Soren Krogh had built things all his life, and he knew the difference between a structure that stands because it is sound and one that stands because no one has leaned on it yet. He thought about that difference all the morning of the meeting, while he worked in his workshop with the door open to the street, planing a board for a neighbor's fence and trying not to think about the evening ahead. The board was honest work. It did what boards do. It did not require him to stand in a room full of his neighbors and ask them to believe him over a man who owned the town's newspaper.
He had not slept well. He had dreamed of the rung itself, lying on his workbench, the break clean on one side and ragged on the other, and in the dream he kept trying to fit the two pieces back together and they would not join, because a thing that has been cut does not heal the way a thing that has broken does. He had woken with that thought still in his head, and it stayed with him through the morning, the way true thoughts do: a cut does not heal. A cut can only be shown.
At noon he went to the town hall for the fifth check of the trial. The crowd was larger than the day before — the meeting announcement had done what Fallon's editorial had undone, drawing people back out of curiosity if not out of conviction — and the depot agent compared his watch to the dial, and nodded, and initialed the log, and the schoolteacher initialed it beside him, and Maren, who had come down from the tower room with her tool case, wrote the entry in her own hand, locked the case, and handed the key to the council chairman, who took it with the grave air of a man carrying something heavier than a key. Soren watched Maren's hands as she worked. The right one moved with the old care, a little slower than it used to, but without the tremor. She caught him looking, and smiled briefly, the way people smile when they do not want to make a moment of something, and he nodded back, and that was all, and it was enough.
After the check, Maren took him aside in the vestibule, where the trial log lay open on the table and the afternoon light came in through the high windows in dusty shafts.
"Tonight," she said, "I will show them the newspaper first, or the rung first?"
He thought about it the way he thought about the order of work on a job: what must bear weight first.
"The rung first," he said. "The rung is a thing they can hold. A newspaper is a thing they must read, and reading takes longer than holding. Let them hold the cut in their hands first, and then tell them what Fallon printed before the fall, and then the log will do the rest, because by then they will already know what kind of man prints a sale notice for a tower that has not yet fallen."
She nodded. "And if he says you cut it yourself?"
"He will say that," Soren said. "He has already said it to two men on the street this morning. I heard him from my workshop door. He said a carpenter who wants work will always find a reason to keep a tower standing."
"And your answer?"
"My answer," Soren said, "is that I kept the rung. A man who stages evidence does not keep the evidence where anyone can look at it for eight weeks. He hides it, or he burns it. I put it on my bench and I showed it to Maren Reed the day she asked me what else I had noticed about the ladder, and I have shown it to anyone who asked since. Besides," he added, and he felt the corner of his mouth move, though he did not quite smile, "if I had wanted work, I would have let the tower fall and offered to build the printing house. That is steady work for a year. Keeping a tower standing is work for a week."
Maren laughed, quietly, and he was glad to hear it, because laughter had been scarce in the tower room that week, and he had missed it more than he had expected to.