Chapter 13: The First Market

The first boat came around the bend below Penhal an hour after sunrise, with Katell standing in its bow.

The second came close behind it.

By the time the mist lifted off the Aven, I had stopped counting, and Enora hadn't.

"Eleven," she said beside me on the landing. "Twelve. That one's riding low. Wine, maybe."

She had a board under her arm with paper pinned to it, and a pencil behind her ear.

At the assize, a white-bearded boat master had told Katell that nobody would row four days upriver to sell turnips at a ruin.

He was in the fourth boat.

He tied up at Penhal's landing, climbed out with a crate of salt on his shoulder and wouldn't look at me.

The landing had been a slab of stone under a cliff all winter.

Now it was a market.

Erwan's men had cut the stalls from the wood on the crag in the weeks after the assize.

They stood in two rows from the water to the foot of the path, with a long shed for the guild's wool at the end.

The hill farmers had come down before dawn with cheese and lambs and baskets of eggs.

Their wives came behind them to see what a market looked like.

Katell walked up from her boat slapping the river off her hands.

"Well," she said. "Somebody came."

"You said nobody would."

"I said my masters said nobody would," she said. "I said I'd come. I always come."

The white-bearded master went past us with his salt.

"Morning, my lady," he said to the ground.

"Morning," I said. "How were the turnips?"

Katell laughed her dropped-crate laugh, and he went red to the ears.

Enora was already gone down the rows.

I watched her stop at every boat and every stall and write a line, and I watched grown boatmen argue with her and lose.