"We do," Soren said, and something in his face eased, as if he had expected an argument and received agreement instead. "I have the timber already. I bought it with my own money in April, because I knew the council would take its time and the ladder would not. I have been waiting for a reason to put it up that the council could not argue with. A clock repairer who refuses to climb a rotten ladder is a reason the council cannot argue with."
She smiled then, for the first time since arriving in Fox Creek, because she recognized a fellow professional: a person who did the work properly even when no one was watching, and who kept receipts.
"Then tomorrow we build a ladder," she said. "And today, if you will hold the light for me, I will look at the movement from the top, carefully, one rung at a time, testing each before I trust it."
Soren studied her for a moment, the way a man studies a tool he has not used before, to see whether it is sound. "You are not afraid of heights, then."
"I am afraid of heights," Maren said honestly. "I am also afraid of clocks that lie. The second fear is larger, so it wins."
He laughed at that, a short surprised sound, and fetched a lantern from the corner. "Then we go up together, slowly, and I go first, and you put your feet where mine have been. That is how my father taught me to climb a roof. He said a ladder is only as honest as the man who tested it."
They climbed. The ladder creaked, as old ladders do, and twice Soren stopped and pressed his weight onto a rung and shook his head and told her to step over it, to the next, and she did, her hands white on the rails, her tool case slung over her shoulder by its strap, bumping against her hip. The clock room at the top was small and close, with light coming through the faces from outside and dust thick on every surface, and the movement standing in the middle of it like a heart that had forgotten how to beat: brass wheels and arbors, a pendulum hanging still, and the suspension spring at the top of the pendulum rod, which Maren saw at once, even in the lantern light, was wrong.
She leaned in, loupe to her eye, and looked. The spring was cracked clean through near its top block, a hairline fracture that had finally given way under the weight of the pendulum, and the pendulum itself hung a fraction off true, and everything was coated in a fine gray grime that spoke of years without a proper cleaning.
"There it is," she said quietly, the way her father used to speak when he found the fault, not triumphant, but relieved, because a found fault is a fault that can be fixed. "The suspension spring. Cracked. And the grime has been working against it for years. It did not stop in a day. It stopped the way all neglected things stop: slowly, and then all at once."
Soren stood beside her, his hands in his apron pockets, looking at the movement the way a man looks at a neighbor's house he has passed a thousand times without ever going inside. "Can it be mended?"
"It can," Maren said. "I carry springs in my case. The same size, I believe, though I will measure to be certain. The cleaning will take longer than the repair. Grime is patient work. It does not come off because you are in a hurry."
"How long?"
"A week, perhaps more, once the ladder is sound. I work slowly because clocks punish haste. A man who hurries a clock will have it stopping again within the month, and then he will blame the clock, and the clock will be innocent."
Soren nodded. "Then we build the ladder tomorrow, and you clean the movement, and Fox Creek will have its time back." He paused, and looked out through the clock face, through the glass, at the square below, where the evening light was going gold on the rooftops. "It is a strange thing," he said, "to live in a town that cannot tell the time. People arrive late and leave early and argue about which of them is right, and the arguments are not about the time at all. They are about trust. A town that cannot agree on the hour cannot agree on much else."