Day 0 / 100

The cloth came ashore at dawn, the way it did every winter, and Ione Calder was waiting for it.

She stood at the tideline of Vethmoor harbor with her boots sunk in cold shingle and her sleeves rolled to the elbow, though the wind off the water was sharp enough to find the bone through wool. Out past the breakwater the Pall lay on the sea like a lid. It had come in with the first frost, as it always did, a wall of pale fog so thick and so still that the fishing boats had stopped pretending they could ignore it and sat at their moorings with their sails furled. Nothing moved inside it. That was the thing people noticed first and the thing they stopped noticing by midwinter: ordinary fog drifted, and the Pall did not. The Pall waited.

Ione had stopped noticing years ago. She noticed now, because the tide was turning, and the tide was the only clock she trusted.

The cloth came in on the last of the ebb, a long ribbon of wet linen tangled in kelp, rolling in the shallows like something asleep. A boy from the net-menders' row got to it first, wading in to his knees with a boathook, and he held it up dripping and grinning, a boy expecting a coin. Ione took it from him without a word. She put a coin in his palm, and he was gone up the shingle before she could think better of the coin.

She carried the cloth up the hill with both hands, the way she might have carried something alive.

Calder & Daughters stood at the top of Tanner's Stair, a long, low building of black timber and slate, with its vats set along the south wall to catch what little sun the north allowed. Inside, the air was heavy with lye and wet wool and the sour, living reek of the indigo vats. The smell, at least, had never left her. It was only the color that had gone.

She spread the linen on the long table under the north window and smoothed it flat with the heel of her hand. A tight herringbone weave. The selvedge finished with a double-turned edge, the kind her grandmother had taught her mother, and her mother had taught her, and she had taught no one, because the only person she would ever have taught was the person who had learned it anyway, at seven years old, by watching. Five winters now. Five winters, five scraps, one each year, every one of them dyed in a blue that Ione could no longer see.

She knew it was blue. She knew it the way she knew the sky was above her on the days the fog hid it. Calder blue, the deep one, with the faint green undertone that came from a second dip in a vat kept a week too long. Only one pair of hands in Vethmoor had ever dared to keep a vat that old. Ione had told her a hundred times that she would ruin the whole batch. Tamsin had never once ruined it.

To Ione's eyes the cloth was the gray of wet slate, with a darker band where the dye had sunk deepest. She carried the memory of the color the way you carry a word in a language you have stopped speaking, knowing its shape and nothing of its sound.

Her thumb found the stain at the edge of her nails, the blue-black that no lye had ever lifted from the creases of her fingers, and began to rub it, back and forth, back and forth. It was a habit older than the loss. Her mother used to say she did it when she was thinking. Tamsin used to say she did it when she wanted something and wouldn't ask.

"You do it when you want something," Tamsin had told her once, laughing, with flour on her cheek from stealing bread out of the kitchen. "And you'd sooner chew through the table than say so."

Ione stopped her thumb. She looked at the cloth until the window light had moved a hand's width across it.

She did not want to ask anyone for anything. She had already asked eleven people.

* * *

The Mist-Walkers' Guild kept its hall on Cooper's Row, a squat stone building with a lamp burning in every window all day long, because walkers could not bear a room without light. Ione had gone there three days running. On the first day the Guildmistress, a gaunt woman named Dunna Kettleby with a guide cord wound twice around each wrist, had heard her out and said no. On the second day a younger walker had said no more kindly. On the third day they had stopped letting her past the door and had sent a clerk out to say it for them.

Eleven walkers, eleven refusals. The deep Pall closed to everyone after midwinter, they said, and its deepest gate opened for only a hundred days each year, and the people who went through that gate did not all come out. Ione knew what the deep Pall cost. She had never pretended otherwise. What she had not been ready for was the way they said no.

They all asked it, one way or another. The honest ones asked it with their faces, a quick flick of the eyes to her hands and away, as if she might catch them wondering. The cheaper ones asked it in coin: a premium for hazard, a clause promising their families a pension if they did not come back, a clause for a sealed cord, a clause for the clause before. Three of the eleven had said yes, for a price, and every one of those prices had been the same question wearing a better coat. Not one of them had spoken the words aloud. It was the single thing you never said to a mist-walker, as old a rule as the harbor wall. How long have you got?

And Ione, who could not stand to be bargained with by someone who was secretly measuring a grave, had thanked all three and walked out.

On the third day, the clerk had come out into the street after her, a narrow young man with ink on his collar, glancing back at the door as though it might be listening.

"There's one more," he said, low. "Harrowgate. Wynne Harrowgate. She's the only one left who still goes past the third marker."

"Is she on the Guild's roll?"

"She doesn't come to the hall anymore. Private work, when she takes any. The Salt Lamp, on Cooper's Row, most nights after dark." He hesitated, and she watched him decide to say the next thing. "A word of advice. Don't be sorry for her."

"Why would I be sorry for her?"

The clerk looked at her a moment longer than was polite. "No reason," he said, and went back inside.

* * *

The Salt Lamp was the sort of tavern that harbor towns grew like barnacles: low beams, a floor worn into hollows by a hundred years of boots, a fire that smoked more than it warmed, and in the front window a lamp whose shade had been cut from a single block of rock salt. Ione had been told it glowed amber. To her it glowed the gray of a candle seen through a dirty cup.

She came in at nightfall with the purse inside her coat, and she knew which one was Wynne Harrowgate before anyone told her, though she could not have said how.

The woman sat at the corner table nearest the fire with her boots up on the opposite chair and a half-mended pack strap across her knees, losing at knucklebones to two net-menders and laughing about it. She laughed with her whole face, head thrown back, one hand slapping the table, the kind of laugh that made strangers at the next table turn and smile without knowing why. She was perhaps thirty. She wore a mist-walker's coat, long and patched and stiff with oil, and around her left wrist a guide cord was wound three times and knotted. Her hair was light and tied back in a careless plait, and it seemed to Ione, in the dim, that it grew lighter toward the ends, until the very tips were barely there at all, like frost at the edge of a candle flame.

The firelight, Ione decided. It had to be the firelight.

She crossed the room without hurrying. The net-menders saw her coming and discovered urgent business elsewhere. She stopped at the table, took the purse out of her coat, and set it down in front of the woman with a heavy, definite sound. She let the silver speak first.

Wynne Harrowgate looked at the purse. Then she looked up, and her eyes, which Ione could only tell were light, held hers with a bright, unhurried interest, as though Ione were a puzzle she had been waiting all evening to be handed.

"Well," she said. "That is a great deal of silver for a Tuesday."

"It's Thursday."

"Is it? Then it's going to be a long night." She swung her boots off the chair with a flourish and nudged it out with her toe. "Sit, Miss Calder. You're making the room nervous."

Ione did not sit. "You know my name."

"Everyone knows the Calder works." Wynne tilted her head. "Best blue on the coast."

"I need a guide. The deep Pall, past the third marker, through the gate and as far as it goes. A hundred days."

"Straight to it." Wynne's grin widened. "I like that. Most people want to talk about the weather first, or ask how I am."

"How you are doesn't concern the contract."

Something crossed the woman's face, quick as a minnow in shallow water, and was gone. "No," Wynne said, lightly. "I suppose it doesn't."

* * *

The tavern keeper arrived with two mugs and no invitation. She was a round, weathered woman with her sleeves pushed up past the elbow and the manner of someone who had been breaking up fights since before Ione was born.

"Sit down, girl, you're blocking my floor," she said, and set a mug in front of Ione and another in front of Wynne. "Let her get a drink in her before you start bargaining. I'm Maudie Fenn, and this is my house, and nobody signs anything under my roof on an empty stomach." She nodded at Wynne with something fierce and fond in her face. "Don't let her put you off. Wynne was the best guide this harbor ever had. Taught half the Guild their knots. Never lost a client in nine years."

Wynne's smile did not vanish. It slowed. It went on for half a beat longer than it should have, like a cart rolling after the horse has stopped, and then it caught itself and was perfectly bright again. "Maudie, you'll make me blush."

"You've never blushed in your life."

"I'm saving it."

While Maudie laughed, Wynne's left hand slid across her lap and drew her coat cuff down over the heel of her palm. It was a small, practiced motion, the kind of thing a person does a hundred times a day without thinking. But Ione had been trained for twenty years to notice the places where a color failed to take, and as the cuff fell she saw the fingertips beneath it. They were pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. They were the pale of candle wax held up to a lamp, close to clear.

And she heard the word the woman had used, the way you hear a flaw in a weave before you can name it. Was. The best guide this harbor ever had.

Ione said nothing. She sat down.

* * *

She laid the cloth on the table between the mugs, unfolded it, and smoothed it flat.

"Every winter for five years, one of these has come ashore," she said. "Linen. Herringbone. Double-turned selvedge. Calder blue, second dip. Nobody else makes this blue. My sister dyes it."

"Dyes," said Wynne.

"Dyes."

The woman held her eyes a moment, and Ione had the odd sense of having been weighed and found to be exactly as heavy as she had said. Then Wynne put out two fingers and touched the edge of the linen, very lightly, the way a person touches a stranger's sleeve in a crowd to be sure of getting the right one. Her fingers went still on the selvedge. The silence stretched. It was the longest the woman had gone without saying anything since Ione had walked in, and it did not look like the silence of someone doing sums.

"Fine weave," Wynne said at last, and her voice was almost her own again. "Go on, Miss Calder. Terms. I can see you've got them in your pocket."

Ione had them in her head, which was better. "A hundred days from the opening of the deep gate. From the harbor to wherever the cloth comes from, and back. Forty silver now, sixty when we return. No hazard premium. No clause for your heirs. No clause for a sealed cord, or a spare walker on call, or a clause in case I fall and you're blamed." She lifted her chin. "I won't ask what you can't answer, and I won't ask you to promise what you can't give. You'll be paid for the hundred days. That's all."

"No hazard premium," Wynne repeated. "You know what the third marker costs people."

"I know what it costs the people who go there."

"And you don't want to ask me whether I'm sure I can get you through it?"

"If you couldn't, you wouldn't be sitting here taking my silver." Ione heard how it sounded and said it anyway. "I'm hiring a guide. A guide gets to the end. It isn't a kindness. It's arithmetic."

The fire popped. At the next table someone dropped a knucklebone, and the sound was a small bright crack in the quiet. Wynne Harrowgate sat very still, and for a moment Ione could not read her at all: not the grin, not the bright interest, nothing. It was like looking at a window with the lamp suddenly taken out of the room behind it.

"That," Wynne said slowly, "is either very trusting or very rude."

"It's neither."

"No?"

"It's a price."

Wynne laughed, and this time the laugh was real. It cracked out of her like something she had not meant to let go, and she put the back of her hand against her mouth and looked at the ceiling beams. "A price," she said, to the ceiling. "Maudie. Did you hear that? She's offering me a price."

"I heard it," said Maudie, who had not gone anywhere.

* * *

Maudie fetched a scrap of paper and a pen, and the contract was written in the space of three mugs, in two hands. Ione's was small and square. Wynne's came after, large and looping and entirely unnecessary, a signature with a tail on it like a comet.

"One condition," Wynne said, blotting it with her sleeve. She did not say it as a joke, though she kept her face warm. "Once we're past the first marker, you do as I say, when I say it. Not as a favor. Not as something we discuss. The way you'd follow a ship's pilot through a reef. There are rules in there, Miss Calder, and none of them are polite."

Ione considered it for as long as it took to turn the paper over. "Agreed."

"Just like that?"

"You asked."

Wynne looked at her with her head tilted, for the third time that night, and said nothing at all. Then she pushed the purse back across the table, took out forty silver pieces, counted them in front of Ione with great ceremony, and slid the rest home. Her fingers did not touch Ione's. Ione noticed that she was careful about it. She did not know why she had noticed, and she did not like that she had.

"We leave at first light tomorrow," Wynne said. "I'll meet you at the sea gate. Bring warm socks. And, Miss Calder?"

"Yes."

"Don't bring anything you can't stand to lose." She smiled, quick and bright. "I'm only saying it to everyone."

* * *

When the door had closed behind the Calder girl, Wynne sat for some time at the corner table with the contract in front of her, and the fire fell lower, and she did not move.

Then she got up, climbed the back stair to the narrow room under the roof that Maudie let her keep, and shut the door. The room held a bed, a washstand, a trunk, and a window that looked out on nothing, which was what windows in Vethmoor looked out on in winter. She sat down on the bed in her coat and, only then, let her left hand come out of its cuff.

She turned it over in the weak light. The skin at the wrist was the color of watered milk. The veins showed through it like thread under muslin, and farther down, past the knuckle, the fingers had gone a shade she did not have a word for, a kind of clean absence, as though someone had begun to wipe her out with a damp cloth and had been called away. It was further than it had been last month. It was further than she had told anyone.

She took a short coil of gray cord from the inside pocket of her coat. It was not her cord. The knots were tied in a pattern she had not learned from anyone, small and careful and slightly crooked, the knots of someone who had been taught by hand and not by guild. She wound it once around her fingers and unwound it, her hand trembling a little, and the tremor was a thing she watched with interest, from far off, as though it belonged to a stranger.

"Two years," she said to the room.

The room said nothing. She had not expected it to.

"She asked the price," Wynne said, more softly, in the voice she used for the dead and the absent, the one that was almost a joke. "Not the time. Do you know, I'd forgotten anyone could. You'd have liked her."

She sat there with the cord in her hands until it was warm. Then she put it away, pulled her cuff down over her wrist, and went down to Maudie's kitchen for something to eat. By the time she got there, she was laughing again.

* * *

At the Calder works that night, Ione packed.

She did it the way she did everything: in order, in silence, with her sleeves rolled up. A canvas satchel of dye stuffs, because she would not leave without them even if there were no vat on the other side of the Pall. Cakes of indigo wrapped in oilcloth. Alum in a twist of paper. A small iron pot. A scrap of the old linen for comparison, pinned to the inside of her coat. When she had finished the satchel she turned to the master vat in its corner, the old one, her mother's, and lifted the lid to look at it.

He had not told her, the clerk, that she would be sorry for the walker. He had told her not to be. She turned that over now with the rest. A hundred days. The deep Pall. A woman whose hand went to her cuff before her smile could finish, whom the harbor already spoke of in the way you speak of a ship that has sailed.

The vat showed her a still surface the gray of old pewter. She knew it was blue. She had stirred it and fed it and dipped her arms in it to the elbow a thousand times, and what she had of it now was a name. Blue. The word had no weight.

She put the lid back. She put out the lamp except for one, and stood in the half dark with the contract folded in her pocket and her thumb working at the stain by her nails. Outside the window the Pall lay against the sea, and the whole town sat on its hill with its back to it.

"Tamsin is," she said.

She said it aloud to the empty works, to the vats, to the dark between the rafters. She said it every night at this hour, not as a prayer and not as a hope, but as a plain fact, the way another woman might say her own name to make certain it was still hers. Present tense, firmly. The workshop said nothing back. It never did.

She said it anyway.