Chapter 1 - Hardown

Sprink ducked, laughing as the egg struck the wall behind him and slid down in a slow, accusing streak.

From the corner of the kitchen, his youngest sister Tilli let out a helpless laugh. She could never keep one in when Sprink was involved, which was often. Marda stood at the kitchen doorway with her hand still raised, though she had nothing left to throw. Her eye went to the yolk sliding down the wall and her expression changed: from anger at her son to the more lasting annoyance of a woman who had wasted a perfectly good egg.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ she said.

‘You could’ve just asked me to stop.’

‘I didn’t miss, Hildregar. That was a warning.’

Nobody outside his family called him that.

‘With an egg,’ Sprink said.

‘Next time it’ll be a pan!’

Tilli was still laughing. Their mother pointed at her. ‘And you — don't encourage him!’

His father appeared then behind his mother in the doorway, wiping his hands on a cloth. Tolben Tinglenog was a patient man, and had mapped, over twenty years, his son's gift for exhausting it. 

‘What now?’ he said.

‘He ate the sausages I’d set aside for the Haldworth party,’ Marda said.

‘Not all of them,’ Sprink offered with some sheepishness. 

‘How many?’ Tolben asked.

‘Most,’ Sprink answered.

His father sighed. A long, weary exhalation that Sprink had been hearing since childhood. ‘Go to the butcher. Take coin from the box. And Hildregar –’

‘I know. I know.’

‘come straight back.’

Sprink took the coins and did not come straight back.

The market in Hardown was a clamorous, close-pressed affair, wedged into the square between the grain stores and the eastern wall. Winter was slowly loosening its hold upon the city: frost still rimmed the puddles in the early hours, as the vendors stamped their feet and blew into their cupped hands between customers. 

What the stalls held was the tail of the stores and everyone knew it. Onions in ropes and beans dried hard as gravel, apples soft and freckled, salt fish stacked in flat grey courses, and here and there a few bundles of green forced early under glass and priced high. Traders from the east and the southern routes spread their wares upon blankets, and the city’s own merchants set out what the storehouses had carried through the cold months. Nothing on any blanket in the square had come out of the west. Sprink walked the rows and checked anyway, as he had since he was a boy, and found only east and south and east again. 

Haggling in three tongues carried over the square. A knife-grinder had set his wheel where the sparks would not catch anything, and a woman with a crate of hens was letting a man put his hand in among them. Woodsmoke lay low over the square, and under it the smell of wet wool and the sour breath of the grain stores. Guardsmen wandered through, and children were loose among the stalls with the noisy chaos of sparrows.

He bought the sausages first. That was the rule he kept: do the honest thing, then do the other. The butcher knew whose boy he was and gave him a fair price. Sprink tucked the wrapped parcel under his arm and turned into the crowd.

He moved through the press of bodies. He was not a large man. At twenty years, he stood shorter than most, and had made peace with the truth that whatever growing he was fated to do, he had done. In a crowd he could slip beneath the lines of sight and through gaps that broader men could not. He let a woman bearing a basket pass before him, and drifted nearer to the cloth stall.

The merchant was Kossite. Sprink had poured ale for enough of them to know the coat, cut high-collared for the river roads. Sprink had been watching him for two days, ever since the man had set up his stall by the south wall. Not because the man was wealthy, though he was. Not because he was careless, though he was that also. But because his money purse hung at his right hip on a single leather thong, and when he reached across his stall to show fabric to a customer, he turned his left shoulder forward and the purse swung free of his body for exactly as long as it takes to draw one slow breath.

The first customer was the wrong one. A man who wanted to be shown nothing, who haggled from where he stood and would not come close, and the Kossite answered him without turning and without moving his feet. Sprink shifted a pace along the stall front and put two fingers on a bolt of green wool and feigned interest. The parcel of sausages stayed under his left arm, while the knife came out of his sleeve and lay flat along his right palm with the blade turned back against the wrist.

The waiting was the hardest part of the work.

A woman came to the stall with coin already in her hand and asked to see the blue. The merchant reached across, the purse swung free, exposed, inviting. 

One cut, clean, angled so the blade never touched cloth or skin. The purse dropped into his waiting palm in the same motion, and then inside his shirt and Sprink was already two stalls away, asking the price of dried figs. 

He was well clear of the square, leaning against the shadowed side of a cooperage, before the small, fierce pleasure of it ran through him, the same pleasure he had felt the first time, at fifteen. He opened the purse and counted. A decent take. Nothing remarkable. He tied the thong and put the purse away inside his shirt.

He tucked the sausages securely under his arm and went on, whistling.

The Fox Shadows took their portion of every mark, whether they had arranged it or not. He made the drop in a cellar beneath a chandler’s shop on Wick Street. Candles above and shadows below, which tickled his humor.

The air in the stairwell was a clash of two climates. From the shop came warmth and the cloying scent of beeswax. As he descended, the warmth died. The cellar was cold, a settled cold that got into the hands and stayed there, and under it the stale air of a place that had not been opened in a season. The boards above creaked with the muffled movement of customers overhead.

It was a long, low room with the stair at one end of it and a door at the other, and along the walls of the chandler’s old stock, stacked molds gone furred with dust and tallow blocks nobody had cut in years. There was a table beside the far door with an overturned crate drawn up to it, and Rendell was on the crate with his back into the corner, where no one could come at him except down the length of the room and in plain view the entire way.

He was cleaning his nails with a knife longer than the task required. He sat easy. The corner said otherwise.

‘Brought something?’ he said.

Sprink crossed to the table and dropped the purse on it. It landed with a dull clink. ‘Kossite cloth merchant. South market.’

Rendell opened it, counted, and nodded. He took the guild’s share and pushed the rest back across the boards. ‘Clean?’

‘Always.’

Upstairs, the shop bell chimed; a bright, silver sound that drifted down through the cracks in the ceiling. After it came the muffled voice of a customer asking about the price of tapers. Then both faded, and the cellar’s silence felt heavier for having been broken.

‘The boss wants a word,’ Rendell said.

His belly turned over, and he fought to keep it off his face. Five years he had been in the guild, and in all that time he had spoken perhaps a dozen words to Vetch. Good evening. Yes. Thank you. I will. The man had never raised his voice at him. Had never threatened him or cheated him of a share, never once looked at him with anything Sprink could have named as unkindness. And Sprink had been afraid of him from the first afternoon he saw him across the cellar, and could not have produced one reason for it that would have survived being said out loud.

What he had instead were the stories.

Nobody agreed on where Vetch had come from. Solenne, or a river town further south, or nowhere, depending on who was telling it and how much he had drunk. Nobody agreed on his face either. It was marked from the cheekbones down, close and deep. Pox, said some. A fire. A rough adolescence. Every teller certain, and no two of them the same, and Sprink noticed early on that his face was a thing people put their own stories onto because Vetch had never given them one.

Kessit they all agreed on.

Kessit had run the Fox Shadows in Hardown for ten years or thereabouts, and Kessit was not dead. That was the part that had fixed itself in Sprink early on and had never come loose. Kessit was alive and living near the fish market, and he swept the yard at a cooperage for his bread, and if you said Vetch’s name in his hearing he would set the broom against the wall and walk into the shop and not come out while you were there. Whatever Vetch had done to him, no one knew. Kessit had never told a living soul, in all the years since. But whatever it was, it had left him breathing.

Vetch knew things. Small things, things no one had given him. He knew that Marek’s mother had left in the winter. He knew which fence had shorted whom, by how much, and that neither party had spoken of it. He had once told a boy he had never spoken to before, the name of the bakehouse on Cutter’s Row where the boy’s sister worked. 

What he had he kept, and what he kept he counted. Now and then he would lay a piece of it in front of you and leave it there, and ask nothing for it. You would leave and think about it for a week. You thought about what else he was holding, and what he would want for it when the day came. Sprink had never once seen him spend a thing. He had never met a man in the guild who did not owe him.

That was the sum of what Sprink had. Rumor, an old man sweeping a yard, and a memory for other people’s sisters.

He went through his own accounts while he waited. Every mark of the last two months, every share paid over, every word he had said to anyone who might carry it anywhere. He came up clean. It made no difference. The cold had got into him regardless. 

The door at the rear of the cellar opened and a man stepped through. Rendell set his knife down on the table. The man was tall and uncommonly thin, his head shaven, his pale eyes still. The stillness in them took hold of a man and kept him.

‘Tinglenog,’ he said. He spoke quietly, yet it reached every corner.

‘Hey, Vetch.’

Vetch put his shoulder against the doorframe and folded his arms. He was near enough that Sprink could have handed him something without either of them leaning, and stepping back from the table now would be a thing they had both watched him do. 

Above them footsteps crossed the boards, slowed, then stopped, and the dust trembled in the cellar air.

‘You’ve been busy,’ Vetch said. ‘Rendell tells me you’ve brought in eleven marks in the last two months. No complaints. No witnesses.’

‘It passed the time.’

Vetch unfolded his arms. He picked the purse up off the table, turned it over, ran a long, scarred thumb along its length and put it down. ‘The Tinglenog. Your family’s inn.’ He said it slowly, so Sprink would feel it named. ‘Travelers sleep there. Merchants. Couriers. They eat and they drink and they talk.’

Sprink said nothing. He had not been asked anything.

‘You ask them where they’ve been,’ Vetch said.

Sprink kept his face still. It took work.

‘I talk to the guests. My father’s been telling me off for it since I was nine,’ Sprink said.

It was a good answer, and Sprink had not chosen a word of it. It had simply arrived. 

Something moved in the pitted face. Sprink could not read it and it was gone before he could try.

‘Mm.’ Vetch brushed a fleck of wax from the doorframe with a finger. ‘A carrier came through your father’s house a fortnight back. Kossite. You gave him his ale and his stew and you kept him talking the better part of an hour on a busy night. Where he’d been. What he’d seen on the road. Who he’d spoken to. And then you asked him whether he had ever been west himself. Whether he had met a man who had.’

Sprink’s ear had begun to ring. He remembered the night. The fire too high, and the man's boots up on the rung of the stool. Bram covering the taps at the far end and giving him looks that promised words later. And somewhere in that room, a man had sat with a cup in front of him and watched Sprink talk to the Kossite, and had gone out afterward and carried it to Vetch. Sprink had worked the evening and never felt it once. 

He went through the regulars in his head. Table by table, face by face, and he got nowhere, and understood that getting nowhere was the point. 

‘West,’ Vetch said. ‘He hadn’t been. He wouldn’t have. A Kossite carrier keeps to his road, and his road runs north and south. He knows every yard and every ford between here and Koss and nothing at all on either side of them. You had that man an hour. An hour of a stranger’s attention, freely given. He liked you.’

It sounded like praise, and he took it as such, for perhaps two heartbeats.

‘You could’ve had what was under his canvas,’ Vetch said. ‘He hauls it for other men, so he’d not have told a soul without being coaxed, and coaxing is the one thing you can do. Whose it was. Where he was to set it down and who takes delivery of it. What he declared at the tollpost and what he left out. Where he beds down on the Koss road, and whether he beds alone, and when he comes back this way.’ He set two fingers on the purse and moved it perhaps an inch. ‘He’d have given you all of it. He was already giving you things he had no business giving a boy who poured his ale. You frittered away that hour and spent that time asking about trees.’

Sprink’s face had gone hot.

‘I’ve men who’d want a fortnight and something sharp to get a quarter of that out of him. You’d have had it before his stew went cold and he'd have thanked you for the evening. You’re asking the wrong questions. It’s a waste, and I’ve no patience for waste.’

He straightened off the doorframe, and went back through the door, and it closed behind him without noise.

The cellar seemed to exhale after he left, Sprink realized he had been holding his breath.

Rendell was still on the crate. ‘He does that,’ he said mildly.

‘Does what?’

‘Makes you feel like you’ve been measured for your coffin.’

Sprink laughed weakly.

He climbed the stairs into the beeswax warmth of the shop and out into the street. He had liked that carrier. The man talked to him for an hour because he wanted to, and Vetch had seen it as an hour badly spent.

This is a home for writing in progress: pages from a high fantasy book, alongside reflections on its concept and design.