Clemency Boards the Anvil Boat

Clemency Rudd had sworn to her son she would cross on a Fishpond boat or not at all. He stoked at Cinder Brow, and a mother’s loyalty ought to be worth a little waiting on a cold bank at Wychcote Ferry. Her dead brother’s chisels lay rolled in sacking across her knees, sold already to a joiner on the far side, provided they arrived.

The first boat in had a black anvil daubed on its bow. So did the second. When the third came nosing through the drizzle with the same anvil, a carter behind her laughed out loud. “Brannoch Vell’s buying the river by the yard.”

The grey band went aboard first, forty-odd of them in matching hoods, moving as one long patient animal. Then a man in oilskins pushed to the plank and pressed a purse on the boatman, paying six hundred and three drops a span to be certain of this boat and no later one. The boatman weighed it, blinked, and waved him on. The rest of the bank shoved after him at a drop and a bit, Clemency’s elbow in a stranger’s ribs.

She stopped at the plank. Behind her the far reach was empty of any Fishpond sail.

“Loyalty doesn’t pay the joiner,” she said to nobody, and paid the boatman. She tucked the chisels under her arm and decided her son need never hear which bow she’d crossed under.