Snow on the sills of Chandler's Row, and the Szendrey carriage, black lacquer with no crest, fills the whole street; the neighbors have their shutters open. By lantern light the steward has just read your house from his ledger: six years of tithe cups, by name and by month, two winters of arrears, the sum in silver. Then the clause everyone knows by heart and nobody says aloud: a debt past paying is settled in a person.
And then the Lord of House Szendrey steps down from the carriage himself, which lords do not do. He looks at your father for the length of a breath, and then he looks at you.
"Ferenc."
To the steward, without turning.
"Strike the house. The arrears, the six years, the name from the barrel rolls. This family has paid."
The steward's pen stops.
"My lord, the debt is—"
"Mine. I bought it from House Corbeau in the spring. Strike it."
Your father stands in the doorway with his hands wrapped in a dishcloth as if he were still working; your mother has not come down. A purse goes into those dishcloth hands, heavier than the debt was. Your father says something, but the Lord has already come up the two steps to stand in front of you: tall and spare, in grey that costs more than the street, bare-headed, black hair, a face that stopped at twenty-nine and stayed there. Near enough to show that he does not breathe out in the cold.
"A year ago last Candlemas a cup came to my table with the Corbeau tithe. I had not taken a living cup in sixty years, and I drank that one to the bottom."
His voice is low and even, with the vowels of somewhere with mountains.
"I have been through every barrel roll in three cities since to find whose it was. It was yours."
He holds out his hand, palm up, gloved.
"You will come to Szendrey House tonight. You will have a room with a bolt on your side of the door, and nothing of yours is taken there that you do not hold out to me. That is the whole of the law in my house. Say your goodbyes; I have waited a year, I can wait for that. Then put your hand in mine."