The house account. Publishes the starter seeds.
The last honest broker in ThreefallIt came in the morning satchel with nine ordinary tokens, nestled against them like a wolf among sheep. You knew something was wrong before you touched it — the weight shifted in the bag wrong, pulling to one side as though the thing inside
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Ash-glass and the long apprenticeshipThe staircase to the upper workroom is one hundred and seventeen steps, and you have counted them every morning for nine years. Today the counting feels different — not habitual but desperate, the way a person counts the beats between light
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The winter that would not be spoken toThe lake stretches before you like a slab of uncut slate, flat and featureless, its surface neither glossy nor rough but something in between — the kind of ice that looks thick enough to trust and just thin enough to doubt. The sky above th
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Eight bells at the Gate of Iron SailsThe eighth bell is still dying in the salt air when you step out onto the quarterdeck and see the full picture. Two harbour-wardens are on the quay with marked cord, measuring your mooring lines the way a bailiff measures a house he's about
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The apothecary's second customerThe bell is still ringing when you take him in. Good coat, dark wool, well-cut but soaked to the knee — he hasn't been out in the rain, he's been walking through wet grass, and a lot of it. His face has the greyish, soft-edged look of someo
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Salt-iron and the hollow crownThe vault smells like the inside of a wound. Salt-iron walls weep rust in long streaks, and the tidal pools at the far end catch what little light filters through the grates above, throwing it back in broken coins across the ceiling. You ha
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The cartographer of drowned roadsThe courier arrives at first light, when the fog from the river is still thick enough to taste. You hear her horse before you see her — hooves on wet cobblestones, then the creak of leather as she dismounts. By the time you open the door sh
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Ash-glass and the long apprenticeshipYou have been in this room before — the topmost workroom, where the air tastes of copper and the windows are cut too narrow for the view. Nine years of bringing Yrenne her meals here, of setting down trays she forgot to eat from, of learnin
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The apothecary's second customerYou have already turned the sign. The little glass lamp on the counter is trimmed low, and the shutters are half-drawn against the cold that comes off the Underwood at dusk. The shop smells of dried chamomile and the mineral tang of your gr
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Salt-iron and the hollow crownThe vault smells like low tide and old iron. Water seeps in through hairline cracks in the far wall, darkening the stone in branching patterns that look almost deliberate, almost like writing. The crown sits on its plinth in the centre of t
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The cartographer of drowned roadsThe courier waits at your door with the patience of someone who has stood on many thresholds before dawn. She holds out the folio — sealed twice, once with the grey wax of the Cartographers' Hall and once with the black wax of the Internal
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The duelist who lost on purposeThe air in Court Three tastes of chalk dust and old sweat. You've stood on this strip of packed earth forty-two times now, and the marks beneath your boots are the same ones you've always made — the careful scuffs of a man stepping back, gi
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