The letter came to the lockmaker on a wet afternoon, from the guild in the capital. A foundry three valleys east had lost control of its master pattern. Somebody had a copy. Any key cut from that pattern would turn any lock that had been taught to honor the foundry's mark, and in that part of the country, that meant most of them.
Ilse read the letter twice and put on her coat.
Her apprentice, Tobin, had been with her one winter. He carried the bag. They started at the top of the hill, where the big houses were, and worked down. At each front door Ilse drew the pins that knew the foundry's mark and set new ones that didn't. She was quick about it. By dark they had done thirty-one front doors, and she let herself feel the good tiredness of a list getting shorter.
On the walk home Tobin said, "The Aldens' cellar door has its own lock."
"It does."
"It came from the same foundry. I saw the stamp when we passed."
Ilse stopped under the lamp by the well. She thought about the Aldens' cellar door, and then about the pantry boxes in half the kitchens on the hill, and the strongbox the miller kept under his bed, and the chest in the chapel vestry that held the parish books. Every one of them was its own lock. Every one had learned the foundry's mark on its own, the day it was made. Changing the front door hadn't taught them anything.
"We did the doors people think of," she said. "A key doesn't know which door you were worried about."
The next morning she sat at the bench with a sheet of paper and did not go out at all until noon. She wrote down every kind of lock in the town, from the gate on the pound to the little brass catch on the schoolmaster's writing desk. Then she wrote, beside each, where it had come from.
That was how she found the second thing.
The foundry's mark had never stood alone. When the foundry was young, an older house across the sea had stamped its seal beside the mark, a way of saying we vouch for these people. Most locks made since had been taught to honor that older seal too. So a lock could forget the foundry's mark and still turn for the stolen key, because the key carried both. The letter from the guild had mentioned it in one line near the bottom. She had read past it the first time.
Tobin looked at the paper for a long while. "That's every lock twice," he said.
"Every lock twice," Ilse said. "Get the bag."
It took them most of a week, and the town was not always glad to see them.
The baker's door they left until the bread was out, because you do not take the lock off a kitchen while a woman is at the oven with her back to the street. The doctor's surgery they came back to three times before it was empty. Ilse had a rule about this, and Tobin learned it the first day: you wait until the house is quiet. A lock changed while someone is inside, busy, trusting the door, is a fright you've given them for no reason. The danger had been real for a month already. It could be real for one more hour while the bread came out.
Some locks were not hers to touch. The widow at the end of the lane had her own man for her locks, a nephew in the next town, and Ilse sent word to him rather than going in. He came the next day. She showed him the paper. He did the work himself.
One lock beat them twice. It was on the old granary, and it was not built the way the others were; the pins sat where she did not expect them, behind a plate that came off from the other side. Her first two tries she reached for the place a lock like that usually keeps its pins, and both times she put the plate back and nothing was harmed. The third time she stopped, took the whole face off, and looked before she reached. The pins were in a drawer she had never seen in a lock before. After that it was ten minutes' work.
"Look first," she told Tobin, and wrote it on the bench in chalk, where it stayed.
On the last night Tobin asked what he had been wanting to ask all week. "How do we know when we're done? There's always another box somewhere. Somebody's grandmother's sewing chest."
Ilse went to the drawer under the bench and took out a key. The guild had sent it with the second letter: a true copy of the stolen pattern, cut on purpose, so that lockmakers could test their own work.
"We don't know by remembering," she said. "We know by trying."
They walked the town with a lantern, the two of them, and at every lock on her paper she put the bad key in and turned.
It would not go. The front doors refused it. The cellar doors refused it. The pantry boxes, the miller's strongbox, the chapel chest, the gate on the pound, the brass catch on the schoolmaster's desk. Each one met the key and held. Tobin started counting them out loud after the first dozen. Somewhere past ninety he stopped counting and only listened: the small dead click of a lock that has stopped trusting what it was taught to trust.
It is a plain sound. Ilse had heard it ten thousand times and never thought of it as anything. That night, going down the hill with the lantern swinging, she thought it might be the best sound her trade made.
At the bottom of the hill she gave Tobin the bad key to carry home.
"Keep it in the bag," she said. "Every time we fit a new lock, try this in it before we leave."
He put it in the inside pocket, the one for things that matter, and they went in out of the rain.
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