The Roll

The roll came last of the finishing tools, a brass wheel on a long handle, its rim cut with a pattern that would print only when the wheel was heeled over and run. Nyra set it in the girl’s hands and let her feel the weight of it. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The roll was for the part that could be set down, a border walked the whole length of a cover without the hand once lifting.

The girl turned the wheel against her thumb and watched the small pattern come around again. “Does it ever meet itself,” she asked, “when you have carried it all the way around the edge?”

“If you have measured true, it meets itself and you cannot find the seam,” Nyra said. “If you have not, there is a little stammer in the line where the end overtakes the start, and that is the one place a reader’s eye will go to rest.”

The girl ran a length along a scrap of leather, slow at first and then too quick, and the pattern wavered where her wrist had tired. She found the stammer at once, without being shown. Nyra nodded. “The tool keeps the pattern. The evenness is yours to give or to lose.”

“What does the book keep of a border run true?” the girl asked. Nyra said that a cover carries its line long after the warmth of the tool has gone out of the brass, and that no one who opens the book will think once of the hand that walked it. The book keeps the border, and you keep the walking of it.