Quenby Hask Gets Her Jar Back

Quenby Hask worked the bank at Spurling Hythe the way her mother had, from the back of the line forward, because the back was where people had waited longest and believed most. Today the back was grey. Forty-odd cloaks, same cut, same hoods, standing close enough to share breath, and House Sec’s runner already halfway down the lane shouting Hale Corrigan’s catch.

She picked a hood at random and opened her coat to show the jars, each one stoppered with wax and glowing the green of a pond in August. “Real light, bottled at the source. Keeps a hearth through winter. Two drops and it’s yours.”

The hood took one without a word. Quenby held out her palm for the coin. Instead the jar went left, hand to hand, under one hood and the next, turned and weighed and passed on, until it came out at the front of the line and travelled all the way back down the other side. The last cloak, or the first, she couldn’t tell, set it in her hand, still warm from fingers.

“Passage is two drops a span today,” said a voice she couldn’t place. “We pay that. We don’t pay for a jar nobody wants to be seen carrying.”

The band went down to the boat in one grey piece. Quenby stood with the returned jar, looked at its green a long moment, and for the first time in eleven years did not put it back in her coat. She left it on the mooring stone and walked up the lane with her hands empty.