In the margin of the Candle Rolls, in Ysolde Marr’s small upright hand: Fishpond’s link, 7,262 travellers carried on a tenth of a drop a span, the Sallow Cross crowd loud enough to hear through the shutters. The candle held steady to the last character. Nothing to add, except that the oil in the reading lamp is lower than the Rolls say it should be, and the lamp is not hers to refill.

A short letter went across on House Mara’s link, sealed with a thumb of tallow and addressed to Tam Ogle at the lamp-camp of Hob’s Landing. It said his mother’s ewe had dropped twin lambs in the wet, that the roof over the byre still held, and that he should come down before the frost. Signed Ada Ogle, who had written it in her best hand and then crossed out the word best.

Orla Benbow had crossed four borders with nothing in her pockets but lint, so she noticed the man in grey who kept touching his hat. Two bands were boarding at Kittle Hythe on the Foundry’s link, word of it come down from Brannoch Vell’s chimneys in the Kilnrows, and both bands wore the same cloth, so the gate-clerk had given up and simply waved the wool aboard. The man stood at the edge of the second band, fingering a strip of paper tucked into his hatband.

“That’s your name,” Orla said, falling in beside him. “Written down.”

Teague Mollard went red to the ears. “I’ve a bad memory.”

“You’ve a good cloak and a bad hat. Sixty people look alike, and you’re the one carrying a label.” She kept her voice low. “Say it. All twelve.”

He tried. He stuck at the seventh and looked at the paper. She made him start again, and again, while the band shuffled forward and the boatmen called the drop-a-span crossing like a fishwife’s price. On the fourth try he got through without looking. On the fifth he got through without moving his lips.

Then he took the strip out, folded it twice, put it in his mouth and chewed, grimacing.

“Ink tastes of nothing,” he said, swallowing.

“Better nothing than somebody,” said Orla, and stepped back into the other band’s grey.

Merriel Dunstan had the Antswarm’s link half checked when the woman came back through the door of the Wakeful hut at Brockwell Weir, still in grey, rain beaded on the wool. Merriel held up one finger and kept working. The seal held. The work behind it was real, every measure of it caught honestly against the Veil. The sums of passage came out even, a drop a span for most, which counted as dear for the week. She breathed on her reading glass, wiped it, and signed the link off.

“I can’t find my bundle,” the woman said. “I crossed with the band, sixty of us in the same cloth, and I wanted the gate to show me it got to my son. Your clerk says the gate can’t tell one of us from another.”

“It can’t,” Merriel said. “Nor can I. Nor can the man from Copperhythe who drinks at the weir-house asking after sheep.” She turned the Roll so the woman could see the entry for the link, sound and closed. “But you know your own name. Say it to yourself and look for what answers. It’s there. It’s forged in. Nobody can pull it out now, and nobody but you and your boy knows which thread it is.”

The woman stood a long while with her hand on the counter. She had folded the cloak over her arm to sell it back to the band’s organiser for a copper. Now she shook it out and put it on again.

“Next time,” she said, “I’ll cross the same way.”

Merriel was already reaching for the next link.

The bell for the Foundry’s link had barely stopped when House Sec’s own glass flared, seventeen seconds behind it, and the lamp-floor at Hollin Scar gave a ragged laugh at the luck of it. Hale Corrigan didn’t laugh. Five links this Book, and every one felt borrowed.

He went down to the loading tally to see what they’d carried. Not much: the gates were thin today, and passage had crept to a drop and a bit a span, which counted as dear for a quiet afternoon. Four great bands in grey had taken most of the room, cloaks alike, so the manifest read like a hymn with one word.

The clerk, Wilm Garside, had a slate under his elbow. On it, in neat chalk, he had drawn arrows between the bands, guessing who handed what to whom by height, by limp, by which gate each band had queued at.

“There are men in Copperhythe who’d pay for a good guess,” Wilm said, not quite looking up. “We wouldn’t be naming anyone. Only guessing.”

Hale turned the slate in his hands. Oil from one link would barely buy the chalk. A guess sold twice became a name.

“We carry,” he said. “We don’t sort.” He wiped the slate with his wet sleeve, arrows and all, and handed it back blank. Then he docked Wilm a day’s oil, so the lesson would cost something in the Lit Lands’ own coin.

At the crossroads above Coldwater, where carts have cut ruts through the heather, a Foundry runner named Joss Penrude came level with a Fishpond runner, Lisbet Corfe, both bound for the same gate. Neither would slow. Penrude asked where Fishpond was buying its oil, and Corfe pointed him up the wrong lane with a perfectly straight face. He took it. She took his spare wick-slip for her trouble, and they parted at a jog, each certain the other had been fooled.

Lowmoor Stage gate ledger, Fifth Age, Book 938. Link 975,022, caught by House Fishpond, head Tamsin Reedwater. 1,392 carried across. Passage two drops a span, entered as paid. Each hood counted twice by the toll-keeper, who wrote the tally small in the margin and signed it R. Ottery. Remarks: the rope held, and the lamp held. Ink dry before the next boat was called.

Quenby Hask worked the bank at Spurling Hythe the way her mother had, from the back of the line forward, because the back was where people had waited longest and believed most. Today the back was grey. Forty-odd cloaks, same cut, same hoods, standing close enough to share breath, and House Sec’s runner already halfway down the lane shouting Hale Corrigan’s catch.

She picked a hood at random and opened her coat to show the jars, each one stoppered with wax and glowing the green of a pond in August. “Real light, bottled at the source. Keeps a hearth through winter. Two drops and it’s yours.”

The hood took one without a word. Quenby held out her palm for the coin. Instead the jar went left, hand to hand, under one hood and the next, turned and weighed and passed on, until it came out at the front of the line and travelled all the way back down the other side. The last cloak, or the first, she couldn’t tell, set it in her hand, still warm from fingers.

“Passage is two drops a span today,” said a voice she couldn’t place. “We pay that. We don’t pay for a jar nobody wants to be seen carrying.”

The band went down to the boat in one grey piece. Quenby stood with the returned jar, looked at its green a long moment, and for the first time in eleven years did not put it back in her coat. She left it on the mooring stone and walked up the lane with her hands empty.