Read Shifting Lands free: the opening chapter

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 bell," said Old Pim, ducking in with a tray on his shoulder. He was a wide man dusted in flour the way Kes was dusted in iron, and he smelled of yeast and burnt sugar. "Every time I come in here it sounds like it's being murdered."

"It's a guard bell," Kes said. "It's supposed to sound like that. It scares off thieves."

"It scares off customers." Pim set a paper bundle on the counter. Two rolls, still steaming. "For the Mother and the Daughter. And don't tell me you've already eaten, Kes, you're thin as a broom."

"I'm wiry."

"You're a broom with opinions." He winked at Ysolde. "Morning, Mother Y. Big day."

Ysolde's pen stopped moving.

"Tithe day," Pim said cheerfully, as if she hadn't heard. "First of the month. My girl's going up the hill after breakfast. You want to walk with us? Get it over with before the line gets long. Thimble each, and they give you a sugar plum after." He laughed. "I gave them the color of my uncle's privy last time. Didn't miss it."

"Kind of you," Ysolde said. "We'll go later."

Pim nodded and went out, and the bell murdered itself again behind him.

Kes looked at Ysolde. Ysolde looked at her notebook. They had been doing this every first of the month for as long as Kes could remember.

---

The Tithe bell began at the ninth hour, a deep slow note rolling down from Spire Square, and Ysolde was on her feet before it finished its first stroke.

"Errands," she announced. "Pim needs a pot of carmine for his cake sugar. The dyers want two pounds of gall. And the Spire's crate is ready, so you might as well take it up this afternoon and save me the climb."

"The Spire crate isn't due until tomorrow."

"Then they'll have it early and think well of us."

"I could go to Spire Square on the way," Kes said, keeping her voice light. "Give the thimble. Get a sugar plum."

Ysolde pulled the pen out of her hair. She did not shout. She never shouted. She simply set the pen down on the counter, very carefully, as if it might break, and looked at Kes.

"Gall first," she said. "Then carmine. Then the crate. Mind the cart on the cliff-stair, the left wheel pulls."

That was all. Kes untied her apron with a sigh and went.

She told herself, as she always did, that it was just one of Mother Y's oddities, like the notebook and the locked box under the stairs and the way she wouldn't let Kes so much as hold a pen loaded with lodeink. Don't draw. Ever. It was the one rule of the house. Not don't steal, not don't lie, not be home by dark (though those were rules too, in a looser, more negotiable way). Just: don't draw. Kes could grind lodeink finer than anyone in the Grindings. She could tell by smell whether the gall was steeped long enough. She could not, by order, make a single mark with it.

It was like being a baker who was forbidden to taste.

She did the gall and the carmine, and by mid-afternoon she was hauling the little hand cart up the switchbacks of the city with the Spire's crate lashed on top: twenty lead pots of lodeink, sealed and stamped with the shop's mark, a sparrow inside a circle. The cart's left wheel pulled, exactly as promised. She leaned against it and counted the switchbacks under her breath. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen, where the street opened out onto Spire Square.

The square was full of blue.

Blue awnings snapped over long tables. Under them sat Guild clerks in grey coats, and in front of each clerk sat a blue glass lantern, cobalt dark, capped in iron. People stood in lines that wound around the square's fountain: housewives, dockhands, Pim's daughter in her best ribbon. One by one they leaned down and breathed onto the glass, the way you would breathe on a window to write your name in the fog. The lantern glowed a little brighter. The clerk wrote something in a ledger. The person straightened, blinked, laughed, took their sugar plum, and went on with their day.

Kes slowed the cart without meaning to. A faint hum came off the tables, low and steady, like bees in a wall. It made her teeth ache.

"Move along, girl," said a Tithe-warden in a dark blue coat, and she moved along.

---

The Spire of Charts did not have a front door for people like her. It had a delivery arch around the side, where a bored porter checked her stamp against his list and waved her through to the service stair. She had to carry the crate up herself, because porters did not carry crates for ink-girls. Two hundred and six steps to the supply room on the seventh floor. She had counted them on her first delivery and every delivery since.

She was on step one hundred and eighty when the boy came round the curve above her at a full run.

There was a moment, very clear, when she saw him: tall and all elbows, red-brown hair sticking up on one side as if he'd slept on it, wire spectacles flashing, an apprentice's plain grey coat flapping open, and a leather satchel bouncing on his hip. He was reading a paper as he ran. Of course he was.

Then he hit her.

The crate went one way and Kes went the other, and she would have gone down the stairs on her head if she hadn't grabbed the rail. The boy's satchel burst. Pens, rulers, a small blue notebook, a compass, a half-eaten apple and roughly two hundred loose pages rained down the stairwell like startled pigeons.

"Sorry!" he gasped. "Sorry. Oh, skies. Sorry."

"The crate," said Kes.

They both dove for it. It had landed on its side two steps down, and Kes pried up the lid with her heart in her throat. Twenty pots. Twenty seals. Not one cracked. She let out a breath that seemed to come up from her boots.

"Is it all right?" The boy was on his knees beside her, gathering papers in great useless armfuls. "I wasn't looking. I'm late for the practical, I was revising, I should have been looking. Sorry."

"That's three," said Kes.

"Three what?"

"Sorries. You don't have to keep going. It's fine. Nothing's broken." She picked up the blue notebook, which had fallen open at her feet. The pages were covered in small, tidy handwriting, columns of numbers, little diagrams of angles with neat labels: triangulation, base line 40 paces, Toll est. minor. Something was folded and tucked into the back cover, a square of paper soft with handling. She closed it quickly and held it out. "Here."

He took it the way you'd take back something alive. "Thank you." He pushed his spectacles up his nose with one finger, and she saw that the left hinge had been mended with a twist of copper wire. "That's, um. That's lodeink, isn't it? Greaves and Daughter?" He was reading the stamp on the lid upside down. "The sparrow mark. We all want the sparrow pots in the practicals. Master Orley says it's the cleanest grind in the city. He says he doesn't know how you do it."

Something warm went through Kes, and she was annoyed with herself for it. "Patience," she said. "And a good wheel. And not running on stairs."

He went red to the tips of his ears. "Right. Yes. That's fair." He stood, all at once, and nearly lost his balance on the step. "I'm Tobiah. Tobe. Fennick. Apprentice, third year. Sorry. Four."

"I'm Kes. And I'll be late too, if you don't let me past."

"Of course." He flattened himself against the wall so she could heave the crate up again, and then, as she passed, he said in a rush, "I've got my anchor exam tomorrow. If I pass, I'll get my first piping." He touched the plain grey edge of his coat where the silver would go. "My father's an Assessor. Double piping. He says it's about time."

He said it like a joke and it didn't sound like one. Kes looked back at him over the crate. He was staring at the stairs with his notebook pressed to his chest.

"Use the sparrow pots," she said. "They don't clot."

He smiled, sudden and crooked. "Thank you, Kes."

---

She left the crate with the supply clerk on the seventh floor, got her chit stamped, and on the way down took the wrong turning.

She would tell herself afterward that she hadn't meant to. That the corridors in the Spire all looked the same, pale stone and grey doors, and the lamps had not yet been lit. That was nearly true. But she also knew that the wrong turning led past the open gallery that ran around the Chart Hall, and that on deliveries she always slowed down there, just a little, hoping for a look.

Today the great doors to the Hall stood open.

She stopped.

The room beyond was round and enormous and full of the last of the daylight, which poured down from the glass dome high overhead. In the center, on a table so vast it looked like a sloping field, lay the Great Chart. It was made of slate and vellum, sheet upon sheet, layered and joined, and drawn across all of it in fine black lines was Varrow. Not Quillhaven. All of it. The Lines ran out from the city like the spokes of a wheel. The anchored towns sat on them like beads. Around and between them, the vast blank spaces of the Drift were only lightly sketched, faint and provisional, as if the mapmakers had not quite believed in them.

Kes had painted a map on her loft wall and been proud of it. This was a map that held a country still.

Linewrights in grey coats with silver piping moved around the edges of the table on tall rolling stools, bending over it with their pens. No one spoke. The only sound was a soft scratching, like mice in straw.

And then, outside, the sun went down.

She knew it before she saw it. She felt it. A tug, deep behind her breastbone, small and sharp, like a fishhook catching. Like someone had tied a thread to the inside of her chest and, very gently, pulled.

She put her hand flat over her heart. Her own heartbeat thudded under her palm, quick and ordinary. And under it, slower, another one. Not a beat exactly. A pull. A long, slow breath going out of the world.

Through the dome, far away to the east, the light was going silver.

"Can I help you?"

A Linewright had come up beside her, a thin woman with a single strand of piping and a frown. Kes jumped.

"Lost," she said. "Delivery. Sorry." She was saying sorry now. The boy had given it to her, like a cold.

"The service stair is that way."

"Right. Thank you."

She went that way. The tug went with her all the way down, two hundred and six steps, and it did not fade.

---

From the cliff-road you could see the whole Drift.

Kes stopped where she always stopped, at the low wall by the Sorrel twins' rope walk, where the road bent back on itself and the city fell away beneath her. Below, the harbor. Beyond the harbor and the city walls, the Seaward Line ran out along the coast, a pale straight road, safe at night, taxed by the Guild. And beyond the Line, inland, as far as she could see: the Drift.

It looked like any countryside at dusk. Hills, brown and gold with early autumn. Dark smudges of forest. The silver thread of a river. But as she watched, the Wander came.

It rose out of the low places first, the way it always did. A silver mist, soft and luminous, filling the valleys like milk poured into a bowl. It climbed the hillsides. It swallowed the forests. It had a faint light of its own, as if someone had mixed moonlight into it, and it moved not like weather but like something breathing.

Every child in Quillhaven grew up watching this. Most of them stopped watching by the time they were ten. It was just the Wander. It came every night and burned off every dawn, and while it was up, out there, the land moved. Hills folded. Rivers slid. Whole villages woke up somewhere else. That was why there was a Guild, and Lines, and lanterns, and a Spire. That was why you stayed inside the walls.

Kes had never stopped watching. From her round loft window she watched it every night. And every night, out there, something moved that was too slow and too large to see, and she would feel, faintly, very faintly, as if she were standing on the deck of a ship.

Tonight it was not faint.

The tug in her chest pulled toward the mist like a dog straining at a lead. She gripped the wall. Out there a long ridge she knew well, a ridge she had watched every evening of her life, gave a slow shrug, and leaned, and was not where it had been.

She fumbled in her apron pocket for her tether.

Every traveler in Varrow carried one: a lodestone compass in a brass case, whose needle pointed to the nearest anchor so you could always find your way back to a Line. Kes's had been Ysolde's gift on her seventh birthday, or the day they called her birthday, since nobody knew the real one. The brass was worn smooth with handling. The glass had a crack across it like a hair.

And its needle had never once pointed the way it should.

Here, on the cliffs of Quillhaven, the oldest anchor in the world, every tether in the city swung to the Spire. Kes had checked other people's. She had seen it. Hers pointed east. Away from the Spire. Away from the city altogether. Out over the Drift, toward nothing at all.

She had shown Ysolde when she was seven. Ysolde had closed Kes's hand over the tether, very firmly, and said, "Then don't show anyone else," and that had been that. Kes never had. She took it out only when she was alone.

Now she flipped it open, and the needle was trembling. Not pointing east. Shivering, as if it wanted to point everywhere, as if the whole Drift were calling it at once.

She snapped it shut and shoved it deep into her pocket and ran home.

---

She came down Gall Lane at a jog with the empty cart rattling, and saw the hound before she saw anything else.

It stood in the street outside Greaves and Daughter, and it was the biggest dog she had ever seen. Long-legged, rough-coated, grey as fog, and so tall at the shoulder that its head was level with the shop window. It was not on a lead. It did not need one. It stood with perfect stillness, and its long nose moved, slowly, testing the air.

A drift-hound. Wardens rode them in the Drift. They could smell anchor-ink through a night of mist. Kes had seen them in parades, at a distance, behind ropes.

She stopped the cart in the shadow of the dyer's yard.

Two figures stood in the shop door. One was Ysolde, tall and stooped, her arms folded. The other was a woman in a warden's dark blue coat, lean and straight-backed, her sandy hair pulled back in a braid so tight it looked painful. She had a short sword on one hip and a coiled staff across her back, and when she turned her head, the last light caught a white scar cutting through her right eyebrow.

Kes took one step backward into the alley beside the dyer's yard. Then another.

"I'll ask once more," the warden said. Her voice was flat and even, a voice that had given orders for a long time. "A girl. Fifteen or so. Brought into the city from the Drift twelve years ago. Small. Dark."

"Captain," Ysolde said, "half the Grindings is small and dark and came from somewhere."

"She would have been about three at the time."

"Then she wouldn't remember much, would she."

"No," said the warden. "That's rather the point." A pause. "The Guild's records say you came back into Quillhaven that same autumn, Mistress Greaves. After a long absence."

"The Guild's records," Ysolde said coolly, "say a good many things. I was in the Drift buying fallstone. I came home. As for girls, I have one apprentice, and she's from the orphan house on Tanner's Row, and she's out on a delivery. You're welcome to her papers."

Kes pressed her back against the wet stone of the alley. Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

The orphan house on Tanner's Row. She had never been in an orphan house in her life.

Mother Y was lying. Calmly, easily, the way she measured gall. As if she had practiced.

The alley ran back between the dye vats to a flight of slick stone stairs that climbed toward the rope walk. Kes went up them backward, one hand on the wall, as quietly as she could. Her lips moved.

"One," she breathed. "Two. Three."

Below, the hound's head came up.

"Four. Five."

The great nose turned. Toward the dyer's yard. Toward the alley. It made no sound at all.

"Six," Kes whispered. "Seven. Eight." The tether was a cold weight in her pocket. Her hands smelled of fallstone. Of course they did. Every inch of her smelled of fallstone. "Nine."

"Ash," said the warden quietly. "Leave it."

The hound held still a moment longer. Then it looked away.

"Thank you for your time, Mistress Greaves," the warden said.

"Mind the bell on your way out," said Ysolde. "It sticks."

The door closed. The bell gave its strangled little dnk. The warden stepped down into the street and laid one hand on the hound's shoulder, and the two of them began to walk away down Gall Lane, unhurried, toward the cliff-road and the lamps that were just beginning to come on.

Kes let out the breath she had been holding. Ten, she thought. Eleven. You're all right. Twelve.

At the corner the warden stopped.

She did not look back at the shop. She turned her head, slowly, and looked straight down the length of the dark alley, straight up the stairs, straight at the place where Kes stood pressed flat against the stone with her mouth still shaping a number.

It was too dark for her to see. Kes was certain it was too dark.

"Tomorrow, then," said the warden, to no one at all, and walked on.

The sample ends here.