The Ink of Binding was kept in the treasury.
Not the part of the treasury that had been picked over, which was most of it. Not the vaults where the gold was supposed to be and wasn't, or the shelves where the ledgers of past accounts sat in their neat rows, each one a record of promises made and promises broken and the slowly widening gap between them. The Ink was kept in a separate room at the back, behind a door that required two keys turned simultaneously, which Rania thought was excessive until Oswin explained, with the neutral tone of someone conveying a fact rather than a warning, that the Ink was one of perhaps nine known sources of its kind left on the continent and could not be replicated.
"It's the reason Valdris was able to issue legally binding contracts that held across kingdom borders," he said. "Documents sealed with this Ink cannot be altered or forged. They are considered absolute in every court in Aureveil."
"So it's a notarization tool."
He seemed to consider how to respond to this. "It is," he said, "considerably more than a notarization tool. But that is one of its functions, yes."
She had come to the treasury that afternoon to sign the formal letters of acknowledgment to each creditor, which were legally required within five days of inheriting the title. Oswin had prepared the letters. They were careful and noncommittal and bought time without conceding anything, which was exactly what she had asked for.
She sat at the small table in the treasury room, the seven letters spread before her, and Oswin presented the Ink. It was in a squat glass bottle with a metal stopper, and the liquid inside was not quite red and not quite black but something in between that shifted depending on the angle of the light. She had expected it to look more dramatic. It looked like a bottle of expensive ink.
She dipped the pen. She signed the first letter.
And the world cracked open.
That was the only way she could describe it afterward, on the nights when she lay awake trying to make sense of what had happened. Not a vision. Not a sound. More like a shift in the air around her, a sudden overwhelming awareness of everything that was owed in that room, all at once, with no warning and no way to close it off.
Oswin's debts appeared first because he was closest. A number, floating just over his left shoulder, rendered in a deep red that looked exactly like the Ink she had just used. Not enormous. An old debt, the kind that had been there so long it had almost stopped pressing. He owed something to someone, had owed it for years, and the weight of it sat on him like a coat he had long since stopped noticing.
Then the guard at the door. A different number, sharper and newer. Money borrowed recently, the anxiety of it still fresh in the way the figure seemed to tremble slightly at the edges. Then the guard's number was joined by something else, a secondary marking underneath it, smaller, in a darker shade, and it took Rania a moment to understand that this was not coin-debt but something else. A promise made to someone and not yet kept. A favor owed. The Red Ledger, she would come to understand later, did not restrict itself to the financial.
But that understanding was later.
Right now she was staring at a room that had suddenly become incomprehensible with information.
Every surface, every person, the walls themselves, carried marks she could not stop seeing. Old debts and new debts and debts that were not debts in any sense she had a word for yet. Numbers and symbols and patterns bleeding into each other, and underneath all of it, like a current she could feel but not see directly, something massive and old that was the debt of the kingdom itself, eight hundred and forty-seven million coins rendered in a red so dark it was almost black, pressing down on everything in the room like weather.
She put the pen down.
Or she tried to. Her hand did not cooperate immediately. Oswin said something. She could not parse the words because her attention was being distributed across too many things at once.
She breathed.
This was a technique she had learned not from any meditation course but from an early job at a policy consulting firm where her manager had been a man of terrifying competence who had told her once, during a presentation that was going catastrophically wrong in front of twelve very important clients, that the only useful thing to do when overwhelmed with information was to stop trying to process it all and instead pick one thing, the most important thing, and focus on that until you could see it clearly.
She picked one thing.
The kingdom's debt. The massive dark-red shape of it at the edges of her perception. She looked at it directly, the way you look at something bright that hurts your eyes but that you need to see, and she held her attention there until the rest of the room quieted.
Eight hundred and forty-seven million. She could see it now not just as a number but as a structure. Not a wall but something more complex, something with components that pressed against each other, some of them loose, some of them load-bearing. She could see, dimly, the shape of where the weight was distributed, which parts were old and settled and which parts were newer and still shifting.
She did not understand all of it. Not yet.
But she saw enough to know that the structure was not uniform. It had weak points. All structures did.
"Your Grace." Oswin's voice again. She could hear him clearly now. "Are you unwell?"
She looked at him. The number above his shoulder was still there, still that faded red of an old obligation, and she found if she didn't focus on it directly it sat at the edge of her vision without demanding too much.
"I'm fine," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "I need a moment."
"Of course."
She looked down at the letter she had just signed. The Ink had dried to that dark red-black, and her signature sat in it clearly. She picked up the pen again, carefully this time, and signed the remaining six letters. Each one brought a small fresh surge of awareness, the Ink connecting her to something she still didn't have the vocabulary for, but she breathed through it and kept her attention on the paper.
When she was finished she capped the Ink and set the pen down and looked at her hand. It was not shaking. She was mildly proud of that.
"Oswin," she said.
"Your Grace."
"The Ink. Does everyone who uses it experience—" She paused. She was not sure how to complete the sentence.
He was quiet for a moment. "No," he said finally. "Most find it simply a reliable medium for formal documentation. But the Ashveil line has always had a particular relationship with it. Your predecessor was sensitive to it as well, though he chose, for the most part, not to discuss it."
She nodded slowly. Filed it. There were questions she needed to answer about what had just happened, but they could exist in a queue for now, behind the more immediate questions about creditor timelines and asset inventories and which of her seven obligations was most likely to take aggressive action in the next thirty days.
She stood. Gathered the letters.
The room still had its new texture, the faint press of all those numbers she was now apparently going to be aware of, whether she wanted to be or not. She thought about that for a second. An economist who could literally see debt. The absurdity of it was not lost on her. If she had told Professor Suh about this, the woman would have looked at her for a long time over her glasses and then said something dry and precise that would have been funny later but not quite yet.
"Dispatch the letters," Rania said. "And find me the head of the treasury records. I want to go through the last fifteen years tonight."
"Tonight?"
"I have ninety days," she said. "I would like to use at least one of them productively."
She walked out of the treasury room. Behind her, Oswin made a note in his folder. The guard at the door straightened slightly as she passed.
The number above the guard's shoulder trembled in her peripheral vision. She noted it and kept walking.
There was a great deal to learn. The sooner she started, the better.