twice more, hard. "You know he's saved your place twice over and you've never once asked him what he got out of it. That's what he told me. He told me you were coming."

"Did he." Megan turned and walked out to the yard, and there he was under the lean-to, fitting a new iron band to a wagon wheel with his bare hands, no tongs, the metal glowing and his gray fingers steady as if it were bread