Nadir read the letter sitting on the floor of his room, with Henry opposite him and a bowl of cherries between them.
He smiled at the part about Bram's stone. At the bottom, he turned the page sideways to follow the kite's tail.
"You ran out of paper."
"It was a long tail."
"I can see that." He read the last few lines again. "You could have told me all this when you came."
"I wanted to write it."
Nadir nodded and put the letter in his box.
Henry had expected him to give it back. He was pleased that he hadn't.
They ate the cherries, dropping the stones into a cracked saucer. Downstairs, someone was dragging a bench across the workroom floor. Nadir had been there long enough to recognize the sound and complain about where Mrs. Sen was moving it.
"It'll block the cupboard again. Then she'll ask why we keep leaving the wax out."
Henry listened while he described the room. He could picture the pegs, the crowded shelves, Ruth's stool beside the window. Nadir spoke about them with the same certainty Henry used when talking about the market.
On his next visit, there was a folded reply waiting for him. Nadir had drawn a much worse kite at the bottom and written that Henry ought to try making the face look friendly.
Henry kept it.
Over the next three months, the orphanage became a place where Henry could find things with his eyes shut.
He knew which stair creaked, which window needed lifting before it would close, and where Bram left his shoes when they weren't beneath the bed. He knew to move his cup when Tessa reached across the table. She would say she could reach without spilling anything, and usually she could, but he preferred to move it anyway.
The kite acquired two new patches and lost one of its teeth. They flew it when their afternoons and the weather allowed. Sometimes Henry stayed behind because he wanted to finish a page. Sometimes he left the page unfinished.
Ivo went to the receiving yard more often. He still had no place with a slayer team, but he knew the workers now and brought home fewer words he couldn't read. When Henry asked about his day, the answer had begun to include complaints about other people putting things in the wrong places.
Henry was still sweeping streets.
He did not mind the work as much as he minded having nothing to say about it. Nadir could show him a strap he had sewn. Ivo knew the names of equipment Henry had never seen. Henry could point out a clean stretch of paving, but by the following morning someone would have tipped ashes across it.
One evening, he said as much to Nadir.
They were walking down from the workshop. A woman ahead of them was trying to persuade a small dog to abandon a piece of cloth it had found in the gutter.
"Ask Besson to give you something else," Nadir said.
"He gives me what needs doing."
"He might have other things."
Henry watched the dog settle its paws more firmly on the cloth.
"I can do the streets."
"I know you can. You can also read now. You know where half his jobs are, and you've been working for him longer than I have." Nadir stepped around a puddle. "You don't have to ask him for a workshop. Ask whether there's anything else he could use you for."
Henry thought about this all the way home.
The next morning, he waited until Besson had handed out the tools. Then he followed him to the shop door.
"Could I do some of the deliveries?"
Besson stopped with the key in the lock.
"What deliveries?"
"The small tools. The things you send people back for. I know most of the addresses, and I can read the slips."
Besson looked at him for a moment.
"You want to spend your day running up and down the town?"
"I already do that. I could carry something on the way."
The man turned the key.
"Come in, then."
His first delivery was a parcel of hinges and a saw wrapped in sacking.
Besson wrote the items on a slip, showed him the name of the man who was to receive them, and told him to bring back a signature. Henry read it before he left. The address was on a street he had swept often, outside a house whose upper floor projected over the pavement on carved wooden brackets.
There was no difficulty finding it. The man was annoyed because he had wanted the hinges an hour earlier, but he signed the paper and told Henry to give Besson the message.
Henry did.
"He wanted them yesterday as well," Besson said, putting the slip away. "He only ordered them this morning."
After that, there were other errands. Henry took nails to a carpenter, carried a pair of blunt chisels to be sharpened, and returned with papers that smelled of glue, iron, or whatever had been on the recipient's hands. He still swept when there was sweeping to do. Besson paid him a little extra for some of the longer trips.
Henry began carrying a pencil stub. He wrote down what people asked him to remember instead of repeating it to himself until he got back. At first he kept the scraps loose in his pocket. Then he folded them into a piece of stiff paper so they would survive the journey.
He liked opening that little packet at the end of a day and finding everything accounted for.
He had been at the orphanage for a year when Mrs. Vautrin asked him to help move the boxes in her storeroom.
They needed to reach the wall behind them. Henry lifted his family's box onto a chair while she shifted an empty shelf. The lid had loosened at one corner, and he saw the edge of his mother's shirt beneath it.
He set the box down more carefully.
"Would you like a few minutes?" Mrs. Vautrin asked.
Henry nodded.
She went to fetch a cloth for the shelf. He lifted the lid.
The sewing tin rested beside the chipped cup, tucked into the folds of a coat. Beneath them were the clothes they had brought from the rented room. His mother had tied a loose button to the sleeve of one shirt so she wouldn't forget where it belonged. It was still there, hanging by its thread.
Henry touched it with one finger.
He could remember her putting that shirt aside. At the time, he had been trying to get past her to the stove. She had asked him to wait, and he had complained because his hands were cold.
For a while, the memory was so ordinary that it hurt more than the things he had expected to feel.
He sat beside the box until Mrs. Vautrin returned.
"Could I use the sewing things?" he asked.
"Of course."
"I mean keep them upstairs. I could put my buttons in it too."
She looked at the tin in his hands. "They're yours, Henry."
He rubbed a thumb along the lid's faded pattern. He had known that. Still, he had spent a year putting everything back exactly where it had been.
"I'd like the rest to stay here."
"Then it will. We'll put the box back where we can reach it."
He helped her finish moving the shelf, then carried the tin upstairs. That evening, he used one of the needles to mend the pocket holding his delivery slips. The stitches were larger than his mother's had been. He put in a second row where the cloth was worn and checked that the pencil could no longer poke through.
When he finished, he kept the needle in the tin and the tin beside his letters.
During the following two months, Henry began saving for a book.
He had seen it in the window of a stationer's near the cloth market. It was small enough for his coat pocket, with a blue cloth cover and a narrow strip of dark leather down the spine. There was nothing printed inside. The shopkeeper had shown him a few pages, turning them with a thumb that left a faint grey mark at each corner.
Henry wanted somewhere to put the things he kept writing on scraps. Addresses. Messages. Parts of letters he wanted to remember. He liked the thought of opening it and finding a page exactly where he had left it.
He went past the window often enough for the woman inside to recognize him.
"It's still there," she said one morning, before he had asked.
"I can see it."
"Just making sure."
He grinned and went on to work.
By the time he was eleven and a half, his purse was heavy enough that he counted its contents every few days. He had enough for the book, provided he brought his lunch from the orphanage and kept a little aside for anything that might need replacing.
He decided to buy it that morning.
There were two deliveries to finish first. The second took him to a workshop above the market, where the door stood open and curls of pale wood had blown into the street. He waited for the carpenter to put down his plane, collected the signature, and returned the slips to Besson.
"Nothing else until after noon," Besson said. "Mind you come back."
"I will."
Henry washed his hands at the trough. Cold water stung the small cracks around his knuckles. He dried them carefully and combed his damp fringe back with his fingers before going into the shop.
The stationer looked up from a stack of envelopes.
"Today?"
Henry put his coins on the counter.
She fetched the book. In daylight, the blue cover showed little flecks of white where the cloth had rubbed against the window frame. Henry opened it in the middle. The pages resisted at first, then settled beneath his hand.
"Do you want paper round it?" she asked.
"No, thank you."
He counted his change and fastened the purse. Then he took out his pencil.
"May I?"
She moved a bundle of envelopes aside for him.
On the first page, Henry wrote his name. He took his time over Theodore, which he used so seldom that he still had to think about the order of the letters. Beneath it he put the orphanage's name and the street.
The woman glanced down.
"That ought to get it back to you if you lose it."
"I won't."
"Nobody intends to."
Henry let the book close around the pencil. Outside, a delivery cart rattled past, its wheels jolting over the stones. Across the road, the trough stood beside the entrance to the cloth market. Beyond it, faded awnings shaded tables piled with bolts of cloth; shoppers squeezed through the gaps, carrying baskets against their hips. Someone called out a price. The shop smelled of paper and the paste warming beside the window.
He was reaching for the book when he felt the pressure.
It settled against his chest so suddenly that he stopped breathing. His fingers tightened on the counter. He drew a breath, then another, and felt the skin along his arms prickle beneath his sleeves.
The stationer had gone still. One hand rested on the envelopes; the other gripped the edge of her desk.
Outside, the calling stopped.
A man beside the trough turned toward the market stalls. The woman next to him caught her child's shoulder and drew him close. Farther away, a chair scraped over the paving and fell.
"Stay inside," the stationer said.
Henry picked up his book and held it against his chest.
Through the window, he could see the watchman beside the market entrance. His hand had gone to his sword. As Henry watched, he let it fall away and stepped back against the wall.
Beneath the awnings, shoppers were backing into the stalls. A seller snatched a roll of blue linen off a table as people pressed against it. Henry leaned closer to the glass.
A passage was opening through the crowded market, leading toward the trough outside the shop.