The hand-stove the Crown had issued Corvin Ashby was the best thing about his posting. It was a flat brass tin the size of a prayer book, warm all day without fuel, and it went stone cold at the curfew bell in Copperhythe whether he was in Copperhythe or not. He sat on the toll bench at Quarrender Bridge with it in his lap and watched House Sec’s runner come over the hump of the bridge, shouting Hale Corrigan’s catch.

Two bands had gone across on it, both in grey, a long one at dawn and a short one just before the runner. Passage was three drops a span today, dear for these parts, and they had paid it without haggling, which Corvin noted, because it was the only thing he could note. Forty-odd travellers, every bundle passed hand to hand along the line until it belonged to no hand at all.

His superior wanted names by the next post. Corvin had a name ready: a wool-dyer called Abel Rusk, who kept a stall by the bridge, spoke too freely of the Crown, and had certainly been in the line somewhere. It would satisfy. It would earn the bonus that paid his mother’s rooms near the harbour, where the lamps never went out.

The stove cooled under his fingers. Curfew, three hundred miles off. He took the page with Rusk’s name on it, folded it twice, and fed it to the toll-keeper’s brazier. Then he wrote, in his neat Glare hand: two bands, contents unknown, sender unknown, recipient unknown. He signed it and sat on in the cold.

“Two hundred and fifty coins, near enough, in one crossing,” said Wynn Treloar, the lodge treasurer, wiping road dust off his cuffs. “The Spider runner swore it at the toll. Third catch running for Ilse Thornmere, after thirty-eight minutes of nothing. Who sends that much on a night like this, if not a patron?”

Aldous Penhallow kept turning the lime with his long rake. The kiln at Limebrake had burned two days, and the quicklime lay in the pit white as old bone, waiting for water. The Cathedral-builders needed forty loads of mortar before frost, and they had coin for twenty.

“Whose was it?” Aldous asked.

“Nobody at the gate could say.”

“Then it’s somebody’s, and not ours.” He nodded at the water butt. Passage had doubled since morning, four drops a span and more, and the treasurer’s letters to the guild in Aurelhold had gone unanswered for a season. “I won’t wait on a chest that may be a merchant paying his own cousin. Twenty loads we slake tonight. Twenty we pray for in spring.”

Wynn opened his mouth, shut it, and fetched the bucket himself. The lime hissed and heaved when the water struck it, and steam rolled off the pit into the dark. Somewhere down the valley, a House Spider bell rang the next search begun. Aldous raked on, laying in mortar for a wall his grandson might see roofed.

Out on Ashfen, where the reeds stand chest-high in brown water, a reed-cutter named Crispin Dunhay swore he saw a lamp hanging low over the far pools while House Spider’s link was caught. It burned without any oil he could see, white and steady, and then it was not there. No one else on the causeway saw it, and the boatmen who heard him out would not say whether they had looked.

At the Sallow Cross bank a girl with a patched coat tugged at an old lamplighter’s sleeve and asked why the Lantern looked so small up there. Ansel Crake, who had caught light on the hills for forty years, didn’t look up. He said it was the same size it had always been, only further off, and that she should be glad she was still standing under it to ask.

The lamp-floor sang as the rope came in, a call and a answer for every pull: Haul on the glass and the glass runs red, lift the light from the dark instead. Two thousand twice and a bell to spare, pull, my lads, the Lantern is there. Thin oil in the pot and a heavy gift in the hand, keep the Antswarm burning till the far bank can stand.

Sim Ashcombe had waited half an hour on the Fallowgate bank with his aunt, long enough to learn every knot in the mooring post, before the House Via runner came down the lane shouting that Hesper Quill’s lamps had caught at last. His aunt paid three drops a span for them both and muttered that it was twice the morning’s price, and the ferryman waved them into the stern behind two great bands of travellers in grey.

Sim watched the grey ones closely. He had seen a woman among them hand a bundle to a man, or thought he had. Then the band shifted, and every cloak had the same horn buttons, the same frayed hem, the same hood pulled low, and he could no longer say which woman or which man.

On the far landing a gentleman in a good wool coat crouched to Sim’s height and held up a copper. “Sharp eyes,” he said pleasantly. “Which of them took the bundle?”

Sim looked at the copper. It would buy a hot pie. He looked at the grey backs going up the road like one long animal. “I don’t know,” he said, and was surprised to find it was true.

“Guess, then.”

“A guess isn’t knowing,” Sim said, because his aunt said it about weather. The gentleman pocketed the copper and stood. Sim’s stomach complained the whole walk to market, and he let it.

Hesper Quill stood alone at the back of the Coldharbour lamp-floor when the catch was sealed and counted what the thin oil had left her. The measure held enough for one more shift and not for two. She tipped the last of it into the reservoir with a steady hand, then wrote the figure on her palm in ink so she would not lose it on the walk home.

The message from the far bank came by lamp, three short shows and a long one, which at Ruddock Ferry meant a bone was broken and someone wanted the setter. Coll Tresidder had his splints bundled in twine and his bid in at a tenth of a drop a span before the far lamp went dark again. Then the hills gave nothing for the better part of an hour.

It was the third such wait since morning, and the regulars on the bench had stopped joking about it. A woman with a crate of ducklings said the Houses were sulking. A tanner said the Veil was holding thick and the lamps couldn’t keep up. Coll said nothing. He was thinking of a leg setting crooked while he sat on a plank.

When the Tide House runner finally came down the bank, salt-stiff, calling Maudry Kell’s catch, the clerk chalked the new terms: three drops and some, a span. The ducklings stayed. The tanner swore and stayed. Coll counted what was in his purse, which was his supper, his lodging and a little over, and pushed nearly all of it across the board.

“You’ll sleep in a hedge,” the clerk said.

“Then the child walks to see me do it,” Coll said, and went down the plank with his splints under his arm, the only fare-payer in his row who didn’t look back at the bench.