Corvin Ashby’s Cooling Hand-Stove

The hand-stove the Crown had issued Corvin Ashby was the best thing about his posting. It was a flat brass tin the size of a prayer book, warm all day without fuel, and it went stone cold at the curfew bell in Copperhythe whether he was in Copperhythe or not. He sat on the toll bench at Quarrender Bridge with it in his lap and watched House Sec’s runner come over the hump of the bridge, shouting Hale Corrigan’s catch.

Two bands had gone across on it, both in grey, a long one at dawn and a short one just before the runner. Passage was three drops a span today, dear for these parts, and they had paid it without haggling, which Corvin noted, because it was the only thing he could note. Forty-odd travellers, every bundle passed hand to hand along the line until it belonged to no hand at all.

His superior wanted names by the next post. Corvin had a name ready: a wool-dyer called Abel Rusk, who kept a stall by the bridge, spoke too freely of the Crown, and had certainly been in the line somewhere. It would satisfy. It would earn the bonus that paid his mother’s rooms near the harbour, where the lamps never went out.

The stove cooled under his fingers. Curfew, three hundred miles off. He took the page with Rusk’s name on it, folded it twice, and fed it to the toll-keeper’s brazier. Then he wrote, in his neat Glare hand: two bands, contents unknown, sender unknown, recipient unknown. He signed it and sat on in the cold.