The moment, he thought, as he dressed and ate bread and cheese standing at his kitchen table, had come yesterday, in the shape of a young woman with a tool case and a precise way of speaking, who had looked at his rotten ladder and said, without hesitation, that they would replace it first. He had liked her at once, though liking was not a word he used lightly. He had liked her because she had not argued, and she had not dismissed him, and she had not climbed the ladder like a person who believed warnings were for other people. She had tested each rung. She had listened. In Soren's experience, people who listened were rarer than people who talked, and worth more.
He was at the tower by seven, with his tools and the first lengths of new pine on his shoulder, and he found her already there, standing at the tower door with her case in her hand, looking up at the clock face.
"Good morning," she said. "I came early to take the measurements before we start on the ladder. The spring must be measured exactly, and the pendulum rod as well, and I want a sketch of the movement before the cleaning begins, so that I know what belongs where when I put it back."
Soren unlocked the door. "We build the ladder first, as we agreed."
"We do," Maren said. "But the measurements take only a few minutes, and they are taken from the top, and I have already climbed it once."
Soren frowned. He had a carpenter's respect for ladders, which is to say he did not trust any ladder he had not built himself, and he trusted this one least of all. "Yesterday you climbed it with me, rung by rung, and I tested each one ahead of you. Today the rungs are a day older, and the damp does not sleep. I would rather you waited until the new ladder is up."
"I have waited a month for no one to come," Maren said, not unkindly. "I do not want to wait another day for measurements I can take in ten minutes. I will test each rung as you taught me. I will step over the dark one, as I did yesterday."
Soren looked at her, and saw the set of her jaw, which was the set of a person who has made up her mind, and he knew better than to argue with a made-up mind. He also knew, because he had spent his life around people who work with their hands, that there are times when a warning, repeated, becomes an insult, and that Maren Reed was not a person who needed to be told twice. So he said, "Then I go first again, and you put your feet where mine have been, and we go slowly, and if a rung so much as sighs under us, we come down and build the ladder first, and the measurements wait."
They climbed. The tower was cool and dim in the morning, with light falling from above in a single shaft that caught the dust in the air and made it look like something solid. Soren went first, testing, pressing his weight onto each rung before he trusted it, and Maren followed, her case slung over her shoulder, her free hand white on the rail. They passed the lower section, where the wood was sound, and entered the middle section, where the rungs were gray and weathered, and Soren tested the dark rung, the one with the crack along its grain, by pressing his boot onto it and leaning his weight forward, and it held, as it had held yesterday, and he stepped over it to the next, and told her to do the same.
Maren stepped onto the dark rung to pass it, because stepping over a rung means standing on the one below it and reaching up, and she was reaching, her hand on the rail above, when the wood gave way.
It did not creak. It did not warn. It broke cleanly, with a sound like a dry branch snapping in winter, and the rung fell away beneath her foot, and for a single suspended moment she was hanging by her hands from the rail, her feet finding nothing, her case swinging wildly against her side, and then her grip, which was a clockmaker's grip, precise but not strong, began to slip.