There was only one way to get those four chests of seasoned marsh iron onto the barge deck right now without triggering a three-day customs impoundment—and it didn’t involve a speech.
Seyun stepped quickly back behind the tarred canvas side-awning of Mother Renn’s cart so the two young White Heron students at the gangplank wouldn’t see a stranger in an unbadged Ash Reed gray robe interfering in their sect’s affairs.
Unfastening his leather belt-pouch with steady, rapid fingers, he tipped its entire contents into his scraped right palm.
There lay the one tarnished quarter-cut silver piece Mother Renn had advanced him at the crossroads yesterday evening for paring her mule’s hoof and balancing the wormwood crates, alongside two of his three worn copper ferry coins. Keeping back only a single bruised copper half-bit so he wouldn’t be thrown off the pedestrian deck himself.
One silver and two coppers was still short of Boatmaster Vorn’s extortionate demand. Until Seyun reached into his inner sash. Then he pulled out the heavy, smaller outer-pouch of dried winter-root slices that Renn had separated from her main delivery packet for his own week’s travel rations and city porterage fee.
“Mother Renn,” Seyun said quietly behind the canvas flap. He held out the silver piece, the two coppers, and the winter-root ration pouch. “Vorn scraped White Heron’s seal off Line Three of the manifest an hour ago to sell their slot to the wool drays. If I call the harbor court guards to prove the erasure, the court guards will impound those four chests of marsh iron in the customs shed until Monday, and Ilyra won’t have her ballast shafts.”
Mother Renn looked down at the coins and the winter-root packet in his palm, then peered past the mule’s ears at Boatmaster Vorn tilting the front chest over the river channel while young Maro and Lin strained with all four hands to hold the rear rope beckets down on the wood.
“And how do you propose to turn one silver, two coppers. A bag of dried winter-root into Vorn’s surcharge in fifteen breaths, clerk?” Renn asked dryly.
“Vorn’s brother-in-law runs the wagon drivers’ horse-sick room on Canal Street—I saw Vorn trade him a tub of sturgeon grease at the solstice market two years ago,” Seyun said, calling up every scrap of Oran wharf-ward memory he possessed. “Winter-root is selling at four silvers the pound in the wagon drivers’ yards this week because the canal horses have the frost-cough. Give Vorn the silver piece, the two coppers. That pound of cured winter-root, and tell him a clerk from the Cedar Ward forge shop sent it down to clear the iron weight without delaying the wool-drays.”
Mother Renn stared at him for half a breath.
“That pound of winter-root and that silver bit are your supper money, your bed money for tonight. The first quarter of your sister’s rent,” Renn said flatly. “If you hand that over for four boxes of White Heron pig-iron, you’ll be walking into Oran with one copper half-bit in your breeches and an empty belly.”
“And if those four chests go into twenty feet of river mud,” Seyun answered under the roar of the water, “two sixteen-year-old Coal students get flogged or expelled for losing armory property, and Ilyra loses the weighted shafts she needs for her Bronze spear drills.”
“So walk out there yourself and hand the boys the money so they can thank you in their report!”
“No,” Seyun said right away. “If two White Heron juniors see an expelled Ash Reed defendant paying off their ferry debt, either their sect pride will force them to refuse it on the dock, or Ilyra will think I’m trying to buy her testimony before this afternoon’s hearing. Pay Vorn in the name of a city forge shop clerk. Quickly—the ox-driver has his hand on the rope winch pin.”
Mother Renn shook her head with a low, rumbling mutter that sounded half like a curse and half like reluctant respect, snatched the silver piece, the two coppers. The heavy linen pouch of cured winter-root out of Seyun’s palm. Then it strode forward to the gangplank with her brass peddler’s medallion swinging from her apron.
“Take your boathook off the box before you pull your own hernia out, Vorn!” Renn barked in a voice that cut through the river fog like a meat-cleaver through gristle.
Boatmaster Vorn paused with the marsh-iron chest tilted at thirty degrees and glared down at the old incense seller. “Stay behind the yellow line with your mule, Mother! This is heavy-freight heavy tax business!”
“This is Canal Street horse-medicine business, you thick-skulled carp,” Renn snapped. He stepped right up to his tally-booth and slapping the silver piece, the two coppers. The pound bag of prime mountain winter-root straight onto his manifest shelf beside the scraped ledger sheet. “The forge shop clerk from the Cedar Ward sent me down with one silver in coin and four silvers’ worth of dry mountain winter-root for your brother-in-law’s coughing heavy cart-mares—provided those four boxes of iron sit flat along the center keel-beam where they don’t take an inch of deck-width off these gentlemen’s wool wagons!”
Vorn’s small, greedy eyes dropped from Renn’s weathered face to the silver bit. Then widened as he untied the mouth of the linen bag and smelled the clear, pungent pepper-tang of first-grade mountain winter-root—worth five silvers easy at the Canal Street stables before noon.
Better still, stacking the four narrow four-foot iron chests lengthwise along the center rope winch walk didn’t actually displace the wool merchants’ fourth heavy cart at all. Vorn could keep the ten silvers the wool merchants had bribed him with and pocket five silvers’ worth of cash and horse-herb on top of it.
The iron boathook came out from under the rope becket in the blink of an eye.
“Why didn’t these two squawking chicks say the Cedar Ward forge shop clerk had settled the keel-ballast rate?” Vorn bellowed magnanimously, sweeping the coins and the winter-root pouch into his leather jerkin pocket before the harbor court guards up by the shed could see the split. “Deckhands! Lend a pole and slide these four iron boxes along the center rope winch curb! Roll that fourth wool-heavy cart aboard and drop the ox-pin!”
At the gangplank, sixteen-year-old Maro and Lin blinked in stunned, breathless relief as two burly ferry deckhands helped them slide the four heavy marsh-iron chests smoothly onto the center planks of the barge. Neither boy had the faintest idea which “Cedar Ward forge shop clerk” had intervened, and before they could ask Mother Renn a question, the old woman was already back at her gray mule’s head, leading the wormwood cart aboard behind the wool heavy cart while Seyun kept his face turned toward the port rail under his gray hood.
With a heavy clunk of the oak rope winch pin and a groan of wet iron links rising from the river bed, the blindfolded oxen leaned into their yokes, the gangplank chains came up. The sixty-foot barge swung out into the brown current toward Oran. Carrying Ilyra’s Bronze training iron safe and dry along the keel, and leaving Seyun with a single copper half-bit in his empty purse.
The two burly ferry deckhands slid the four dark ash-wood chests of marsh iron into place along the center rope winch curb. Then, Seyun stayed behind the canvas side-curtain of Mother Renn’s cart and watched sixteen-year-old Maro and Lin hurry aboard after their cargo.
The two boys were still trembling from the fight-or-flight rush of the face-off. It was young Lin kept rubbing his right wrist where Maro had grabbed him to stop him from drawing his practice sword. Meanwhile, Maro knelt right away beside the lead chest to check that Vorn’s iron boathook had not split the dovetailed corner joint or let bilge water touch the bog-seasoned shafts inside.
“Which forge shop in the Cedar Ward do you think sent the old woman down with the horse-herb?” Lin whispered to his senior brother once they were seated on the chests and the barge had begun to move. “Was it Master Goran who shoes the patrol horses?”
“Must have been,” Maro said, letting out a long, shaky sigh as he wiped river mist from his forehead. “Senior Sister Ilyra had Goran re-temper her spare metal ring last month. Thank the founders somebody in the city was watching the manifest, or Osen Tal would have had both our tunics stripped for losing four hundredweight of mountain bog-iron on our first wharf errand.”
Ten feet away behind the wormwood crates, Seyun listened to the two sixteen-year-old boys console themselves with that harmless explanation. Then he felt no urge at all to step around the mule and claim credit.
At Ash Reed, whenever an inner student or a patron did a favor for the lower yards—donating a barrel of bruised apples after frost or replacing a cracked practice rack—there was always a formal announcement at morning assembly so the donor could stand on the dais and watch fifty outer students bow from the waist.
Keeping his gray hood pulled low. Meanwhile, Maro and Lin patted the dry lids of the marsh-iron chests gave Seyun a much cleaner, sharper satisfaction—at least for the first five minutes of the crossing.
He had read the doctored manifest in one glance. He had weighed the corrupt harbor court guards’ three-day impoundment trap without falling into it. He had used his knowledge of the Canal Street horse-sick room to turn one silver piece, two coppers. A pound of winter-root into a five-silver settlement that left Boatmaster Vorn greedy and quiet. And as a result, Ilyra’s Bronze spear ballast was crossing the Oran River on schedule without two sixteen-year-old boys getting their heads cracked by court guards’ nightsticks.
Then he touched the flat, fully empty leather purse at his belt, felt the hollow coldness of the winter wind blowing through his thin gray robe now that his travel rations were in Vorn’s pocket. Then he heard Mother Renn’s heavy boots coming back along the wet deck planks from the wheel-chock.