An-Audit-Of-Hours
The job came on cream paper that should have smelled of nothing and instead smelled of cut grass and frost, and Cora knew before she opened it that it was not the kind of work she usually did.
She was a forensic accountant, the sort hired when a number somewhere has quietly stopped telling the truth and someone needs it made to confess. She was good at it. She had a flat in the city, a cat she pretended not to love, and a temperament built for the long patient unknotting of other people's lies. She did not believe in much. So when the letter offered triple her rate to audit "a discrepancy in the accounts of the Court of the Long Year," and gave an address that was a stile at the edge of a wood that, on every map she owned, did not contain a wood, she went — partly for the money, partly because the number in her head had already started itching the way it did when something didn't reconcile.
The wood was real when she reached it. The stile was real. And the man waiting on the other side was the most beautiful and most wrong thing she had ever seen — tall, courteous, his shadow falling the wrong way from the afternoon sun, his smile holding a few too many teeth arranged a little too evenly.
"The Reeve of Hours," he introduced himself, and bowed exactly low enough to be insulting if she had known the rules. "You audit debts. We have a debt that will not balance, and our own