The fog coming off the Harth water at the North Quay smelled of pickled herring, wet river-weed, and the cold mineral silt that had been washing down from the upper gorge ever since the Crown Furnace’s bedrock flumes began to over-boil.
Jon Hale walked past the rear boundary of the fish-cleaning shambles—where the thirty-five-yard strip of smooth, frost-riven river cobble now lay empty under the grey sky between Plot Twelve and Plot Twenty—and led Joran Finch and Sister Oda down the stone slipway onto the timber planking of the fish wharf. At the landward corner of the quay, Master Fisherman Harlan Pike and three of his boat-hands were hauling a tarred hemp seine-net over a wooden horse, binding split willow floats into the meshes in case Captain Dain needed a barrier boom strung across the upper weir piers.
Twenty paces further out toward the pilings, half-hidden behind a double tier of coopered white-oak herring barrels stamped with the salt-mark of the town, sat Eban—the twelve-year-old wharf orphan who slept in the loft above Harlan Pike’s curing shed and earned his barley-loaf by gutting smelts and scraping barnacles off the flat-bottomed river punts.
The boy had his bare, brine-reddened heels hooked over the lower iron hoop of a salt barrel. In his lap lay a three-pound lead sinker-weight and an old broken cobbler’s rasp. As he drew the iron teeth of the rasp across the scarred grey lead to trim away the river-burrs, his lips were pursed in a low, clear…
