Hester Brayle Lodges a Grievance

The Antswarm’s bill came down to Mallow Quay with Ilse Marrow’s ring of ants pressed into the wax, and Hester Brayle broke it on the gate-post: 3,557 aboard, two drops and a tenth a span, and two great bands in grey that filled half the hull like wet sacking. The hauling crew sang them on. Hester wrote the count and left the names column as she always did now, empty.

Lucan Thorley was waiting under the eaves with his little book open. He had been coming a week and had written nothing in it yet. “Anything to report, mistress? The cloaks trouble you? The price?”

“The price,” Hester said, and watched his pencil lift. “Two drops a span. My ferryman burns more than that keeping his lamp lit through the night crossings. The Houses feed on the gift and the gift is going. In seventy-odd thousand links it halves, and nobody on this quay knows what we eat after. That’s my grievance. Write it down.”

He wrote it, carefully, and then held out a warm token with the open eye stamped on its face. “For your trouble.”

“No,” she said. “It’s a true complaint. You’d spoil it, paying for it.”

Thorley looked at the line he had written, the first in his book, and for once did not seem to know what it was worth.