The Rivercross Chronicle

To the Chronicle,

I keep an inn on Lamp Row, and every season some young clerk from the Council asks why so many of our upper windows have a lamp in them that is never lit.

It is a mourning custom, from the coast. You leave a lamp dark for someone who has not come home, and you do not light it until they do. Half the Row has someone on the roads. The other half keeps the habit out of politeness.

That is the whole of it. There is nothing more to see, and the young clerk should go home.

But I will say this, since you print what people need: if you are ever walking down Lamp Row at night with nowhere to go, and you see a dark lamp in an upper window, knock. Somebody in that house has been waiting for someone. It costs them nothing to be glad of you instead.

A Row innkeeper, who keeps a bowl

The dwarven assay houses mark Fray goods with three lines: what a thing is, what it does, and what it cost. An unmarked relic is called unweighed and is contraband in all twelve wards.

Marked this week at the anvil house on the Guild Quarter hill:

A pewter spoon, ordinary. Stays warm to the touch however long it is left in snow. Cost: the porter who carried it out has not felt warm since.

A child’s shoe, left foot. Walks a short way north on its own when set down, then stops. Cost: unknown. The Assay-Master has declined to follow it.

A sealed jar of river water from a Fray in the hills, in which a river can be seen flowing the wrong way. Not marked. The Assay-Master says she will not put her name to a thing she does not understand, and that this is the eleventh time she has said it in forty years, and that she remembers every one.

The day has nine watches, each kept by a god, and Rivercross tells time by them. A meeting at Orvek’s watch is mid-morning; a tavern that shuts at the Lean Watch is a tavern that shuts too late.

Some advice, gathered from people who should know:

Begin repairs in Orvek’s watch. The Unfinished Hammer favours work that is honestly not done yet.

Do not ask a Morrow for healing in the Lean Watch if you can help it. Lending is warmth on loan, and in that hour the dawn is furthest off and there is least of it to lend.

Cross a bridge in daylight if you can, and touch the stone hand if you cannot.

Make promises at dawn, when Auveth is listening. Break them at no hour at all.

Readers write to ask which watch is luckiest. The Chronicle’s printer says it is whichever one you are still awake in.

To the Chronicle,

You asked who is missing. I will tell you who carried.

I have carried for the Guild nine years. Four sheaves a carry, which is four days of a labourer’s wage, for a walk into a place where the sky is the wrong colour and the ground forgets which way is down.

The Crossers have their discs: Carried, Counted, Bearer and the rest, stamped iron on a cord, so that if they fall someone can read who they were. Porters have no disc. On the register we are a number in a column, and when the number comes back smaller, nobody writes down which of us it was.

So we do it ourselves. On the stair down to every Fray mouth I know, there are three stones stacked by the path. That means someone came this way and turned back. We leave them for each other.

If you see them, do not knock them down.

One of the Uncounted

The innkeeper who wrote to us last quarter has sent a recipe, with instructions that we print it exactly.

River-bank stew, for keeping a bowl

Into the big pot: whatever the river gave you, cut small. Onions, always. Barley, two hands. A ham bone if there is one, a stone if there is not, because the stone makes people ask, and asking makes them stay at the table.

Simmer from Orvek’s watch until somebody comes in from the cold. Salt it then, not before. Salt it for them.

Lay one more bowl than you have people. If nobody comes, the stew keeps. If somebody does, they will not have to ask whether there is enough.

Once a winter, when the ice is thin at the edges and the eels come slow and stupid under it, the barrow sellers of Listener’s Bridge hold Eel Day.

Everything is half price. Every stranger is offered a cup of hot eel broth whether they want one or not. Every child is given a copper bit to throw into the river at the stone hand of Nhalis, and every child spends the rest of the day trying to get it back.

It is the one day the Eelmen admit to being the Eelmen. Mother Sib sits on a chair in the middle of the bridge, accepting gifts and remembering who did not bring one.

The Chronicle went this year. We drank the broth. It was not good, and it was not meant to be. A seller told us that Eel Day is for the river, to thank it for the year, and that the river is not particular about broth.

We touched the stone hand on the way off. Everyone does. It is very smooth now.