The washhouse of the Reed family occupied a half-sunken stone cellar at the corner of Tanners’ Lane and Silt Ditch. There, the ground was cheap. That was because the cellar floor seeped river water whenever the spring tides pushed through the sewers.
Inside, the air was warm, dense, and choking with the smell of boiled birch ash, animal fat soap, and wet wool. Three large copper cooking pots sat over open brick fire-pits, boiling sheets from the city hospice and greasy aprons from the butchers’ stalls. Steam condensed on the low ceiling floor beams. He dropped warm, soapy water onto the stone flags like greasy rain.
Sera Reed stood by the middle cooking pot, her sleeves rolled past her thin elbows and a long ash paddle in her hands. Her hair was tied back in a faded red kerchief, grey at the temples and damp from the kettle steam. Across the table, Emmet sat on a low stool of split pine, his left leg ending four inches below the knee in an ash peg strapped to his thigh with cracked harness leather. In his lap was a block of birch wood and a curved drawknife, peeling curls of pale shavings onto the floor to shape replacement shoe pegs.
When Tomas pushed open the heavy oak door, the draft set the copper kettles hissing. He set the cedar box down on the scrubbed pine worktable between a pile of dry towels and an iron scale used for weighing soap lye.
Emmet stopped his knife. His pale grey eyes, washed out from thirty years of looking at wet stone, moved from his son’s face to the silver-grey wood, then to the bronze brackets.
“You’re home three hours before the bells, Tomas,” Emmet said. His voice was gravelly, worn rough by coal dust in the guild cellars. “Garrow had sixty bags of salt water salt. Did the heavy cart tip?”
“The heavy cart didn’t tip,” Tomas said. He unbuckled his hemp haul-strap, coiled it over his shoulder, and pulled up a stool. “Rennet docked my shift. He ordered this thrown into the incinerator hopper. I refused.”
Sera rested her washing paddle against the rim of the copper cooking pot. She took a coarse linen rag from her apron strings, wiped her red hands. Then she stepped to the table. She didn’t look at the box. She looked at Tomas’s coat, checking the seams for tears and his collar for blood.
“Docked three coppers?” she asked, her voice flat and even. “The rent collector comes on Tuesday, Tomas. Master Varner already added two silver coins to the notice. That was because the chimney pipe cracked. If you lose your porter shifts, we can’t pay the five-year renewal on the cellar lease.”
“Look at the plate, Mother,” Tomas said.
Emmet leaned forward, his wooden peg scraping on the stone flags. He laid his broad, scarred thumb against the copper inlay, feeling the edges of the rivets. He was silent for nearly a minute, his lips moving as he read the four words chiseled into the metal.
“Oren Voss,” Emmet whispered. He looked up, his weathered forehead creased with deep lines. “The Shield-Bearer. Forty years ago, when the bells rang for the Flood March, I hauled baggage for his vanguard. Six carts of seasoned oak timber and three chests of iron bolts. He had a great black horse and a shield painted with a golden lantern that shone like a watch fire.”
“Did you see him die, Father?” Tomas asked.
“Nobody saw him die,” Emmet said, shaking his head slowly. “The six champions rode north to the pool gates with their cloaks snapping in the gale. The council told us to stay at the second milestone and dig diversion ditches. Then the water came. Not in a wave, but like a black wall forty feet high, roaring down the riverbed. It took my baggage cart, it took four wagon drivers, and it took my leg. The water went down three weeks later. Then, the champions returned with golden wreaths and songs from the high priests. But Oren Voss wasn’t with them. They said he fell at the breach holding the water gate against the drowned horrors.”
“He didn’t fall at the breach before he wrote this,” Tomas said. He pointed to the twelve notches along the lower margin. “He deposited this box at the guild before he marched. A birthday gift for his daughter Mirelle. She was eight years old. The locked deposit was forty silver crowns.”
Sera’s eyes narrowed. Her gaze moved from Tomas to the box, sharp and suspicious as a fishwife checking bad herring. “Forty crowns? A noble’s fee for a child’s toy? Where is the money?”
“In Town Vault Three,” Tomas said. “Under lawful delay interest, it has grown to two hundred crowns. Capped by charter.”
The room went entirely silent, save for the bubbling of the soapy water in the cooking pots and the hiss of steam against the ceiling.
Sera didn’t smile. She didn’t gasp. She folded her arms across her damp apron, her face hardening into the defensive, stubborn mask she wore whenever a tax court guard entered the alley.
“Two hundred crowns on a piece of paper isn’t two hundred crowns in an iron pot,” she said coldly. “If that box held two hundred crowns that an honest man could spend, Caldus Marr would have taken it home in a velvet pouch twenty years ago. Why is it in a fire cart?”
“Because it needs delivery to the living recipient,” Tomas explained. “Voluntary receipt by Mirelle Voss. No substitutes. No proxies. And twelve couriers signed the plate and then set it down because they couldn’t reach her, or because they were afraid of what they would find.”
“Where is she?” Emmet asked.
“Fen Hollow,” Tomas said. “The grave ward.”
Emmet’s breath hitched. He set his drawknife on the pine shavings, his rough fingers curling into a fist. “Fen Hollow. The drowned lands. That’s twenty-five miles through black clay and wild water. The King’s Road was washed into the marsh thirty years ago, Tomas. Men don’t go there unless they’re running from the gallows or carrying corpses.”
“Nessa Vale knows the way,” Tomas said. “She surveyed the dykes three summers ago. She agreed to guide me.”
“Nessa Vale has two broken ears from the South Bridge,” Sera said sharply. He leaned over the table. “She’s a dock land-mapper who lives on five-penny timber tallies. Can she pull you out of a mud pit if the levee breaks? Can she carry sixty pounds of baggage if your knee gives out?”
“I’m carrying the baggage, Mother,” Tomas said quietly. “I took the class. Last Claim.”
Emmet looked at his son’s chest. He reached out and touched the coarse wool of Tomas’s coat. There, the three-inch hemp haul-strap usually rested.
“You took an uncalled class?” Emmet whispered. “A scavenger’s title? The guild won’t let you haul on the high terrace with an uncalled badge.”
“I don’t haul on the high terrace now, Father,” Tomas answered, meeting his father’s eyes. “I haul in the Gut for three coppers a shift while clerks’ nephews steal my tally pegs. If I deliver this box, the lawful closure fee clears the locked deposit. It pays two hundred silver crowns. That buys the cellar outright. It buys forty cords of seasoned birch for your stove. It buys a lease that Master Varner can’t revoke.”
Sera looked at the cedar box. Her hands, red and chapped from forty years of lye and cold river water, reached out. She didn’t touch the bronze. She touched the corner bracket. There, the swamp cedar was smooth and clean.
“If you go,” she said, her voice dropping into a low, fierce murmur, “you don’t go like a beggar hoping for charity. You leave a copy of the contract here, in this cellar, signed by Nessa and witnessed by the notary. If Marr tries to declare the bond abandoned while you’re in the marsh, I’ll take the copy to the Court of Claims myself.”
She turned to Emmet. “Get the buckle.”
Emmet paused, then reached down beneath his pine stool. There, a loose floor flag was hidden under a pile of dry birch shavings. He lifted the flag and pulled out a small, flat box of beaten tin. Inside lay a heavy silver belt buckle, four inches wide, engraved with two crossed carrying poles and an oak wreath: Bellwether All-Valley Porter Stakes, 440 A.D.
“Forty years,” Emmet muttered, his voice trembling slightly. “I won it against twenty-four men from the timber yards. I carried four hundredweight of pig iron two miles along the river dyke without setting it down.”
He pressed the heavy silver into Tomas’s palm. “Take it to Master Kessel at the Fish Gate. He’ll give you eight crowns for the silver weight. Pay Nessa her advance, buy yourself boots with double soles that won’t rot in the silt, and buy two coils of three-strand manila. If you die in the marsh for an uncalled title, I’ll have no son to carry my pine box to the ditch.”
Tomas closed his fingers around the cold silver. “I won’t die in the marsh, Father.”
“Don’t make promises to old men,” Sera said. He turned back to her boiling kettle and picking up her paddle. “Make them to the road. The road is the only thing that checks your receipts.”