The Long Thaw

Tick 59recorded without narration

Peirmarket — winter of year 95

Tulhold is one bad season from open trouble. It works: Bram Ashfoot sets up to help the sick while listening to people, and it comes off clean. Bram Ashfoot wrote: "I set up where the sick can find me and start listening to what people say while I work." Partly: Kestrel Vane reads and asks quiet questions — looks after the people nearest to hand, and it gets most of the way there. (acting on their own while away)

For now, it holds.

Tick 58

The market at Peirmarket runs thin and grey under an autumn sky, stalls half-empty, breath fogging over the fish-crates. Kestrel Vane finds the man who passes for authority here — a warden with ink-stained cuffs and no patience for pleasantries — and asks, plainly and without edge, what it is he wants from travellers like them. He answers, but not everything, and not straight. Demands come back half-shaped: taxes owed, papers wanted, a debt of goodwill Kestrel is expected to understand without being told its size. It is enough to know the shape of the trouble without seeing its face.

Meanwhile Bram Ashfoot keeps to his usual habit, watching the market's rhythms the way he watches a wound before deciding how to dress it — he will not trust a thing until he knows how it works. He learns something today, some mechanism of how Peirmarket ticks under its rot, but the learning comes rough-edged, incomplete, the kind of understanding that raises more questions than it answers.

Around them both, the talk in Leldgate has soured further. Merchants mutter that the town is one bad harvest, one hard winter, from something breaking open. And under that talk, quieter, spreads a newer rumor — that the Goul Knot, whoever or whatever holds that name, is stirring toward some purpose of its own. No one says what. No one says when. But the word moves stall to stall like smoke finding the cracks in a roof, and those who hear it go quiet for a moment before returning to their business, as if saying nothing might keep it from being true a little longer.

Tick 57

Bram Ashfoot spends the morning where the smell of grain dust hangs thickest, going stall to stall with a borrowed ledger and a stub of chalk. He counts twice where the sacks look shorted, runs his thumb along seams to check for false bottoms, tallies the barrels of oil and salt fish against what the tallymen swear was delivered. It is slow, unglamorous work, and by noon his hands are grey with dust and his back aches from bending. But the sum holds. Whatever else is coming for Braernbrothstead this season, it will not be an empty larder that breaks it — there is enough, if it is watched, if no one panics and starts hoarding against a hunger that hasn't arrived yet. He writes the final number twice, underlines it, and lets himself breathe.

Across the market, in Peirmarket proper, Kestrel Vane sets up to play for whoever stops to listen, and people stop. A tune meant to loosen coins from pockets becomes something else in Kestrel's hands — a way of watching who's thin in the face, who flinches at a raised voice, who hasn't eaten today and won't say so. Kestrel works the crowd like a hedge-doctor works a wound, finding the people nearest to hand and trying to do right by them with a look, a word, a coin passed sideways. Some of it takes. A few walk away steadier than they came. But the crowd is too wide and the need too deep to catch it all, and half of what Kestrel reaches for slips through anyway — a debt unpaid, a grievance unheard, a face that turns away before help arrives.

Neither of them fixes what's coming. But the stores are counted, and somebody in the crowd today was seen.

Tick 56

Spring had softened the mud at the edges of Peirmarket into something walkable, and the stalls had that loose, unhurried look they get when the frost is finally gone. Kestrel Vane moved between them without hurry, asking the same small question of anyone who looked old enough to remember: the old road, the one that had been closed, did they know why? A cloth-seller pointed them toward a fishmonger. The fishmonger remembered the year, if not the reason, and named an old cooper who'd know more. It came together easily, one thread pulling the next, until Kestrel had a clean thread of memory running back to whenever the road had shut — no snags, no lies caught in the telling, just market gossip doing what it does best.

Across the square, Bram Ashfoot had his sleeves rolled up, lending his hands to whatever needed lending. He'd never been one to touch a mechanism he didn't understand first, so he took his time with it — testing the give of a joint, the pull of a rope, before he trusted his weight to it. It cost him something. Half of whatever he was working on came loose in his hands, not broken exactly, but undone, and he was left holding two pieces that used to be one. He set them down, unbothered, the way a man does when he's used to things not quite working out and has learned not to make a story of it.

The market went on around them both, indifferent, the way markets do — coins changing hands, gulls arguing over fish heads, nothing that would trouble anyone's sleep tonight.

Tick 55recorded without narration

Peirmarket — winter of year 94

Better than anyone hoped: Bram Ashfoot sits with those grieving their lost loved ones, and it lands better than it had any right to. Bram Ashfoot wrote: "I sit with the ones who lost someone." Partly: Kestrel Vane plays for whoever will listen in Peirmarket — looks after the people nearest to hand in Peirmarket, and it gets most of the way there. (acting on their own while away)

For now, it holds.

Tick 54

Frost had come early to Peirmarket, whitening the cart-ruts before the sun burned it off by mid-morning. Bram Ashfoot moved through the stalls with the particular patience of a man who won't buy what he can't explain, turning jars and bundles over in his hands, asking the sellers how a tincture was cut or a root was dried before he'd part with coin for it. He got most of what he needed — the satchel at his hip heavier by midday — though one or two questions went unanswered, sellers shrugging or naming prices too steep for the knowing.

Kestrel Vane took a bench near the well, out of the worst of the wind, and set to writing while the morning was still fresh enough to trust. Names, hours, who had said what and to whom — the ink ran thin toward the end of a line and Kestrel had to go back over certain words twice to make them legible. It wasn't a clean record. Some of it came out in the wrong order, some of it in a hand hurried enough that only Kestrel would be able to read it back later. But enough of it held together that it would be useful, if anyone asked what had happened here.

Around them both, Peirmarket went on being Peirmarket — thin trade, thinner talk. Word from the direction of Thoungraldgate kept circling the stalls in the low voices people use for bad news that isn't theirs yet: one poor season more, folk said, and there'd be trouble there that wouldn't stay penned behind its own walls. No one in the market seemed to think it was close. Not yet.

By the time the frost came back with the afternoon shadows, Bram had his supplies, mostly understood, and Kestrel had their notes, mostly legible, and neither of them had heard anything yet that made the market feel less than ordinary.

Tick 53

Morning came up slow over Peirmarket, the kind of heat that sits on the awnings and makes the fish-sellers move like they're underwater. Bram Ashfoot was at it before the bells, laying out his little jars and folded cloths, checking the same hands and the same coughs he checks every week, the debt he won't name sitting quiet in the back of his throat like it always does. He didn't ask for anything more than what the work gave him, and that turned out to be enough. Word moved through the stalls faster than he did — a poultice that took, a fever that broke overnight, a birth that went easier than anyone expected — and by midday people were bringing him bread and cheese he hadn't asked for, just to have stood near him while he worked. It landed better than it had any right to. He kept his head down and said the same thing he always says, that someone has to, and let it go at that.

Kestrel Vane, off on their own errands about the edges of the market, spent the day looking after whoever was nearest to hand — a cart with a broken wheel, a child separated from her mother near the grain stalls, an old woman short on coin for salt. It worked, mostly. Supplies got where they needed to go, the child found her mother, the old woman got her salt. But none of it was clean; there were raised voices at one stall, a shortfall somewhere that had to be smoothed over with an apology instead of coin, small frictions that didn't quite resolve. Kestrel moved on before anyone could ask questions.

By evening the market settled into its usual noise, unaware of how close it had come, on an ordinary Tuesday, to being remembered fondly for entirely the wrong reasons.

Tick 52

The morning came up grey over Peirmarket, the kind of light that makes stalls look older than they are and canvas smell of last night's rain. Bram Ashfoot kept to a corner near the apothecary carts, turning some device or ledger over in his hands, asking his questions in that low, unhurried voice of his — how does it draw, how does it hold, who made it and why. He got half his answers. The thing worked, some, the way a lock works when you don't quite have the right key but the tumblers move anyway. He set it down still not satisfied, filed the rest away for later, the way he files most things away.

Across the square, Kestrel Vane found themselves needed. Whatever stood between the two parties — voices raised, or about to be — Kestrel put their body in the middle of it and did not move. No speech, no bargaining, just the plain fact of standing there, arms loose, feet set, until the moment that wanted to become something else decided it wouldn't. It came off clean. Nobody had to say thank you. The crowd's noise dropped back down to market noise — coin counted, cabbages weighed, someone's mule complaining about the cart.

The day went on around both of them after that, ordinary and slow. Bram carried his half-answered questions off toward wherever he keeps such things. Kestrel stayed a while longer where they'd planted themselves, watching the square settle, in no hurry to explain to anyone why they'd done it, or what exactly they'd stopped.

Tick 51

Cold does what cold does in Peirmarket this time of year—it finds the gaps in coats and the gaps in grudges alike. There was no trouble from beyond the market itself today, no riders, no news worth repeating, only the ordinary business of people trying to stay warm and paid.

Bram Ashfoot went where the hurt were, and did not ask first who they served or who they'd wronged. A split knuckle from one stall, a wrenched shoulder from another, a stitch needed by someone who wouldn't have been offered water by half the sellers around him. Bram gave it anyway, and his hands were steady, and the herbs he had on him were exactly the ones he needed, and the bandages held. Whatever debt sits behind his eyes, it didn't slow him today—if anything it seemed to loosen, a little, watching wounds close instead of open. People noticed. Not loudly. But they noticed a hedge-doctor who didn't check allegiances before he checked pulses.

Kestrel Vane, elsewhere in the market's business, kept an eye on the people nearest at hand—the ones easy to overlook in a crowd like this, the ones who get jostled and shorted and stepped past. Most of what needed watching, Kestrel watched. Not everything. Something slipped past at the edges, small enough that it might not matter, or might matter later. Kestrel would have wanted to catch it clean; today it was almost enough.

The market went on being a market—breath steaming over crates, coins changing cold hands, the low hum of people who have somewhere to be before dark. Nothing broke. Nothing this turn asked to be avenged. Bram's small, complete kindness sits there now, plain and unremarked-on by most, but not forgotten by the ones it touched.

Tick 50

The market at Peirmarket had that particular hush that comes just before shouting — carts stopped at odd angles, a woman with flour still on her hands standing too still, men with their arms crossed too tight. Whatever had set the two sides against each other, it had gone past words and toward something with weight to it. Kestrel Vane stepped into the gap between them anyway, hands open, voice pitched low and steady, the way you'd talk down a spooked animal. It took time. It took repeating things back to both sides until they were tired of hearing themselves. But it worked — the shoulders came down, the raised hands found pockets to go into instead of fists, and the argument that had been ready to spill into the lanes stayed where it was, contained, ugly but not bloody.

Across the square, Bram Ashfoot went about his own business more quietly. He'd come to Peirmarket for supplies, and he wasn't a man who bought a thing without knowing how it worked first — not after the debt, not after everything that debt had taught him about trusting what he was told. He asked questions of the stallholders, turned items over in his hands, tested weights and seals. He got most of what he needed understood, though a few particulars stayed stubbornly unclear, the kind of gaps that might matter later or might not. He carried on regardless, his mind elsewhere, on the thing he never names.

Neither of them spoke of Muckryancross today, though the word had been passed through the market more than once — one bad season, people said, and that place would tip into open trouble. For now it was someone else's worry. Peirmarket had its own small fire put out, and that would have to be enough for the day.

Tick 49

The rumor moved through Peirmarket the way rumors do in summer heat — slow at first, then all at once, passed hand to hand like a coin nobody wants to hold too long. The Broken Spears were preparing something. Nobody said what. Nobody needed to. Stallholders began packing their good stock earlier than usual, and the alley behind the tannery, usually loud with dice games, went quiet by midafternoon.

Bram Ashfoot didn't have time to worry about spears, broken or otherwise. He had medicine to find, and he found it, working stall to stall with that patient, unhurried manner of his, the one that made people forget he was in a hurry at all. When the price came in higher than he liked, he paid it anyway, counting out coins he'd probably regret parting with come winter. The medicine was good. It would do what it was meant to do. That much, at least, was settled, and settled cleanly — no half measures, no lingering doubt about whether he'd been cheated.

Kestrel Vane, elsewhere and occupied with reasons of their own, still managed to keep half an eye on the market square, the way they always did without seeming to try. People nearest to hand — a fruit-seller's boy, an old woman minding a cart of dried fish, a pair of newcomers who didn't know which streets to avoid — found themselves looked after in small, unremarkable ways. It worked, mostly. But there were rough edges to it, moments where Kestrel's attention arrived a beat too late, or a warning came out garbled, more felt than understood. Nobody got hurt. Nobody thanked them either.

Above it all, the tension in Peirmarket sat like a held breath. The Broken Spears were coming, or building toward something — and the market, medicine bought and watch kept, waited to find out what that something was.

Tick 48

News from Rinnigate reaches Peirmarket the way news always does — in pieces, in the mouths of carters and grain-sellers who weren't there and swear they were. The rulers thrown out, some say fled, some say worse. Nobody in the market square can agree on the shape of it, but everyone agrees something has broken loose in the world, and broken things travel.

Bram Ashfoot works the crowd anyway, because a crowd with news to trade is a crowd with coin loosening in its pockets. He plays for whoever stops to listen, testing a new patter against old faces, seeing what holds and what doesn't. Half of it comes loose in his hands — a verse mistimed, a trick that wants steadier fingers than his today — but he keeps enough of it together to be worth a few coins tossed his way, and nobody in Peirmarket seems to mind a hedge-doctor who fumbles a little. It makes him easier to trust, if anything.

Kestrel Vane has less patience for half-truths. There's someone in the market — a face that's been too careful, too quiet about the news from the east, quiet in the specific way of someone who knows more than they're letting on. Kestrel leans in, presses, doesn't let the deflection stand. And it works. Whatever they were holding back comes out — not everything, maybe, but enough, the words dragged loose the way stubborn things come loose, reluctantly and all at once.

Around them Peirmarket keeps its ordinary rhythm, stalls and haggling and the smell of turned earth from the spring planting, even while the news sits over the square like weather that hasn't decided whether to break.

Tick 47

Cold sat over Peirmarket like a lid on a pot, and word came in from the east the way bad news always does — sideways, through a carter's mouth, before anyone official had said a thing. Braernbrothstead had turned on its own rulers. Nobody in the market seemed to know exactly how, only that it had happened, and that a man named Gaepom the Patient had died somewhere in the business, folded into the doings of the Long Wolves and not coming back out again. The name meant something to some of the older stallholders, who went quiet when they heard it and did not explain why.

Bram Ashfoot set up his little table near the well where the sick already knew to find him, laid out his jars and his needle-case, and got to work on chapped hands and coughing chests. He kept his ears open the way he always did, but today it paid off beyond anything he expected — a woman waiting on a poultice let slip something, an old man complaining of his knees said more than he meant to, and by midafternoon Bram had heard the shape of the whole Braernbrothstead business laid out clean, along with three or four things about Peirmarket itself that he hadn't known that morning. He said nothing, only nodded and kept his hands moving, filing it all away.

Kestrel Vane, elsewhere and quieter about it, spent the day the way they often did — reading what could be read, asking soft questions of the people close at hand, checking that no one nearby had gone hungry or cold without anyone noticing. It half worked. Some of what they learned was useful; some of it slipped past them, half-heard, half-understood. Still, a few people in Peirmarket slept easier that night for having been asked after.

The market itself stayed calm, untroubled by any of it — for now.

Tick 46recorded without narration

Peirmarket — autumn of year 92

Thoungraldgate threw out its rulers. Partly: Bram Ashfoot reads and asks quiet questions — needs to know how a thing works before trusting it, and it gets most of the way there. (acting on their own while away) Better than anyone hoped: Kestrel Vane speaks politely with local authority to learn their demands, and it lands better than it had any right to. Kestrel Vane wrote: "I go and speak to whoever holds authority here, politely, and ask what they want from us."

For now, it holds.

Tick 45recorded without narration

Peirmarket — summer of year 92

Better than anyone hoped: Bram Ashfoot checks the stores and counts what is actually left, and it goes better than anyone expected. Bram Ashfoot wrote: "I check the stores and count what's actually left." Partly: Kestrel Vane lends a hand around Peirmarket — looks after the people nearest to hand in Peirmarket, and it gets most of the way there. (acting on their own while away)

For now, it holds.

Tick 44

News from Tulhold reached Peirmarket the way most news did, riding in on a cart of onions and spreading before the cart had even stopped rolling: the rulers were out, thrown down or thrown off, nobody was quite sure which. The market went on trading regardless. Grain still needed weighing, and the scales still needed watching.

Kestrel Vane worked the stalls with patient, unhurried questions, asking after the old road closure — the one nobody used anymore, the one that cut behind the tanneries and out past the millrace. Most folk waved the question off, but an old woman selling dried fish remembered it clear enough: closed by order, years back, after the bridge went soft in a flood. She told it plain, no embellishment, and it matched what Kestrel already half-suspected. The answer came easily, the way true things do when you ask the right person.

Bram Ashfoot, meanwhile, had taken it upon himself to keep an eye on the market from the shade of the awning nearest the well, the way he often did when the debt he carried made him restless. He'd found a length of chain looped through the well's winding gear and, curious about how the mechanism held, worked at it to understand the tension before he'd trust it to hold a bucket over a man's head. He got halfway through his inspection when a coupling gave way and half the rig came loose in his hands — not dangerous, just clattering and undone, a small embarrassment rather than a disaster. He set to gathering the pieces, unbothered, the way a man does who has seen worse fall apart on him.

The market noise didn't rise or fall for any of it. Somewhere south, a town had changed hands. Here, fish got sold, a road's history got confirmed, and a well went briefly, harmlessly, to pieces.

Tick 43

The frost has stripped Peirmarket down to its bones. Half the stalls stand empty, their canvas rolled and gone to whatever town still has coin worth chasing. What's left is quiet in the way that isn't peaceful — the quiet of people who have stopped expecting.

Bram Ashfoot finds his way to the ones sitting with their losses, the way he does most winters, though he never says why he's drawn to that particular grief. He doesn't bring herbs this time, or not many. He just sits. Says little. Lets the silence between them do the work a poultice can't. And something in it catches — more than it should, more than sitting usually does. A woman who hasn't spoken since her husband's burial says three words to him. An old man who has been staring at the same patch of frozen mud for a week looks up, actually looks up, and asks Bram his name. Word of it moves through the thin market the way word does when there's nothing else to talk about — that the hedge-doctor sat with the grieving and something in them came loose that had been stuck fast since autumn.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the market, Kestrel Vane goes through the motions of tending to what needs tending — checking on those nearby, seeing that they have what little there is to have. Most of it holds together. But something slips through Kestrel's fingers in the doing of it, some thread of the work left half-finished, a debt or a promise or a sack of grain not quite where it should be. Nothing catastrophic. Just a loose end, hanging, waiting for someone to notice it later.

The cold presses down on Peirmarket all the same, indifferent to both.

Tick 42

Word came down the Leldgate road before the leaves had finished turning: the town had thrown out its rulers. Nobody in Peirmarket seemed to know quite how, only that it had happened, and the news moved through the stalls the way news does when nobody is sure whether to be glad of it or afraid.

Bram Ashfoot sat with it the way he sat with most things that mattered, turning it over with quiet questions to whoever passed near his stall — the old miller's wife, a carter who'd come up from the south road, a boy who'd heard it third-hand. He wanted the mechanism of it, not just the fact: who had moved first, who had let it happen, what had actually broken. He got most of the way to an answer, enough to nod slowly to himself, though a piece of it stayed just out of reach, the way these things do when you're two towns away from where they happened.

Kestrel Vane took a different approach. Before the day's talk could soften or reshape itself into something tidier, they sat down and wrote out everything as it had come to them — the rumor, the order it arrived in, who said what and how certain they'd sounded. It was meant to be a small, practical thing, a habit of care for people who'd want the truth of it later. But laying it out line by line, seeing how the pieces fit together with a clarity Kestrel hadn't expected, they found themselves unsettled — not by what had happened in Leldgate, but by how easily, how completely, the writing had made sense of it. They sat a while afterward, looking at the page, not quite ready to trust how good it felt to understand something that fast.

The market went on around them, indifferent, smelling of woodsmoke and turned earth.

Tick 41

The summer sat heavy over Peirmarket, the kind of heat that made the fish stalls stink by noon and the dogs lie flat in what shade they could steal. Bram Ashfoot worked through it. He'd taken to setting his kit out at first light — the little knives, the packets of dried yarrow and willowbark, the bowl he used for mixing — and he did not stop for the heat or for much else. Someone has to, he'd said, and he meant it the way a man means a thing he doesn't want examined too closely.

Today the work went well. Too well. A poultice he mixed half by rote came together clean and right on the first try; a splint he set held so true the patient walked off testing his weight on it within the hour, disbelieving. Bram found himself standing over his own hands afterward, turning them over like they belonged to someone else. There is a kind of luck that feels like being watched, and he had that feeling now, sharp under his ribs, though he said nothing of it to the people thanking him.

Elsewhere in the market Kestrel Vane moved through the stalls seeing to supplies, checking in on the handful of people who'd come to lean on them without quite meaning to. Most of what needed doing got done — a debt of bread repaid, a child's shoes traded up a size, a word of comfort left where it was needed. Not everything closed clean, but enough did. Kestrel worked without ceremony, the way people do when the work is simply theirs to do.

The market carried on around both of them, indifferent and ordinary, the tension of the place low and unremarkable, like a held breath nobody was thinking about yet.

Tick 40

Peirmarket wakes slow, the way it always does after a cold night, stalls creaking open one shutter at a time. At Thoungraldgate the silence that had sat there for days finally gets an answer: the Sentinels of Zoumpae rise up to fill it, quiet and sudden as water finding a crack, and the market takes note of them the way it takes note of weather — a change to be watched, not yet understood.

Bram Ashfoot works his usual corner, playing for whoever will stop and listen, coins dropping slow into his cap. He's got some new trick or tonic he wants to try on the crowd, but a hedge-doctor's caution is a hard habit to unlearn — he needs to know how a thing works before he trusts it in front of strangers, and in the taking-apart, half of it comes loose in his hands. He sets the pieces down, unbothered, already turning to the next tune, the debt he won't name sitting where it always sits, untouched.

Kestrel Vane doesn't have that luxury of patience. Somewhere in the crowd's shifting, two forces close toward each other, and Kestrel steps into the gap between them and refuses to move. No speech, no threat — just the flat fact of a body that will not step aside. Whatever it was meant to do, it does: the pressure breaks, redirected around them like water around a stone, and the moment that could have gone wrong instead goes nowhere at all. The market keeps breathing. Stalls keep opening. The Sentinels stand at the gate, new and unexplained, and Peirmarket goes on pretending, for now, that nothing here needs their attention.

Tick 39

Winter loosens its grip on Peirmarket by degrees. The stalls are full again after the lean stretch — root vegetables stacked in damp pyramids, a butcher's cart with actual meat on the hooks, the smell of woodsmoke and wet canvas over everything. People haggle like they mean it again, instead of just going through the motions.

Bram Ashfoot spends the day with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, working through a line of the hurt and the half-hurt without asking who struck the first blow or why. A boy with a split scalp from some quarrel over a cart. A woman with fingers gone white and stiff from the cold, whose husband owes money to somebody Bram would rather not name either. He binds, he presses, he tells them to keep it dry, and none of them thank him the same way, and none of that seems to matter to him. It works. The wounds close the way wounds are supposed to. Word of this sort of thing moves through a market fast, on the same currents as the price of grain.

Away on whatever road they're walking, Kestrel Vane spends a quieter day of it — reading whatever's put in front of them, asking soft questions of the people nearest at hand, trying to look after them the way they look after everyone whether asked to or not. Half of what they're chasing comes loose in their hands, the other half stays knotted. It isn't the kind of day that gets talked about later, just one more mile added to whatever road they're on.

Peirmarket goes on being Peirmarket, a little warmer than it was, a little richer, still watching itself for the next lean stretch.

Tick 38

By midday the market had thinned to a handful of stalls and a smell of woodsmoke, the kind of quiet that autumn brings to a place before it closes down entirely for the season. What custom remained had knotted itself into two clumps of raised voices near the well — over what, exactly, hardly mattered anymore; it had the shape of an argument that wanted to become something worse. Kestrel Vane walked into the gap between them without any particular plan beyond not letting it happen. A word here, a hand raised in the universal shape of wait, a question addressed to one side and then, deliberately, to the other. It worked cleanly, the way these things sometimes do when nobody involved actually wanted the fight badly enough to refuse a way out. Voices dropped. Shoulders came down. By the time the well-argument had talked itself into something smaller than a grievance, the moment for shouting had passed it by.

Off at the market's ragged edge, Bram Ashfoot had set himself up as he does, playing his tunes for whoever would stop and listen, working the crowd for coin and gossip both. He'd been asking around about some device or trick he meant to trust his hands to, wanting to understand its workings before he leaned on it. He got half an answer — enough to know roughly how the thing worked, not enough to know if it would hold. He tucked that uncertainty away with his earnings and kept playing.

Tick 37

The market at Peirmarket has gone thin the way a crowd goes thin before rain — a few stalls left, awnings half-rolled, everyone talking in the low voices people use when they think the season's turning against them. Bram Ashfoot works his way down what's left of the row, asking after medicine in the patient, roundabout way of a man who doesn't want to look desperate. He finds what he needs eventually, from a trader who knows exactly what desperate looks like and prices accordingly. Bram pays more than he should — pays without arguing the second time the number goes up — and comes away with the medicine wrapped in cloth against his chest, though the coin that's left in his purse is thinner than the crowd around him, and the trader's smile stays with him longer than he'd like.

Off at the edge of things, where a few stragglers still linger by the last open stalls, Kestrel Vane plays. Not for coin exactly, though coin comes anyway — plays because someone ought to, because the people standing nearest deserve a tune that isn't about the thinning market or the heat or whatever's got everyone talking low. It's a good set, warm, unhurried, and it does what it's meant to for most of the small crowd gathered close — shoulders loosen, someone laughs for the first time that morning. But a couple of the farther listeners drift off before the song's done, unmoved, already thinking about the road home, and Kestrel lets them go rather than chase a room that's already half-empty.

By the time the sun's high and the last stalls start folding their cloth, Peirmarket has settled into whatever quiet it was heading toward all along — smaller, a little poorer, but not without its small mercies today.

Tick 36

News from Muckryancross came in sideways, the way it always does in a market this thin — a carter repeating what he'd heard from a woman who'd heard it from someone else, the rulers there thrown out, though nobody in Peirmarket could say by whom or to what. It didn't stop the stalls from being what they were: half-empty tables, a few sacks of grain, someone's chickens complaining in a crate. Bram Ashfoot moved through what remained of it methodically, turning over jars and sniffing at bundles, asking after the provenance of a salve before he'd hand over coin for it. He wanted to know how the thing worked before he trusted it, same as always, and by the end of the morning he'd gotten most of what he needed, though one or two questions he meant to ask went unasked, folded into the general business of getting by.

Kestrel Vane had less patience for half-answers. There was someone in the market — a face Kestrel had marked earlier, too careful with their words, too quick to change the subject — and Kestrel went back to them and pressed. Not roughly, but steadily, the kind of pressure that doesn't let a person retreat into shrugging. It worked. Whatever this person had been sitting on, they gave up more than they meant to, and Kestrel came away from the exchange knowing something they hadn't known an hour before.

Around them the market kept thinning toward nothing, the way it had been thinning for weeks, and the news from the north sat over the stalls like weather that hadn't decided whether to break.

Tick 35

Winter has picked the market clean. Half the stalls stand empty, their awnings stiff with frost, and the few vendors left huddle close to braziers instead of calling out their wares. Into this thinness Bram Ashfoot sets up his little table near the well, where the sick and the merely cold can find him without having to ask twice. He works with his hands and keeps his ears open, and today it pays off better than he had any right to expect — a woman with a cough tells him, between coughs, about a shipment gone missing three weeks back; an old man getting his knee bound mentions who was seen arguing with the toll-keeper the night the granary lock was found broken. None of it costs Bram anything but salve and patience, and by midday he has more threads in hand than he knows what to do with, more than he's had in months, laid out before him like herbs to be sorted.

Kestrel Vane, off on their own business, spends the day the same quiet way they spend most days — asking soft questions of whoever will answer, checking in on the handful of people who've come to expect it of them. It goes half well. Someone opens up a little, gives up a scrap worth having; someone else clams up entirely, spooked by nothing Kestrel did, just the season, just the thinness of everything this time of year. Kestrel comes away with something, but not as much as they'd hoped, and no clearer on what to do with it.

The market goes on thinning around them both. Nothing has happened to draw eyes. But Bram now has more to chew on than he's had all winter, and somewhere behind his understanding of debts is a name he still won't say.