Checked at Gorse Hollow by the candle nearest the door, read through twice and then once more with the glass held close. The Oathbound’s seal sits square on the link, and every mark of the work holds from first nonce to last. Whoever caught it wrote small and kept the margin clean, which is more than most Houses bother to do. Don’t trust, verify. Checked and held. W.C.

Mara Quill had kept the gate at the Sallow Cross stage for eleven years, and she had never seen the rope take a weight like this. By the time House Spider rang for its catch, the crowd had folded itself against the timber until the posts groaned, and a man near the water was holding a sleeping child above his head like a lamp.

Nobody told them to stand back. There was nowhere to stand back to. Mara pulled the gate chain and let the ferryman take the first score, then the second, and somewhere past the third she stopped trusting her own knots. The Spider’s runner came down the bank with his hood up and a tin of oil under his arm, and he looked at the crowd the way a man looks at a bill he already knows he will pay.

The catch came through as the light went green, and the ferry pushed off so low in the water that the wash slapped over the stage boards. Head Ilse Thornmere would be counting her lamps tonight, Mara thought, and she would find them all burning, which was the one thing about the Spider that never changed. The child was handed back to her mother on the far side of the rope, and no one on the shore cheered.

“Is that the lamp they mean?” the girl asked, pointing past the rope. “Lamp’s behind the wall, love. Hold my coat.” “Why’s it so dim, then?” “Because it’s dying, and nobody at the gate says so.” “Then why do we pay to cross?” Her father looked at the toll-keeper’s chalk. “Ask him. He’s got the pen.”

Gate ledger, Sallow Cross, Book 938, link 50. Count at the rope by knots, checked twice: 6,938 carried across. Passage posted at 0.1 sat/vB, as the Ferry Inn chalked it. House Fishpond caught the link under Tamsin Reedwater eighty-eight seconds after the last one. Tolls taken from those who could pay, the rest waved on. Ferry bell rung for the next crossing. Signed, R. Ottery, toll-keeper.

Seven thousand five hundred and some souls pressed onto the Sallow Cross stage, and their breath hung over the rope like a second, warmer fog. Ilse Harrow stood under the Ferry Inn’s awning with a cup of broth bought in Glare coin and watched House Via’s catch climb the Chain. Near-free passage meant the crowd could hardly believe its luck, and the Houses behind the lamps were left to burn on whatever the Lantern still gave.

A House runner came in out of the wet to warm her hands. Her name was Dorrit, and there was ink to the elbows of her coat. Ilse set a card on the table beside her and a lamp no bigger than a fist. ‘It dims when you tell it to,’ she said. ‘In a bad season you keep the wick low, and nobody’s lamps go out.’

Dorrit turned the little dial once and watched the flame sink. ‘And who turns it?’

‘Whoever keeps the lamp,’ Ilse said. ‘That’s you.’

It was a fair answer, and she knew it was a clever one. Dorrit pocketed the card without thanking her. Out on the stage a child coughed, the rope creaked against its posts, and the ferry bell rang for the next crossing. Ilse finished her broth and thought about the mother on the shore who would be glad of cheap passage tonight, and about the Houses that would have to keep a dying god alive on the other side of it.

Ness Corran had carried her twelve words across three borders and had never once been asked to spend them. She stood at the back of the Sallow Cross queue with her pack against her shins and watched a man in a good coat push to the rope and hold up his oil purse. The pump clerk did not look up. He tapped his slate, and the figure that came back was enormous: over a thousand times the breath everyone else had paid, enough to feed a family for a season in the Lit Lands.

“For the front of the ferry,” the man said, as if apologising for it.

“Front’s the front,” the clerk said, and wrote it down.

The man climbed aboard ahead of a woman with a sleeping child. Far off, House Foundry’s catch was being carried up the Chain, and the rope eased as the ferry shoved off. Nobody cheered. The woman looked at the man’s back for a long moment, then at the few coins in her own fist, then at the grey water.

Ness moved her lips, not for the man but for herself, the way she did when the world made her want to be paid for something she already owned. Not your name, not your light. She had never believed the saying more than she did now, watching a rich man’s light cross the water while the poor stood on the shore holding their breath.

Ysolde Marr had checked links by candlelight for nineteen years and had never once been thanked for it. The new link came down the Gorse Hollow chute still warm from the glass, and she set it on the scrubbed bench beside the Candle Rolls, where the wax dripped into its tin dish. House Fishpond’s mark sat at the head of it under Tamsin Reedwater’s seal, and every line below agreed with the line above.

She read it twice, the way she read everything, then once more backwards, because a flaw sometimes hides in the order of things rather than in the things themselves. Out past the shutters the Sallow Cross ferry was still taking on its load, and she could hear the rope groan through the wall. Every passenger aboard had paid a breath of oil to be carried, and not one of them would ever know that a woman with a bad back had spent a quarter hour on their crossing.

Near the bottom she found the thing she was looking for and was sorry to find it: a small carved mark that matched nothing on the Rolls. She held the candle close. It was only a child’s drawing of a boat, scratched by a Scribe’s apprentice who had waited a long time at the gate for a ride. Ysolde marked the link clean, wrote her name beside the seal, and went back to her cold soup, which was the only thanks the work ever gets.

On the Antswarm’s lamp-floor a cracked tin cup sat on the rim of a barrel, full of cold tea that nobody had drunk since the last catch. Dov, the youngest wick-boy, filled it each shift and set it where the old hands would find it when they came off their stools too tired to lift their arms. Nobody ever said whose turn it was to drink it. The cup was the only thing on that floor that did not wait on the Lantern, and Dov liked to think someone should be looked after before the light was.