Ness Corran Takes a Cloak

The drovers’ barn at Mossgate smelled of wet wool and lamp smoke. Wat Ember stood on a hay bale handing out grey cloaks from a cart, all cut from one bolt, all the same weight to the ounce. Each traveller brought one even measure of light and would leave with one even measure, and no clerk at the far gate would know whose was whose.

Ness Corran took a cloak and held it at arm’s length. She had crossed borders with nothing but twelve words in her head and had never once hidden her face. Hiding felt like admitting there was something to hide.

“Nobody here’s a thief,” Wat said, reading her. “We just don’t fancy a stranger writing down who paid the midwife and who paid the priest.” He nodded at the barn door, where a pleasant man in a good coat had been asking the drovers about their sheep for an hour and buying nobody’s sheep.

From the hills came word that the Foundry had caught the link. Passage was cheap, under a drop a span, and Brannoch Vell’s crew would be glad of the gift, because they would be getting little else. The band filed out to the gate.

Ness put the cloak on. It fitted badly, like everyone’s did. At the gate the man in the good coat counted forty-odd grey shoulders and wrote nothing at all.