The iron market well in the middle of Mere tasted of wet gravel, drowned horses, and thirty years of company tailings.
Tessa Dene stood by the mossy stone basin with her wooden bucket, waiting for the red silt to settle before she skimmed three pints off the top. A cold drizzle fell from the leaden clouds that hung over the valley, turning the lane into a soup of yellow clay and coal dust. Across the square, the shuttered timber front of the Survey House rose two stories higher than any weaver’s cottage, its heavy oak door marked with the stamped lead seal of the March Ledger.
Beside her, at the small plank stall beneath the overhang of the cooper’s shop, apothecary Rella was weighing out dried dock leaves with a pair of brass scales that leaned two grains to the left.
“That’s forty nails, Tessa,” Rella said, squinting through a cloud of pungent woodsmoke from her charcoal brazier. “Straightened on the anvil, or just hammered flat on a cold river stone?”
“Straightened on the smith’s horn with an eight-ounce hammer,” Tessa said, untying the greasy rawhide cord around her bundle. She laid the copper nails across the damp counter in neat rows of ten. “Every shank is true. You can drive them into cedar window battens without splitting the grain. I worked the burrs off the heads with a scrap of sandstone.”
Rella picked up one of the coppers, rolled it between two stained thumb-pads, and gave a grudging grunt.
“Aye. Your father taught you his eye before the pit took his chest.” The old woman reached into a dark stoneware jar beneath the counter and brought out two squares of grey wrapping paper tied with hemp string. The scent of dried gentian and bitter-root cut through the smell of the well water. “Two draughts. Steep them in water that has come to a hard boil, then strain the leaves through a clean rag. Don’t give him the dregs. The dregs pack the stomach and make the cough turn red.”
“I know how to steep it,” Tessa said, tucking the two paper packets into the dry inner pocket of her canvas salvage coat.
She did not reach for her purse, because she did not own one. Instead, her right hand rested naturally against her hip, where a wide strip of greasy harness leather held her knife.
It was eight inches of flat, grey salvage iron, forged from a snapped pit-tram leaf-spring and ground down on a river whetstone until the belly of the blade was wide and slightly curved, like an overgrown butcher’s tool. The handle was two slabs of river ash pinned through the tang with copper wire. The edge was razor-sharp, honed every night until it could slice a turnip into shavings thin enough to read a tax writ through.
The village constable had stopped her twice by the mill weir to inspect it.
Both times, Tessa had held the knife out by the wooden handle and asked him if the Crown had begun taxing kitchen cutlery. Under the March Charter of the seven founding dukes, a dagger with a cross-guard or a hunting spear with a barbed socket carried an assessment of four silver bits a year—a weapon tax designed to make sure nobody in Mere could afford an argument with a bailiff. A flat-bladed bread knife, lacking a guard and blunt at the tip, was legally classified as domestic cookware.
“A kitchen knife,” Constable Galt had sneered, poking at the ash handle with his staff. “A girl your size walking the night lanes with eight inches of tram-iron.”
“My father likes his rye bread cut thin,” Tessa had told him without blinking. “And if a dog tries to take my salvage sack behind the slag heaps, I prefer to butter the dog.”
She took her bucket from the well coping and walked down the slippery slope of High Lane, where the runoff from the Crown silver-and-iron mine ran in a murky orange ditch along the fences. Her boots were split along the outer seams, patched with oiled calfskin and stitched with waxed twine, but the grease kept the cold river water away from her toes if she stepped quickly.
Near the corner of the timber yard, where two dozen heavy pine trunks lay seasoning beneath a shed of rotted hurdles, two voices rose above the thud of an adze.
“I’m telling you, the lintel was split two fingers wide,” Corin’s voice drifted through the gap in the palisade. The woodcutter was leaning against a stack of split ash palings, scraping mud from his breeches with a splinter of pine. “Then that gust came through the gap, and the whole stone began to talk.”
“Wind in the flue,” Jori answered, his broad back bent as he hauled a bundle of cedar laths onto a hand-barrow. “Old chimneys always whistle when the squall turns north.”
“It wasn’t whistling,” Corin said stubbornly. “It sounded like a man with a throat full of sand. Said the arch was dressed by master masons and pinned with honest lime. And when we wedged that cedar post under the belly, the crack closed right up. There was fresh mortar in the joint, Jori. White, wet lime, smelling like it came out of a tub five minutes ago.”
Tessa slowed her pace, setting the wooden bucket down on the dry verge beside a stack of barrel staves.
“And you found dry roots under the bench?” Corin asked.
“Ten pounds of them,” Jori said, giving the laths a solid slap with his calloused palm. “Resinous pine fat-wood, cured like bacon. Lit with a single spark. Kept the porch dry as a parson’s parlor while the rain was drowning the ditch. And that isn’t the best of it.”
Jori straightened his back, wiping his brow with his sleeve. He lowered his voice, though not enough to escape a scrap-picker whose ears were trained to hear copper nails drop into wet grass.
“Over on the west stair,” Jori murmured, “where the door to the watch-tower used to hang before the fire thirty years ago. The oak door rotted off its pintles ten winters back, but the top hinge is still bolted into the dressed stone jamb. A full plate of yellow brass, Corin. Eighteen inches of metal, three inches wide, with four heavy brass screws holding it into the lead plugs.”
Corin let out a low whistle through his teeth. “Brass? From the old guardhouse?”
“Solid brass,” Jori said. “The soldiers must have brought it from the royal arsenal before the mutiny. If a man went up there with an iron pry-bar and a cold chisel before the frost locks the masonry, he could walk away with four pounds of clean scrap. Old Rella would give six silver bits for that much brass to cast her ointment pans.”
“Then why didn’t you take it?” Corin asked.
Jori shifted his weight, looking down at his muddy boots. “The stair looked dark. And after that voice in the lintel... I had my kindling. A man shouldn’t get greedy around burned stone.”
Behind the palisade, Tessa stood very still.
Her mind worked with the rapid, merciless arithmetic of an empty cupboard. Six silver bits.
Six silver bits was six months of bitter-root tea for Edren’s chest. It was four sacks of dried yellow pease from the valley carters, half a tub of salt pork from the cooper’s cellar, and a pair of sound cobbler’s boots with double soles that wouldn’t suck yellow clay every time she crossed the market ditch.
Four pounds of yellow brass, bolted to a door jamb in an abandoned hill fort that nobody had claimed since the Hill War burned the rafters.
Jori was afraid of a whistle in an old chimney flue. Corin was afraid of a ghost that talked about mortar.
Tessa picked up her water bucket.
She knew all about ghosts. Mere was full of them. Ghosts with hollow cheeks and black spit who sat by cold grates waiting for the company pension that never arrived. Ghosts with stamped discharge papers signed by clerks who had never held a pick or seen the water rise in a lower sump.
A ghost in an old watch-tower was just an empty room with an echo.
She carried the bucket fifty paces down the lane to the gate of her father’s cottage, set the water on the porch stone, and reached into the lean-to shed behind the water butt.
From the dark corner beneath the split shingles, she drew out her salvage kit: an eighteen-inch iron pry-bar with a claw foot forged by her father before his hands began to tremble, two flat steel wedges wrapped in an oily rag, and a heavy wooden mallet with a head of seasoned apple-wood.
She slid the pry-bar into the loop of her canvas sack, checked the edge of her bread knife with the flat of her thumb, and tightened the rawhide belt around her waist.
The clouds above the ridge were turning a bruised, purplish grey as the afternoon began to fail, and the wind coming off the high moors carried the sharp, clean smell of wet pine needles and wild slate.
Tessa Dene took one look back at the shuttered windows of the Survey House on High Lane.
“Six silver bits,” she whispered to the yellow clay under her boots.
Then she turned her face toward the mountain track and began to climb.