Mrs. Vautrin returned from the upper workshops with a piece of leather in her pocket and three additions to Nadir's agreement.
She had asked about his hours, his meals, and what would happen if Mrs. Sen became too ill to teach him. Nadir listened while she explained the answers. Then he asked to see the leather.
"A sample of your work in three years, if you pay attention," she said.
It was a short strap with a buckle sewn into one end. The stitches were so even that Henry ran his thumb along them, feeling for the holes.
Nadir agreed to the apprenticeship. He would finish his remaining mornings at the receiving yard, spend the next rest day packing, and move upstairs at Mrs. Sen's before work began again.
There was suddenly a last day for everything.
On his last evening, Mrs. Vautrin laid his clean shirt on the dining table. The collar had dried folded under itself. She pressed two fingers along it, and the crease slowly relaxed beneath her hand.
Henry leaned closer. The cloth did not shift all at once. A little ridge sank, then another, until the collar lay flat.
"[Smooth]," she told him. "Only cloth, and only a small patch. A proper iron would finish before I'd done both sleeves, but this will save him looking as though he slept in it."
Nadir inspected the shirt. "I won't get it on without creasing it again."
"Then I'll have had a peaceful few minutes looking at it."
She folded it and gave it back to him. He went upstairs to pack, leaving Henry beside the table.
"Mrs. Vautrin?"
She looked up.
"When am I supposed to leave?"
For a moment, she seemed to think he meant the workshop. Then her expression changed.
"You mean the arrangement made at the town hall."
Henry nodded.
She took him into her office and brought his papers down from a shelf. He recognized the long shape of his full name before he could read the words around it. The sheet had a red stamp near the bottom, blurred at one edge where the ink had spread.
"When you're eleven years and six months," she said. "That remains the arrangement. There's no date here for a journey, or any explanation of how you'll be collected."
"Who am I going to?"
"Matthias Sorel. A scholar of Marécourt."
She turned the paper so he could see the name. Henry read it twice.
"I remember them saying a scholar. I don't remember much else."
"You'd just lost your parents. It was a great deal to tell you at once."
"Does he teach children?"
"He intends to teach you. Beyond that, I couldn't tell you how he'll go about it." She drew her chair closer. "Scholars work with talents that aren't chiefly suited to fighting. That doesn't mean they stay indoors with books. They kill creatures and grow stronger too. Some study materials, some the creatures themselves, some things I wouldn't know how to explain. Sorel is a... very well respected man. Concetta was satisfied with the arrangement, and I have no reason to doubt her judgment."
Henry studied the name again. He had imagined an old man with a house and chores that needed doing. Now he tried to add teaching to that picture, but had no idea what he would be expected to learn.
"Is it in the city?"
"A farm on the far outskirts of Marécourt. Still inside the fortress."
Marécourt was Bellevaux's capital. Henry had heard its name from drivers, merchants, and people complaining about decisions made there. To him it had always meant crowds: streets wider than Rocheforte's, buildings too numerous to count, work for more people than he could imagine.
"There are farms there?"
"Beyond the built-up parts. Marécourt is enormous, Henry. An address can belong to it and still be a long way from the nearest busy street. His place is well out among the fields."
He asked her to write down the name and address. She found a scrap of paper and copied them in the careful print she used for the younger children's lessons.
He folded it once and put it in his pocket.
Nadir had filled his box badly. His coat took up most of the space, and he was trying to fit his comb between two sleeves without snapping its remaining teeth. Ivo sat on the next bed, turning the buckle on Mrs. Sen's sample strap.
Henry stood beside the window.
"I'm going to leave too," he said.
Nadir stopped pushing at the coat.
"When?"
"When I'm eleven and a half. They arranged it when Ms. Aparo took me to the town hall. I'm supposed to live with someone near Marécourt."
Ivo looked up. "What for?"
"To learn, Mrs. Vautrin says. He's a scholar. Matthias Sorel." Henry unfolded the scrap. "He has a farm."
"You never told us," Nadir said.
"I know." Henry flattened the paper against his leg. "I didn't know what to say about it. I hadn't met him. I still haven't. It didn't seem like something that was going to happen."
Ivo put the strap down.
"Did he ask for you?"
"There was a letter."
"You didn't have to go and speak to him? Or show him what you could do?"
Henry shook his head.
"I can't even get one morning carrying equipment," Ivo said.
His voice was quiet, which made it harder to answer. Henry had not won anything. He remembered sitting beside Aparo while the official spoke, wanting everyone to stop asking him questions.
"I don't know why he wants me."
Nadir took the coat out of his box.
"You could put in a word for Ivo when you do find out."
"I can ask."
"Find out what he wants first," Ivo said. He picked up the strap again, rubbing its edge between his fingers. "A farm could mean anything. You might be feeding chickens."
Henry thought that sounded possible.
Nadir began folding his coat more carefully. "I wish you'd told me before. I thought you'd be here for years."
"I thought so too, mostly."
For a while, they packed without talking. Henry held the box steady while Nadir pressed the coat into one side. This time there was room for the comb.
"You'll come back, won't you?" Nadir asked.
"I don't know how far it is."
"Then write. You're getting better at it. I'll write back, and Ivo can tell us which words we've got wrong."
"If yours looks like the yard labels, I'm giving it straight to Mrs. Vautrin."
Nadir grinned. He found a place for the strap and shut the box.
Henry put the folded address away. He still knew very little about the man who had written that letter, but the boys knew as much as he could tell them now.
They carried Nadir's things uphill the next morning.
He took the box, Ivo carried a bundle of clothes, and Henry brought the bedding Mrs. Vautrin had agreed he could keep. The blanket smelled faintly of soap. A loose thread brushed Henry's chin whenever he shifted it against his shoulder.
Behind the town, the mountain slopes rose in dark folds, pine woods filling the gullies between bare shoulders of stone. Clouds gathered along the higher ridges and hid their tops. Montferrand's outer walls stood on the far side of that range, with a considerable stretch of country still between the mountains and the fortifications. From Rocheforte, the mountains blocked them entirely.
Henry looked down at the roofs when they stopped on the landing. He could pick out the orphanage street now. Nadir had found it on their previous visit and spent the walk home explaining where Henry had been looking wrong.
At the workshop, Ruth showed Ivo where to put the clothes. Mrs. Sen had cleared a peg for Nadir's coat and left a clean apron on the bench.
They carried the bedding upstairs and made the narrow bed. With the box beneath it and his coat behind the door, the room began to look occupied.
Henry lingered at the window. A wagon moved along a road between the fields, its pale load swaying above the sides. He had spent years working in Rocheforte without seeing that road.
"You can come up on my afternoon off," Nadir said. "Mrs. Sen says that's all right, as long as we stay out of the workroom when she's busy."
Ivo nodded. Henry said he would.
Downstairs, Ruth had already pulled a stool beside hers. Nadir sat on it, shifted until his feet rested properly on the lower rail, and reached for the apron.
Henry and Ivo let themselves out.
During the next three months, Henry learned which afternoons Nadir could spare.
At first, he went up whenever their work finished early. Twice he found the workshop busy and had to leave after a few minutes. After that, they agreed on a day, and when one of them could not manage it, a message travelled through Besson or the receiving yard.
Nadir came down too. He brought stories about crooked stitches, customers who changed their minds, and Ruth's habit of singing half a song before remembering she disliked it. His fingers grew rough along the sides. He wore a leather guard when he sewed, and smelled of the same grease that hung in Mrs. Sen's workroom.
His old bed was given to a younger boy before the week was out. Henry sometimes turned toward it with a comment meant for Nadir and found someone else looking back.
He and Ivo kept working. They carried tools, cleared gutters, and swept the market after rain had plastered leaves against the stalls. In the evenings, their reading moved beyond the first pages of Mrs. Vautrin's book. Ivo could now make out most of the old delivery slip without asking for help. He still kept it inside his coat.
Henry began writing short accounts of his day on scraps of paper. He wanted to be able to send Nadir something better than a list of jobs when the time came. Sometimes he wrote about his parents. Once he filled half a page describing how his father had cut his hair, stopping every few minutes to brush the clippings from his neck. He folded that page and kept it with the family things.
The grief still caught him unexpectedly. He could spend a whole morning thinking about work, then hear a woman calling a boy home and have to stand still until he could breathe comfortably again. But there were evenings when he wanted to stay at the table after supper, and things he remembered because he meant to tell Nadir.
Near the end of the third month, Nadir gave him a small leather purse.
"Offcuts," he said before Henry could ask. "She let me keep them. I made one for Ivo too, but he said he'd fetch it himself."
They sat on the floor of Nadir's room. The purse had a flap held shut by a loop and a wooden peg. Its edges were darker than the centre, polished smooth beneath the stitches.
Henry opened it. The lining was soft against his finger.
"You made all of it?"
"Ruth showed me the corners. I did the sewing."
Henry took the coins from his pocket and put them inside. He closed the flap, worked the loop over the peg, and turned it upside down. Nothing fell out.
Nadir watched him with a pleased expression he was trying to hide.
"Thank you," Henry said.
He used it to pay for bread on the way home. The shopkeeper counted out his change, and Henry put each coin into the purse before fastening it again. When he reached the orphanage, he still had half the loaf under his arm. He found Ivo in the yard and sat beside him to share it.