“Those are Maro and Lin from our city residence yard,” Ilyra said. Her hand dropped instinctively to the ash-wood grip of her spear sword sheath as she recognized the two young outer students on the lower landing. “They must have been sent down to meet the mountain barge carrying my marsh-iron training ballast.”
Before Seyun could answer, she swung back into the saddle of her bay mare, touched her heels to the horse’s flanks, and trotted briskly down the stone ramp toward the boat ramp to see why the ferry crew was threatening her juniors. Before a blue-coated harbor court guard stepped out from the customs shed halfway down the ramp. Then he held up a brass docket-board to stop her horse at the mounted-traffic gate.
“Mounted sect officers cross on the upper chain-ferry at the stone pier, Lady Patroller!” the harbor court guard called out, pointing his brass board toward the priority boat ramp two hundred yards upstream where the White Heron and Ash Reed wagons had just rolled aboard. “Your horse is already showed up on the residence voucher with the array-wagon. If the chain-ferry casts off without your mount on deck, the residence loses its priority slot until tomorrow noon!”
Ilyra reined in sharply at the mounted gate, caught between the departing priority barge upstream—where the deckhands were already knocking the wooden chocks from the gangplank—and the commercial cargo boat ramp below. There, the two junior students stood beside her four chests of marsh iron.
Halfway down the ramp. There, the mounted gatehouse met the pedestrian steps, Ilyra leaned down from her saddle as Renn’s cart rolled past.
“The priority barge upstream is casting off with the hall’s array-wagon. The harbor court guard won’t let a shod warhorse onto the lower plank dock,” Ilyra said quickly to Seyun, her voice tight with frustration as she glanced down at the two teenaged students arguing with the burly boatmaster on the commercial barge below. “Those four iron-bound chests on the boat ramp contain the seasoned marsh-iron ballast rods and replacement spearheads sent down from White Heron ridge for my Bronze spear drills. Maro and Lin are only first-year Coal boys from the city yard.”
“Go catch your priority barge before the chains tighten,” Mother Renn told her gruffly, jerking her thumb toward the upstream pier where the ferry horn was blowing its final warning blast. “The boy and I are rolling right onto that lower barge with the wormwood crates anyway. We have eyes.”
Ilyra looked directly at Seyun. Even now, with their political disagreement sharper than ever after the customs-rail revelations, the practical trust forged in the shrine courtyard and the abbey doorway held firm when it came to keeping her junior hall-mates out of a dockside brawl.
“Don’t get into a fight with harbor guild boatmen,” Ilyra told Seyun firmly. “Just make sure Maro and Lin don’t let themselves be provoked into drawing steel before a court guard, and meet me at the southern wharf gate on the city side in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll watch them,” Seyun promised.
Ilyra wheeled her bay mare around and cantered up the priority raised stone road. Just then, the upstream ferry crew began winching the gangplank chains.
While Ilyra paused at the gatehouse, Mother Renn clicked her tongue to the gray mule and guided her hand-cart slowly down the pedestrian and barrow ramp that led directly onto the lower commercial boat ramp.
Seyun walked beside the left shaft-bar, keeping his pace unrushed and his eyes open.
He walked down the wet stone incline. Then, he drew a slow, measured breath through the fourth Ash Reed base stance and let the warmth circulate past the silver curve beneath his left collarbone. Four dawns had now passed since Elder Hesh returned his three copper needles in the rain at Ash Reed’s outer gate, and two full days since he had lain on his back under Ilyra’s spear in the abbey gallery. Under the steady, cooling draw of Mother Renn’s reed-ash healing wrap and his disciplined walking breaths along the highway, the narrow return seam of Place I had opened by barely two finger-breadths. Enough to take the choking pressure off his heart during Coal shifts, yet nowhere near the width needed to project a single spark of Flame outside his skin.
He was tired from four days of mountain roads and heavy lifting. His belly was hollow again six hours after the noon barley crust. And his entire fortune in the belt purse beneath his sash consisted of three copper coins, the one-silver advance piece from Mother Renn. The wrapped delivery packet of bitter-reed and winter-root medicine she had entrusted to him to sell in the city wards.
Left on the lower ramp with Mother Renn and the mule, Seyun walked down onto the crowded, mud-slicked timber planks of the commercial ferry landing.
The air down by the water smelled heavily of wet river silt, tarred hemp cable, dead carp, and coal smoke from the ferryman’s deck stove. The commercial barge was a broad, flat-bottomed scow sixty feet long, guided across the swift brown current of the Oran River by an overhead iron chain winched by a team of blindfolded oxen turning a rope winch on the center deck. Already packed onto the rear two-thirds of the barge were three wool-merchants’ drays piled high with greasy fleece bales, four charcoal barrows, and two dozen foot-passengers huddled out of the river wind.
At the very edge of the loading apron. There, the muddy gangplank met the bow of the barge, stood the four narrow, iron-strapped chests bearing the white-stenciled heron mark of White Heron Hall’s armory.
Each chest was barely four feet long. But Seyun could tell from the deep groan of the six-inch dock planks underneath them and the dark, bluish-black sheen of the corner fittings that they were packed solid with seasoned marsh iron. Bog-ore smelted with peat charcoal and underwater for ten winters in mountain peat-bogs until the soft melted rock waste rotted out. That left an extraordinarily dense, shock-absorbing iron prized by spear masters for weighting practice shafts when crossing from Late Flame into Bronze.
Standing over the four chests with a heavy iron-shod boathook held across his thick chest was the commercial ferry boatmaster. A bull-necked guild builder in a greased leather jerkin with a brass heavy tax-medallion hanging from his ear. Facing him were the two sixteen-year-old White Heron outer students, Maro and Lin. Their young faces were flushed red with humiliation and panic as the boatmaster kicked the nearest marsh-iron chest two inches toward the unrailed edge of the slimy dock.
“I don’t care whose little white bird is painted on the lid, boys!” the boatmaster bellowed over the roar of the river current, loud enough for the wool merchants on deck to laugh into their collars. “Dead-weight iron ballast pays double winter surcharge—six silver pieces on the nail—or it goes into the mud at the bottom of the river so these gentlemen’s wool bales have deck room! Pay the six silvers or clear my gangplank in thirty breaths!”
As Seyun and Mother Renn led the gray mule down the final thirty yards of the pedestrian plank-way toward the commercial ferry barge, Seyun took in the full layout of the dockside face-off with the rapid, practical eye he had used at the funerary shrine and the abbey doorway.
The commercial boat ramp was a floating timber wharf supported on tarred cedar pontoons that rose. Then it fell with the winter river swell. To the left of the gangplank stood the boatmaster’s wooden tally-booth, its hinged front shutter propped open with a willow stick so the clerk inside could hang the daily reservation slate on a brass hook where drovers could read the deck set.
In the center of the greasy planks stood the four-foot chests of White Heron marsh iron. Their dark ash-wood sides were bound with iron straps and stenciled in white paint: WHH — ARMORY BALLAST — ORAN RESIDENCE YARD. Each chest had rope carrying-beckets at both ends and weighed at least two hundredweight. It was heavy enough that the two sixteen-year-old outer students, Maro and Lin, had clearly needed a dock-barrow and all their young Coal strength just to muscle them down the stone steps to the boat ramp.
Over them towered the boatmaster, Vorn. A fifty-year-old river-guild builder with forearms like smoked hams, a greasy leather jerkin reeking of sturgeon oil. The loud, bullying confidence of a man who knew the harbor court guards up at the customs shed took two coppers on every overweight surcharge he squeezed out of country passengers.
Behind Vorn, leaning over the forward rail of the ferry barge among their stacked fleece bales, two prosperous wool-cloth merchants in fur-lined caps watched the Dispute with smug impatience. They waited for the boatmaster to clear the White Heron chests off the bow apron so their fourth heavy cart could roll aboard before the chain-oxen started the rope winch.
“Sir Vorn, please look at the voucher again!” sixteen-year-old Maro pleaded, holding out a slip of stiff white residence paper that trembled slightly in his cold fingers. Meanwhile, his younger friend Lin braced both boots against the front chest to keep it from sliding into the brown river swirl. “Senior Steward Osen Tal’s clerk paid the four-copper dead-weight heavy tax at the south wharf office on Tuesday! The chests are for Senior Sister Ilyra’s Bronze spear check drills!”
“And I told you twice, little heron, that a Tuesday wharf-slip without the Friday winter-ice stamp is worth what you wipe your nose with!” Vorn barked, rapping the iron point of his boathook against the top chest lid hard enough to splinter the white stencil paint. “Six silver pieces for the double-winter iron surcharge before the oxen turn the drum. Or I hook these four boxes into the channel and you can dive for your sister’s spear-weights in the spring!”
Beside the mule’s halter, Mother Renn stopped the cart and glanced sideways at Seyun.
“Well, clerk,” the old woman murmured dryly. “There sits your rival’s Bronze practice iron, six inches from twenty feet of brown water. Let’s see how expensive your sense of fairness gets before supper.”