Fennmark

Fennmark is the first real town I’ve been in since I stopped being a real person.
It comes up out of the flat in stages. Smoke first, then the sound, then the walls, then the crowds of people that I’ve been avoiding for three years. Carts. Shouting. A rail yard off to the east with an engine sitting in it, hissing, a line of carriages behind it and a crowd around the platform that never quite goes down.
They’re putting lines in everywhere now, and for once the people saying it’ll change things are right.
Because the crystals only go where the crystals are. Twenty of them in the kingdom, give or take, all of them in cities or the sort of town that likes to think it’s one. If you live anywhere smaller than that, and nearly everybody does, then a crystal gets you to the nearest big place and then abandons you to the same mud your grandparents walked. Three days to Bellhollow from the nearest chamber. Five to some of the mountain villages.
The rails don’t care. They go where it’s cheap to lay track, which means they thread through the middling towns and the mill villages and the places that only have a name because somebody put a bridge there, and they stop at all of them. Slower than a crystal. Vastly slower. But a farmer in a village of two hundred can put his sister on a train on a Tuesday and she’ll be somewhere that isn’t walkable by Thursday, and that’s never been true before in the history of anything.
So the crystals are for people with somewhere important to be, and the rails are for everyone else, and the guild charges what it likes for the first because it knows exactly how much a day is worth to a man who can pay.
Ashveil has a crystal. Of course it does. One of the four.

The guild hall is the biggest building that isn’t a temple. Gordwin goes in to file the beasts and takes Brask with him, and comes back out eleven minutes later looking like a man who has just done a great deal of paperwork about some scorpions.
“Well?” Ellery asks.
“They’ve written it down.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the whole of it. A woman wrote it down, and she was very thorough, and she asked me twice how big the big one was because she didn’t believe me the first time.” He rolls his shoulder and winces. “They’ll send a survey team inside the month. That’s what she said. Within the month.”
“And will they?”
“Ellery,” he says kindly, “go and look at the train.”
Ellery goes and looks at the train.

The teleport chamber is at the back of the hall, and it’s the biggest room in the building: a hexagonal chamber, a checkered pattern decorating the floor, and the crystal standing in the middle of it, taller than a man, humming a note you feel in your teeth rather than hear.
You can’t teleport to a place. That’s the thing everyone outside the trade gets wrong. You can only teleport to another crystal, and they’re all fixed, and they’re all pinned to a schedule, because someone worked out a long time ago that two crystals firing at each other out of sequence puts everyone involved somewhere nobody’s ever found.
So there’s a board on the wall with chalked times on it, a queue, and clerks. Magic that can move a man four hundred miles in a heartbeat, and the bottleneck is a woman with a ledger.
The board says ASHVEIL - TWICE DAILY. The afternoon one leaves in three hours.

“Name goes in the book,” Gordwin says, at my elbow. “Origin, destination, purpose of travel. Clerk copies it out twice and one copy goes to the capital at the end of the month.”
I look at the register on the desk. Open, half a page filled, an inkwell beside it.
“Ah,” I say.
“Mm.” He reaches into his coat. “Which is why you’re not signing it.”
What he puts on the desk is a slip of stiff grey card with a Guard seal pressed into one corner and nothing else on it at all. The clerk takes one look, goes slightly pale, and stamps it without reading it.
“Standing passage. Guard business, no entry required.” He takes it back and folds it into my hand. “You’ll use it to get to Ashveil and then you’ll put it somewhere safe, and if anyone ever asks, I issued it for escort duty and you’re the escort.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s a prediction.” He’s already going into the other pocket. “Hand.”
I hold my hand out and he drops something small and cold into it. A silver stud, the kind of thing you’d wear in an ear and forget about, with a hairline groove round the edge that isn’t decoration.
“No,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Gordwin…”
“It’s one-way, before you start. It doesn’t listen, and I can’t talk into it.” He folds my fingers shut around it with his whole enormous hand, the way you’d close a child’s fist round a coin. “Press it twice and I’ll know where you are. That’s all it can do. That’s the entire function.”
“And then what?”
“And then I come.” He says it like he’s confirming the price of his meal. “Wherever it is. Whatever it is. I’d rather you never used it, and I’d rather it was in your ear than at the bottom of a drawer, so put it in.”
I put it in.
“Good.” He steps back. “Three hours. Go and buy something to eat that isn’t bread, you look like a coat with a boy in it.”

I’ve got three hours and more coin in my pocket than I’ve spent in a year, and I end up standing in the middle of a market square with absolutely no idea what to do with either.
It’s Ellery’s fault. He’d said something on the road about his mum, and presents, and how you never turn up to someone’s house with nothing in your hands because his gran would have your ear off for it. He wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about a woman who keeps bread warm in a village I’ll never see.
It occurs to me, about forty minutes before departure, that tomorrow I’m going to walk into a duke’s house and most likely meet a fourteen-year-old girl who’s spent a year being examined by every expert in the kingdom.
And that I have, in my bag, two shirts and a whetstone.
“Oh, this is going to be excruciating,” she says, delighted, appearing on the lip of a fountain with her heels swinging. “Please buy her a rock. Please. Wrap up a nice rock.”
The trouble is that anything I can afford, she owns twenty of. Anything I can’t afford would be insulting coming from a hired tutor in a pressed coat. Jewellery’s absurd. Sweets are for a child, and everyone’s been treating her like one for a year, which is probably half her problem. Books, she’ll have books. Her father’s got a library with a name.
“You’re thinking about this like it’s a siege.”
It is a siege.
So I buy her a notebook.
It’s from a shop off the square, and it isn’t fine. It’s a working book. Good paper, sewn binding, plain brown board covers, the sort of thing a surveyor buys eight of. A hundred pages, blank, no lines. I buy a decent pencil and a knife to sharpen it with, and then I stand outside the shop holding all three and feeling like an idiot, because it’s a notebook, it cost less than my dinner, and she’ll open it and find nothing inside.
Which is the point, I suppose.
Every one of those examiners came in and wrote about her in their own books and took them away with them. Nobody handed her one.
“That’s almost thoughtful,” she says, and there’s a small, unpleasant pause. “How very unlike you.”

The rest of my coin goes on the alchemist’s row, which is where I’d have gone first if I’d had any sense, and where I lose most of my remaining time. Bloodroot, three bundles, because it keeps. Silverleaf, which is overpriced this far inland and I buy anyway. Powdered flux, two jars of solvent, a tin of iron filings, and a paper twist of seeds for a creeper that only grows properly in a high mana field and which I’ve got no business owning and no reason to need, and which the woman behind the table sells me without asking a single question, because why would she. Just two circles.
You can tell a great deal about a person’s mana from what happens to a plant they’ve been holding.
Nobody’s going to let me put my hands on a duke’s daughter. But they’ll let me hand her a leaf.

They walk me back as far as the hall.
There’s no speech. He said everything he had on a wet rock in the dark a few nights ago and neither of us has anything to add, so Brask nods at me, and Ellery shakes my hand with both of his like I’m going off to war, and Gordwin just puts his hand on my shoulder.
The same shoulder. We both notice. Neither of us mentions it.
“Eat something,” he says. “She’ll have my head.”
Then he’s gone across the yard, shouting at Ellery about the cart, and the door swings shut behind him.
Twenty minutes later I stand on the checkerboard floor with forty strangers and a bag I can carry in one hand, and the crystal takes that note it’s been humming all day and turns it into a sound like the world drawing a breath, the light blinding us as it exhales.