The first rule of Mara’s travelling library was that a wet book still counted as a book. The second was that if you returned one with teeth marks, you had to tell her whose teeth.
“Goat,” said the man at the Redwater gate.
“Yours?”
“My sister’s.”
“That’s a family matter, then.” She took the novel, inspected the cover, and wrote goat, second offense on its card. The man handed her two pears for the late fee. She kept one and gave the other to the goat, who had come along to watch the transaction. It bit the pear in half with a crack.
Mara pulled her cart into Redwater. The cart held forty-three books, a box of index cards, one spare wheel, and a biscuit tin she had never opened in public. She knew the count because she made it at every stop. Since the roads had broken and the old network had gone quiet, counting had become a way of arriving somewhere whole.
At the mill, nobody was counting flour. The wheel stood still in the creek, and three people were shouting over it. Redwater’s miller, Dena, had a length of rope around her waist. Across from her stood a boy with a bag of grain and a woman whose boots were white with dust.
“The coupling split,” Dena told Mara, before anyone asked. “I have the replacement. I don’t have the measurements.”
“You had the manual,” said the woman in dusty boots.
“I loaned it to Pike.”
“You sold it to Pike.”
“I don’t sell borrowed books,” Mara said. This was true, although she had once accepted a jar of plum jam to keep one in a village an extra week. “Which manual?”
Dena named it. Mara knew the book: a dull green cover, a photograph of a mill on the first page, pencil notes in the back. It had left Redwater in the hands of a Pike mechanic called Ivo fourteen days ago. The loan was overdue by eight.
“He’ll bring it,” Dena said.
“He was supposed to bring it on Tuesday,” said the boy with the grain. “My mother needs flour today.”
The crossing to Pike was upstream, where the creek narrowed around a fallen tree. Mara could make it by evening if she left at once. She did not tell the boy she would return with his flour. She could promise only that she would look for the book.
“Leave your cart,” Dena said. “The path’s all mud.”
“Where I go, it goes.”
“Even if it takes you twice as long?”
“Especially then. Someone always needs a book on the way.”
Mara did not tell Dena about the biscuit tin. Inside were the only copies she had found of three old handbooks, sealed in cloth. She had learned to keep the books with her after the fire at South Gate, when a barn and every borrowed title in it had burned while she slept in a safer house. A cart was awkward in mud. It was also something she could grab.
She reached the crossing after sunset. The tree was still there, but the water had climbed over it. On the opposite bank, a lantern moved between the pines. Mara called out. A man answered, then vanished. A few minutes later he came back with a long plank and two more people. They laid it across the shallowest part, braced both ends, and took the cart wheels one at a time. Mara held the handles and tried not to watch the water.
“What have you got?” asked the man as they lifted the last wheel.
“Books.”
“That’s heavy.”
“You should hear the opinions.”
At Pike’s workshop, Ivo was asleep in a chair with his boots on. A child at the bench was mending a lantern. She woke him by dropping a handful of screws into a tin.
“Your librarian’s here,” she said.
Ivo opened one eye. “Then my life has caught up with me.”
He claimed to have returned the manual. Mara showed him the card: his name, his crooked mark, the date. He tried to read it upside down and gave up. Then he said he had left the book with his brother, who had taken it to the storehouse, where someone might have used it to prop a window.
“A book about a broken mill is propping a window?” Mara asked.
“It’s a straight book.”
They found the window propped by a brick. The manual lay on a shelf, opened to the drawing of Redwater’s wheel. Several measurements had been written in the margin in Ivo’s heavy hand. A loose sheet, folded into quarters, showed a different piece entirely.
“I came here to make that,” he said. He pointed to the loose drawing. “Dena’s replacement has the old bore. The wheel changed last winter. If she fits it by the printed measurement, she’ll break the pin.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
Ivo looked at the child with the lantern. She kept turning a screw with fierce concentration.
“Redwater took our timber and said we’d settle the price after harvest. Then the road went. We didn’t see the price. I said I’d finish this when they paid.”
“And you took the book.”
“She loaned it.”
“She loaned it for six days.”
He folded the loose drawing again, making its creases exact. “I know what I did.”
Mara could carry the measurements back herself. She could hand Dena the book and leave Pike’s grievance where she had found it. The boy with the grain would get his flour, if Ivo’s drawing was right. Pike would still be waiting for its timber money, and Redwater would still call the debt a misunderstanding.
“Come with me,” she said.
“I’ve already told you—”
“I heard you. Come tell Dena.”
He was silent long enough for the child to finish with the lantern. She lit it and held it up. Its glass was cracked, but the flame burned steady.
“I can go,” she said. “He can stay here and be cross.”
Ivo looked at her. “You have school in the morning.”
“Mara brings school in a cart.”
That settled something. Ivo found his coat. Mara lent the child a book about a ship whose captain could never find the right harbor. The child promised to return it without using it on any windows.
They reached Redwater in the grey part of morning. Dena listened to Ivo’s explanation with both hands on the manual. She disputed the timber bill, called his sketch ugly, checked one measurement against the wheel, and went quiet. Then she asked him to hold the coupling while she worked. Mara and the boy carried tools when asked and stayed out of the way when they weren’t.
At noon the wheel turned. It made a hard knocking sound on its first rotation. Dena stopped it, adjusted something where Mara couldn’t see, and tried again. This time the wheel went around without striking the frame. The boy watched until his neck hurt. Dena told him to bring his grain.
Mara was hungry enough to eat both pears if she hadn’t given one away. She settled for the one left in her pocket. Beside the mill, Ivo and Dena argued over the timber bill in lower voices. They wrote a number on the back of a flour sack and both signed it. Mara did not know whether either was pleased. They had at least made a number that could be found again.
Dena returned the manual that afternoon. On the loan card, Mara charged Ivo eight days late. He offered a handful of screws. She accepted one, the best of them, and put it in the biscuit tin beside the handbooks.
“You keep hardware with your books?” he asked.
“One piece. In case I need to remember why this one came back.”
The boy appeared with a warm loaf wrapped in paper. His mother had milled the first bag and sent it down before the oven cooled. Mara broke the loaf three ways and handed the largest piece to him. He said he had already eaten. She handed it to him anyway. He took it, and in a moment she was glad she hadn’t asked him to thank her.
Before leaving, Mara copied Ivo’s revised measurement into the manual in small letters. She wrote his name beside it and asked Dena to check the copy. Then she packed the book, the pear core, and her cart for the next village. At the gate the goat came out to meet her, plainly prepared to renew its membership.
“No novels for you,” Mara said.
The goat considered this, then ate the corner of her empty loan form.