One Drop

The good flour was at the back of the shelf, behind the bean crock, in a bag folded over twice.

A hand's worth left in the bottom of it.

I bought that with my own coppers and gave the whole bag away in an evening and never noticed.

Somebody had folded the top over and put it where it would keep.

Who folds a bag?

"Mira. Did you do this?"

"Do what," said Mira, from the doorway, and went out again, which is an answer.

So I lit the brazier under the oven in the drying ground, in the open air, with no flue on it anywhere.

Then I turned the tray four times, a quarter turn each, on my knees on wet brick.

Six came up. All six.

Up off that tray like a shoulder, cracked across the top where a crack belongs. I split one and it was hollow the whole way through and warm.

Six out of six!

Proud of six cream puffs at half past four in the morning, and who's up to tell?

I put them under a cloth and went in. A person can only stand in a yard at half past four for so long.

Shu was on the sheet on the table with its mouth shut. Fifth morning. Gray as a wet floor.

"You're up," said Gedda, from the step, eating.

"It's slower today."

"Slower how?"

"Slower," said Gedda, and went on chewing.

Slower than what?

That was the whole answer and it was the honest one.

Yulen came at five and stood in the door frame with the book shut in his hand.

"I have written down that I said no," he said. "That is all I am going to do about it."

"You're staying."

"I am staying."

Is he going to watch me do it?

Grateful, and I'd rather have been shouted at.

Here's what I had, and I'd had it since a floor on Sunday.

One drop. I can't do one drop.

A boy with a candle and a bubble and a thread on two nails spent four mornings proving that, and he was right every morning.

Then I got it at the table with the box open in front of me, and it came off a jug.

You cannot get a thin line out of a full jug by tipping it less. Tip a full jug carefully and it comes out in a slug and takes the cloth with it.

Any girl who has ever filled twelve of anything knows that.

So you don't tip it less. You put a small end on it. Same bag, same hand, same squeeze, and what comes out the far side is a line you could write a name with.

I've spent two months trying to make the pour smaller.

The pour was never the thing you make smaller.

One drop. Less than everything — and it isn't me that does the less. It's what I put in front of it.

Ken says you get a box of stuff nobody buys and one of them's the whole game.

The box was on the table with the lid off. Mira gave me that box in a wrecked pool room and never said what for.

A grating out of a palace yard. A cracked tile. A latch off an oven door. Two halves of a rod that went off on my wrist. A brass clasp out of a furnace.

And a cup. White, gold line around the rim, in two pieces, and I've carried it since my first hour in this world.

The gold line sat a hair apart on a wet floor in a hall and it's sat a hair apart in my pocket ever since.

"Everybody out of the pool room."

"There's nobody in the pool room," said Mira.

"Then get them in it and get them out of it!"

"Do it in the pool room," said Yulen. "The floor is already cracked and the crack goes to the gutter. You will want that in a minute."

He's ahead of me!

I got down on those tiles with Shu in the sheet in front of me, and pressed the two halves of that cup together with my thumbs, the way you hold a split seam and hope.

Is it going to hold?

"Sorry about this," I told it. "You were doing your job. I broke you in the first hour and you've been in a pocket since."

I wanted one drop off the bottom of that seam and nothing else in the room touched.

Then I let go.

Fsshk.

I squeezed. That's the whole of what I did wrong, and I did it in about half a second, because my thumbs are my thumbs.

The seam went wide. The entire lot came through it at once.

It took the bench. It took the bowl, the crock and Mira's slate off it and put all three in the wall.

It went up the eight steps and out of that door into the kitchen and stood there.

And it took the tray.

Five of them went off the cloth into the water. They came up and turned over and were nothing at all, the way choux is nothing the second it's wet.

Sick. I had that down as hungry all morning.

Not those. Anything else in this building, but not those.

One was left. It had gone under the cloth and stayed on the dry corner of the tray.

I picked it up in two hands. They were going so badly I nearly finished the job myself.

"I'm sorry," I told it, properly, with a bow, on my knees, in front of a doctor and a fifteen-year-old. "That was me. All of it was me, and there's no more flour."

Ashamed, and there's no flour left to be ashamed with.

"IT'S ONE," said Mira, from the top step.

She's shouting!

"Mira—"

"IT'S ONE AND IT'S ON THE TRAY AND IT'S DRY! AND YOU'RE SQUEEZING — YOUR THUMBS ARE WHITE, I CAN SEE THEM FROM HERE—"

"I'm not squeezing."

"YOU ARE SQUEEZING! DON'T HOLD IT SHUT. LET THE SEAM DO IT!"

She's right.

She called four aims off a wall in a capital and she's right about my hands.

"Do what she says," said Yulen, "and do not improve on it."

So I did it again, and I did nothing with my thumbs but hold the halves together, and I let a seam be a seam.

Then I let go.

It went in, and it had one place to be, and that place was a hair wide.

And it came out of the bottom of that cup in a thread.

Not a stream. A thread. A thread a boy wet on two nails in June without breaking it, hanging off a gold line, going nowhere at any speed at all.

A bead came down it and stood on the end and got fat.

Is that one?

Both hands gone, and I'm frightened, and I'm doing it anyway.

The rest of it's coming. Is one of these all I get?

I put the end of that seam over the mouth of a melon-sized animal on a folded sheet.

The bead went.

One. In the middle of that mouth. No bigger than the one that sat on the thread.

And its eyes came open before anything else did.

Ha!

My whole face has gone. Glad, plain glad, and I'm keeping it.

Then the rest of it arrived, and I put it where a pour goes, which is down into an empty pool.

It filled to the second tile and sat there being water.

"It's off gray," said Mira. "Not far. But it's off it."

"Is that it going?" said Io, from somewhere behind me.

Then Shu got its feet under it, and put that whole mouth over my open hand, and gave one back.

One. In the middle of my palm.

It did that on an upturned pail in June while I was annoyed about a bubble, and I asked a boy whether it was meant to.

Since June, in a yard, with soap in my eyebrows, and I asked if it was meant to.

Who taught it that, and when did it decide?

I sat down on a wet floor and cried with a cream puff in one hand, and that goes on the record too.

"IT'S GOT ITS EYES OPEN," said Lady Io, and came down the eight steps in a coat worth a bathhouse. "ITSEYESAREOPENANDITSFEETAREUPLOOKATTHEFEETTHEYAREUPBECAUSEOFME—"

"They're up because of the drop—"

"THEY ARE UP BECAUSE OF ME! I HAVE SAID SO IN FOUR HOUSES IN THAT CITY AND I SHALL GO ON SAYING IT!"

"Is it drinking?" said Mira.

"It's drinking."

"Say it louder. Half this lane's on the step."

"IT'S DRINKING!"

"It's taking the room," said Gedda, from the step.

Then it stopped a long way short of the wall, and sat down in the wet, with two tiles still under it.

It stopped.

Nobody made it stop and there's a room of it left.

And then it said something, on a wet floor in Kanal, and it was the first thing it had said since a stair in Vasa.

"Thank you. That gets said as well."

It gave every one of them back on a stair.

It kept one.

"That's Tulk," I said, and my voice went, and I let it go. "I took the back wall off his loft and the ward's laundry with it, and he thanked me for that."

"He'll want to know it said that," said Mira.

"Then go and tell him."

"I'm not going anywhere," said Mira.

Gedda got up off the step and put her cloth away, which she does not do.

"I'll say one thing and it's free," she said. "That animal has taken more out of this kingdom than anybody in it has ever put in. It did not have to give one drop of it back."

"Gedda—"

"It gave the lot back on a stair. That's said. Is there any bread?"

Left lying: a pool room wet to the wall, and two tiles' worth in the bottom of it.

The crack takes it under the step into the gutter, and the gutter goes down the lane past four doors.

Every soul in this ward knows where it goes.

Ottar had a rope on the bottom of the lane before dark.

Onnik's mother's thimble was on the sheet by that mouth, where it has been since the night he brought it down.

Shu got that mouth over it and gave it back full, to the top, measured out of itself the way it did into a bronze jug in a square.

Weller says a thimble isn't a vessel, and it's standing full on a wet floor, and I want him down here to look at it.

It went up the hill in a boy's two hands, and he did not run.

Mira wiped her own slate down her sleeve and wrote on it and turned it around.

The Drop. One drop. Less than everything. And she'd put a line under it.

"That's four," she said.

The Narrow, the Braid, the Fill and the Drop.

The last one was on the tray under the cloth, on the corner of the table.

The water was off it. The bag was folded and empty on the shelf.