Quenby Hask Buys a Cloak

Quenby Hask could price a traveller from the boots up. Cracked leather meant a jar at a copper, good wool meant three, and a shaking hand meant whatever she cared to ask. At Spurling Hythe that morning the Spider boat was loading at two drops a span, and she worked the bank with six jars slung from a yoke, shaking each one bright before she held it out.

Then the grey bands came down the lane, two of them, forty-odd souls in the same undyed cloak and the same hood, every hem turned up to the same width. Quenby tried her boots trick and found they had swapped boots as well. She picked the smallest hood, because the smallest are usually the youngest, and held a jar up to it. “Light that keeps,” she said. “Your own. No name needed.”

The hood looked at the jar, which was already fading in the cold, and then looked past her. A hand came out of the next cloak and pressed something into the small one’s palm, and the small one turned away without a word. Quenby never saw whose hand it was. Neither did Ilse Thornmere’s purser at the plank, who tallied each band as a single entry and waved them aboard.

She carried the yoke back up the lane with nothing sold. At the top she stopped at the slop-seller’s stall and asked what a grey cloak cost. She said she would think about it. Then she paid, out of the morning’s float, and folded it under the jars.