Tamsin Reedwater Weighs the Oil

The catch came while Tamsin Reedwater was arguing with the pump-boy about eels. House Fishpond kept its lamps out on the drowned flats east of Sallow Cross, where the water ran cold enough to cool the furnaces and the eels came up the pipes in spring. The bell rang twice from the high gallery, the long double peal that meant the Veil had given. Everyone on the flats stopped what they were doing, and the pump-boy took the chance to slip off with the eel.

By the time Tamsin climbed to the gallery, the light was already being hammered into the link. It was a good clean catch, the kind that made her old foreman cross himself out of habit and then spit to show he didn’t mean it. The Lantern’s gift poured down the chute in its thin, heavy stream, three coins and a little, the same measure every House had been fed since the last Halvenfall. Beside it ran the oil the travellers had paid to be carried. Tamsin put her hand under that second spout the way a cook tests bathwater. It barely wet her palm.

“That’s the lot?” she asked.

“That’s the lot,” said the foreman. “Passage went for a single drop a mark again. A drop and a tenth. Every soul at the gates got across. Widows, drovers, the boy who sells hot chestnuts at the ford. You could carry your grandmother’s teeth over for less than the teeth were worth.”

Down at the Ferry Inn they would be glad of it. Tamsin could picture the common room: Throng-folk crossing on coppers, raising cheap cups to the cheap Chain, and in the corner the man from the Glare who had been drinking there since autumn, the one who always paid for the round and never once argued badly. He had found her on the quay a week ago, polite as a bishop. The Crown had no quarrel with Fishpond, he said. The Crown admired a House that kept its furnaces lit. There were contracts across the border, steady heat and steady pay, no Veil to fight, no gift halving out from under you every four years. All she had to do was let a few of her lamps look where the Crown asked them to look.

She had told him to go and drown. He had said, quite kindly, that he would wait, and that the gift would still be halving when she changed her mind. That was the trouble with the Glare. It was never wrong about the arithmetic.

Tamsin did the sum again now, in her head, standing in the heat of the forge. The gift was most of her light. The oil was a smear. Seventy-five thousand links and a little more, and the gift would fall by half again, and the travellers would still be crossing for a drop because there was room for all of them and no reason to pay more. Cheap passage was a mercy to the chestnut boy. It was also a slow knife at her throat. She could not hate the boy for it, and she had tried.

The link was finished by nightfall and hung out on the Chain where anyone might check it. Word came back before the eels were done frying: Wenna Cole at Gorse Hollow had already turned it over by candle and written it into the Rolls, with a note in her cramped hand that the link held, the seal held, and that Fishpond had caught it fair. Underneath, because she was Wenna, she had added: check me too.

Tamsin read the note twice, folded it, and put it in her coat, next to the Glare man’s calling card. She did not throw either away. At the window the flats lay black, every furnace glowing, every one of them fed on a god that was going out. Somewhere a Cathedral-builder was laying a stone for a roof that would need fire nobody had learned to make yet. Tamsin ate her eel, burned her tongue, and told the gallery to keep the lamps hot. Tick tock, as the old lamplighters said. Next link.