The year's last leaf dried slowly in the cold's own time, turned by hand whenever the day turned, on the racks in the back room.
While it dried, the making for the list ran in the mornings, the way it had run all the year: name by name, in the list's order, every name standing over its making before the water boiled.
The thirteenth name was Ume of the candle stall, two doors down, the winter fever gone out of her and her shoulders left weak for the dipping frames her trade hung its year on. She came herself at noon, with her price counted out in tens from the candle cloth, and repeated the taking back clean, the whole course, three days, morning and evening, the cup hot.
"The course is for the weakness, Ume," Ren said. "It is not for the frames. The frames wait till the course is done, and the strength is yours again to judge."
She took the wrapped cure under her arm and went back to her stall and its smell of wax. The thirteenth name came off the list.
The fourteenth name was Saburo the tile-mender, whose fever had gone and left his footing unsure at the height his trade was worked at. He came at dusk on the second day, straight off a roof, with the tiles' grey dust still on his sleeves, and he would not sit while the course was told him.
"It will not make a roof safe, Saburo," Ren said. "It is for the unsteadiness the fever left in you. The roofs wait till the course is done — and if the steadiness comes slow, the roofs wait for another man's legs, and there is no shame entered anywhere for it."
He paid in counted coin. He repeated the taking back once, plain, like a man memorising where his feet would go. He took the jar in both hands, the way a man carries a thing at a height, and went down the street as the dark came on.
Ren lifted the stone and took the list out, and drew his line through the name, once, clean, the way he had drawn it through thirteen names before it. Then he set the stone back on a list that stood at no names — the list that had waited out the heart of a winter and the whole of a year, served name by name, in its order, off the making, with none skipped and none sold out of its turn. The counter felt strange under his hand, and ordinary, both at once.
The making of the last tranche ran on the third day, in one run, at the long table: the leaf off the racks, weighed batch by batch, the jars scalded, dried, filled to the lip, and closed with wax poured and knifed round the rims. Every jar of the lot had its label before it stood with the others, and the jars stood in their rows on the counter when the sealing was done: thirty jars of one making, one drying week on every label, the biggest single lot the shop had sealed in the year.
He counted them twice where they stood. Thirty. The book took the lot's page in its turn: the leaf in at the door, bundle by bundle, in its count; the drying week; the making; the jars out, and their number.
The next morning a runner brought the office's note down, folded once. The register's keeper would have the year's biggest lot read under the register's line before the winter. The shop was to bring the lot up, and the day book with it.
Ren loaded the thirty jars in two crates of fifteen, padded with straw, on a hand-cart, and took them up the hill himself in the cold morning, the day book under his coat against the frost, at the pace of a man whose load could not be hurried.
The clerk was waiting at the long table by the window. The register lay open on the table at the shop's line — the keeper had sent it down the corridor for the reading — with the name standing in its square capitals and the two conditions under it, in the keeper's hand. While the crates were opened and the jars set out in their rows, the clerk wrote the row's places on slips, one for every jar, and put the slips in the cup.
The door clerk's voice reached Ren first — a name and a style, flatly: Nara Shikaku, head of the Nara clan. The hill's outside word on preparations had come down in person a second time — for a lot this time, not a file, under the register's new line. He looked at the rows of jars first, the way he had looked at the file, and said nothing to Ren.
"By lot," he said. "The cup chooses, not your hand."
He drew five slips, one by one, and turned each face up as it came. The clerk took the five jars from their places in the rows and ranged them on the board under the lamp.
Shikaku lifted the first jar and read its label off in his tally voice — the name, the drying week, the mark — and set it down, and read the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, each in the same flat fall of words. His thumb worked the wax of two of the seals, slow, pressing for the give that would have told a lie. Then he pointed at three of the five, without looking up.
"Weigh them," he said.
The clerk weighed the three jars at the office scales, one by one, by the window, and read each weight aloud as it settled. The three weights settled as one: the same weight, three times over.
Shikaku opened the day book at the lot's page, where Ren had set it on the table, and read it on his feet: the leaf weighed in at the door, bundle by bundle; the drying week; the making; the jars out, thirty, under their labels. He read it down once, and then he closed the book and gave it back across the table into Ren's hands, the way a thing is returned when it has been found in order.
"The lot is what its labels say," he said. "That is all the register asks. And it is enough."
And he went out, and the door shut behind him. His clan's book had never been in the room, and nothing had been asked of him but the reading, and nothing given but the word. The lot was the lot, and it had stood under the line that bore the shop's name, and it had been read by the hardest outside eye the hill could bring to it, and it had agreed with itself in every particular that had been tried.
The jars went back into their crates whole — thirty, all of them, none kept, none taken — and the cart came down the hill in the late morning at the load's own pace. The jars were counted up onto the high shelf by tens and units, aloud, onto the shelf where the year's count had been standing all the autumn, waiting for its last thirty to come home.
That night Ren counted the high shelf the slow way: aloud, by tens and units, from the first jar to the last, as a count is made for other hands to read after his. Then he counted it again, from the last jar to the first, and the count came back the same.
He opened the day book at the refusal's page, and under the refusal's lines — where the year's hardest count had been waiting since the night the note went unsigned — he wrote the count the refusal had been waiting for.
Under the refusal, the count it waited for. Plan: two hundred. Sealed and standing before the first snow: one hundred and seventy-six. The gap: twenty-four, at the price of the source, written the night the note was refused. Of the beds' leaf, seventy-one. Of the bought leaf, one hundred and five standing, of one hundred and fourteen sealed in the year — nine of them ash in the wet week, counted and burned in their month.
The list stands at no names. The last two were served in their order off the autumn's making. Every name the wave wrote has been served — none skipped, none sold out of its turn.
He shut the book on the page. The high shelf stood full in the lamplight behind him, row over row under their labels — the summer's month and the autumn's, the beds' leaf and the bought, every jar with its week on it and its source in the book. Under its stone on the counter, the list stood empty for the first time since the wave's winter. Behind the shop, the beds stood in the year's first hard frost, done giving, under a sky that held the first snow the way a held breath is held — not yet, and coming.
The year of the two hundred had answered with one hundred and seventy-six, and every one of them was true.