Shifting Lands: The Wayward Lines, Four Clean Young Adult Fantasy Adventures

Book One, Chapter 1: Greaves and Daughter

The fallstone went in black and came out silver, and that was the whole trick of it.

Kes Marrow leaned her weight onto the crank and felt the grinding wheel bite. Under the stone, a fist-sized lump of meteor iron cracked, shifted, and gave up another thin hiss of powder into the trough. Grey dust rose in the dawn light from the shop window and settled on her forearms, her apron, her eyelashes. By noon her curls would be grey with it. By evening she would look, as Old Pim liked to say, like a girl who had been rolled in the moon.

"Fine grind," she muttered, and rubbed a pinch of the powder between her thumb and fingers. Smooth as flour. No grit. "Fine grind, Kestrel. Steady hand."

"Talking to yourself again," said Mother Ysolde from the stool by the stove.

"Somebody has to. You're talking to your notebook."

"My notebook is better company." Ysolde did not look up. She sat with her long legs folded like a heron's, half-moon spectacles on the end of her nose, a pen stuck through the white knot of her hair, and the red leather notebook open on her knee. Its cover was cracked like old paint. On the front, in faded gold, someone had once pressed the words Where I Am.

Every morning it was the same. Kes had heard it so often she could have said it along with her, the way children say prayers they do not understand.

"Where am I," Ysolde read, tapping each word with an ink-black fingertip. "Shop. Grindings. Quillhaven. Good." She turned the page. "Kes. Fifteen. Grinds too fast when she's bored. Good." She turned another. "Pim. Bakery. Two doors uphill. Owes us for a pot of red. Hm."

"He paid that last week."

Ysolde licked the pen from her hair and crossed something out. "Then Pim is good also."

Kes grinned and bent back to the wheel. She had asked, once, when she was small, why Mother Y needed a book to tell her where she lived. Ysolde had looked at her for a long moment over the tops of her spectacles and said, "Because I was a Linewright, girl, and Linewrights pay," and had not said another word about it for a week. Kes had learned to leave it alone. There were a lot of things in the shop she had learned to leave alone.

Greaves and Daughter, Inks and Pigments, was three stories tall and one room wide, wedged between a dyer's yard and a rope walk at the bottom of the cliff where the poor quarter of Quillhaven collected like silt. The ground floor was the workshop: the great grinding wheel, the crucibles on their iron stand, the shelves of jars that went up and up into the dark. Ochre and lamp-black. Oak gall soaking in rainwater. Gum arabic in amber lumps. Verdigris, which Kes was not allowed to touch without gloves. And on the highest shelves, in small lead pots with wax seals, the lodeink: fallstone ground fine as smoke, mixed with gall and gum, the ink that held the world still.

Up in the loft where she slept, on the plaster wall beside her round window, Kes had painted a map of the city when she was eleven, and Ysolde had let it stay. It showed Quillhaven the way she saw it from that window: the white stone streets climbing the cliff like stairs, the bell towers, the harbor below, and at the very top, needle-thin, the Spire of Charts with its glass dome. It was not a good map. The scale was wrong and the harbor was too big because she had liked painting boats. But it was hers, and she could see it from her pillow.

The shop bell clanged and then stuck halfway, the way it always did, giving off a dying, strangled dnk.

"Somebody fix that ...