The Grey Cloak in the Bow

Fen Pask worked the Sallow Cross queue the way a heron works a ditch: slowly, one leg at a time, jars clinking in a sling under his coat. Each held a honey-coloured glow of pond-water and fox-fire. He called it Dawnlight, guaranteed to grow.

He’d marked the man in the grey travelling cloak an hour back. Good boots, no luggage, and a face that had never once waited for anything. Fen sidled up with his best jar. The man looked at it the way you’d look at something a dog left.

Then the gate runner came down the bank calling passage at ₿1.7 a span, and the cloaked man pressed a purse into her hand and named his own figure: ₿2,593 a span. She made him say it twice. A woman with a basket of eggs laughed out loud, then stopped when she saw he meant it.

House Spider’s bell sounded from the hills soon after, and the ferry pushed off with the grey cloak standing alone in the bow, on a stretch of deck that had cost more than Fen’s whole season. Somebody said Ilse Thornmere would burn that oil before supper and wouldn’t ask whose it was.

Fen tucked the jar back in his sling. A man who would pay a king’s ransom to be certain of the crossing wouldn’t spend a copper on a promise. Hard to sell hope to anyone who can afford the real thing.