Turn 2 of 7

Pick up one of the coins and study it more closely

You pick up one of the coins and hold it beneath the lamplight. It is heavier than any currency you know — copper-coloured but dense, almost the weight of iron, and the metal is warm in a way that has nothing to do with the man's pocket. The stamp is crude but deliberate: a tree, its branches bare, its roots splayed open beneath the trunk like veins pulled free of the soil. You turn it over and the reverse is smooth, untouched, as though only one face of it was ever meant to be seen. The edge is slightly irregular, hand-struck rather than machine-minted, and there is a faint smell on it like wet bark.

Your grandmother kept a box of coins beneath the counter. Not for spending — for studying. Foreign currency, odd tokens, things that came through the shop over four generations and were too strange to refuse and too unusual to forget. You have not looked at it in years, but you remember, with the slow certainty of childhood memory, a coin that felt like this one. Warm and heavy and wrong. Your grandmother had wrapped it in cloth and put it at the bottom of the box and told you, with the flat certainty she reserved for things that were not up for discussion, that it was not money. It was a weight.

"Where did you get these?" you ask.

Aldous Vane blinks. The question seems to catch him off guard, as though he expected you to reach for a jar or a book, not for the coins themselves. His mouth works for a moment before he answers.

"Payment," he says. "For a service rendered. A long time ago, or — not yet. I'm not sure which." He passes a hand across his forehead and leaves a wet streak in his hair.

"I was given to understand they would be accepted here."

Behind you, in the back room, Iris's stool creaks again. She is leaning forward, you are certain of it, trying to hear without being heard. You can feel her attention like a draft against the back of your neck. The coin sits in your palm, warm and patient, and you think of your grandmother's box beneath the counter, and of the word she used. A weight. Not a price. Something that holds a thing down, or keeps a thing in place.

You set the coin down gently, separate from the others, and look at Aldous properly for the first time. His coat is good quality but has been worn for many days. There is mud on the cuffs that is not the mud of Little Halloway's lanes — darker, richer, the black loam of deep forest. His eyes are grey and bloodshot and there is something behind them that is not quite fear. It is closer to grief, the kind that has been carried so long it has worn grooves in the carrier.