A Ransom Paid at Sallow Cross

Ness Corran had carried her twelve words across three borders and had never once been asked to spend them. She stood at the back of the Sallow Cross queue with her pack against her shins and watched a man in a good coat push to the rope and hold up his oil purse. The pump clerk did not look up. He tapped his slate, and the figure that came back was enormous: over a thousand times the breath everyone else had paid, enough to feed a family for a season in the Lit Lands.

“For the front of the ferry,” the man said, as if apologising for it.

“Front’s the front,” the clerk said, and wrote it down.

The man climbed aboard ahead of a woman with a sleeping child. Far off, House Foundry’s catch was being carried up the Chain, and the rope eased as the ferry shoved off. Nobody cheered. The woman looked at the man’s back for a long moment, then at the few coins in her own fist, then at the grey water.

Ness moved her lips, not for the man but for herself, the way she did when the world made her want to be paid for something she already owned. Not your name, not your light. She had never believed the saying more than she did now, watching a rich man’s light cross the water while the poor stood on the shore holding their breath.