UNDER THE CROSIER’S SHADOW - A Stringless Willow Pole at Sallow-Stream

Brown water swirled in tight, murky eddies against the split skin of submerged willow roots.

The Sallow-Stream was thick today. Limestone wash from the upper cuts at Crow-Watch had turned the current the color of unbaked rye dough, dragging clumps of dead froth and sodden alder leaves along the bank. Kellan stood knee-deep in the cold mud, his right boot leaking where the seam had pulled away from the welt. His toes were numb. They had been numb since three miles back when they crossed the cattle-ford, but the cold was easier to manage than the burning under his collarbone.

Behind him, the skeleton shuddered. Its broad, iron-strapped pelvis creaked under the weight of the frame, the blue ceramic urn sitting high between its shoulder blades like a oversized, glaze-cracked egg. Inside the vessel, Master Sarix clattered his jaw against the clay rim.

“Watch the lip, boy,” Sarix rasped through the mouth-grate. His voice sounded like dry gravel dragged over a shovel blade. “You pitch me into that silt and I’ll haunt your boots until the leather rots off your shins. Up to my nose in chalk-sludge. I was a scholar of the Fourth Seal, mind you, not an anchor-stone.”

“Shut it, Sarix,” Kellan grunted. He hauled his foot clear of the grey mud with a wet shluck. “Yvaine, stay on the high grass. The clay’s soft where the bank caved.”

The arc-scout didn’t answer. She never answered when the light was like this—thin, sour, filtered through a sheet of grey cloud that looked like boiled tallow grease. She stood three paces up the slope, her long legs wrapped in strip-linen and smear-wax to keep the river damp from softening her dry sinews. Sackcloth draped over her head and broad shoulders, pulled low to hide the white bone of her nose-bridge and the dried rendered mutton fat she’d pressed into her eye sockets to block the sun’s glare. Across her breast lay the heavy horn bow. In the canvas quiver at her hip, the sun-refined arrows Kellan had forged in the coal-pit glittered faintly—marrow-shafts baked with siphoned light, tipped with rusty iron spikes that smelled of burnt lard.

She shifted her feet. The wax on her wrappings cracked with a tiny sound like dry pine needles breaking underfoot.

Kellan wiped his hand on his tunic. His fingers were stiff, grey with mortar-dust and iron rust from his belt-tools. The skin glamour he carried across his cheekbones was tight—stretching like wet sheepskin over a frame that didn’t quite fit. Ever since he’d siphoned the sun-bead in the cellar, his face felt too warm to the touch, like he’d slept with his cheek against a hot oven stone.

“Someone’s ahead,” Yvaine said. Her voice was flat, dry as oak shavings, coming from beneath the grey sackcloth hood.

Kellan paused. He reached back, his palm resting on the pommel of his short-blade. “Where?”

She didn’t point. She just tilted her head toward the bend where the stream narrowed between two flat sheets of dark river slate.

A man sat on a ironwood stump near the water’s edge.

He was old—or he looked old in the way dead oak looks old, peeled of bark and silvered by frost. He wore no coat despite the raw chill coming off the hills, only a vest of tanned pig-skin stiff with grey grease and old wood-ash. His bare arms were thick, corded like hemp rope, covered from wrist to shoulder in white, puckered brand-marks that looked like sunbursts stamped into pig iron. A heavy iron broadsword, long as an ox-yoke and broad as a spade, lay across a sack of salt on the rocks behind him. Its crossguard was wrapped in dried eel-skin.

In his hands, he held a stick.

It was a sallow pole, cut long and thin from a low willow, the bark peeled back near the grip where his knuckles showed grey and knotted. The tip hung six inches above the brown froth of the stream.

There was no line tied to the tip. No horsehair, no twisted gut, no copper hook. Just bare brown wood suspended over the muddy water.

Kellan stopped ten paces off. The air around the man didn’t smell like the river. It smelled like a charcoal-burner’s pit after a hard rain—cold soot, burnt marrow, and old lye.

“He’s got no line,” Sarix muttered from his jar, the metal pot helmet resting over the urn’s rim tilting forward. “Fool’s fishing for mud-gudgeon with a stick. Or he’s simple. Most of them who live along the upper cuts are simple. Too much lead in the spring-water.”

The man on the stump didn’t move. He didn’t turn his head, but his ears twitched—the left one was half-gone, chewed off by frost or a dull iron knife years ago.

“I can hear the teeth rattling in your bucket, old man,” the fisher said. His voice wasn’t loud, but it had a heavy, grinding weight to it, like two millstones turning without any corn between them. “Tell your frame to stop clinking. You’re scaring the fat ones under the root-ledge.”

Kellan stepped between the man and Yvaine. He could feel the cold heat of the bone-arrows through the canvas of her quiver, a low hum that set his teeth on edge. “Cyrus?”

The fisher spat into the stream. A yellow wad of tobacco juice hit the foam and floated away. “Don’t call me by that name. That name belongs to a man who had two good eyes and a roof over his bed. I’m just an ash-driver taking the sun off my back.”

He turned his head then. His left eye was milky, covered in a grey cataract that looked like a drop of thick grease floating on cold broth. His right eye was black, sharp, and bloodshot around the rim. He looked down at Kellan’s boots, then slowly up his shins, past the iron belt, to the skin of Kellan’s face.

Cyrus snorted. The sound was wet and raspy. “Glamour’s thin on your jaw, boy. Look like you’ve been painted with skimmed milk. Who taught you to stretch light over bone? Must’ve been a hedge-caster with thumb-fingers.”

“It holds,” Kellan said grimly.

“It reeks,” Cyrus corrected. He didn’t drop the willow pole. His hands remained steady, the wood barely trembling over the water. “Smells like a sun-bead cracked open in a bucket of tallow. You’ve been siphoning mirror-dust. I can taste the limestone powder on your skin from here.”

“We’re passing through to the lower ford,” Kellan said, his hand staying on his sword hilt. “We don’t want any trouble with an Ash-Walker.”

Cyrus let out a short, dry bark that might have been a laugh if his lungs hadn’t sounded so full of soot. “Ash-Walker? Is that what the monks call us down in Garrowford now? Master Eustace must be getting soft in his old age if he’s giving us titles again. Last I heard, he was signing dispatches with a blind-eye quill and calling us sun-thieves.”

“Master Eustace is still in the scriptorium,” Kellan said. “Signing orders for the grain-levy.”

“Aye. He would be. Sitting on his fat ham-bones while Corley strikes sparks off cold iron in the forge.” Cyrus tilted his head, his black eye fixing on Yvaine. “That thing behind you… she’s dry. Not much fat left on those ribs. But the arrows… those are fresh.”

Yvaine’s fingers tightened on the riser of her horn bow. The grey sackcloth shifted, revealing three inches of her rib-cage wrapped in salted linen.

“Easy, girl,” Cyrus grunted. “I ain’t here for your bones. If I wanted bone-meal for my cabbages, I’d go to the ditch at Crow-Watch where the apprentices died on the stairs. Plenty of marrow rotting up there under the slate.”

Kellan took half a step forward. “You were at the quarry?”

“I go where the slag is cold,” Cyrus said. He shifted his grip on the sallow pole. The tip dipped an inch closer to the grey froth. “Sun-Queen doesn’t like her mirrors broken, boy. You took a bead from the upper cellar, didn’t you? Siphoned it down into a bone-pot and thought you were clever.”

Kellan didn’t answer.

“She doesn’t forgive mirror thieves,” Cyrus said softly. The tone had left his voice; now it was just flat, hollow, like wind blowing through an empty grain bin. “You think you’re carrying light to fight the grey rot. You think you’re making arrows to keep the crows off the wall. But light doesn’t like being pinned to iron. It festers. It turns to lye under the skin.”

“He’s talking rubbish,” Master Sarix squeaked from the urn, his iron helmet rattling as the skeleton shifted its stance. “Ignore him, Kellan. He’s been eating wild parsnips. Ash-walkers always go addled after their third year near the furnace. The lead gets into their liver.”

Cyrus didn’t look at the urn. He just stared at the spot where his stringless stick hovered over the dark water. “The Sun-Queen’s got nine eyes, boy. Eight are made of glass, and the ninth is buried under the shale at Sallow-Stream. Every time you pull a spark out of a bead, one of those eyes turns red. You think you’re hiding under that skin-glamour? You look like a lantern wrapped in an old dish-rag.”

The water near the willow tip churned.

It wasn’t a large rise—just a dark, muscular shape moving under the brown froth, three feet down where the current cut under the ledge. A trout, grey-backed and heavy, its fins scarred from the spring floods. It rose toward the wood, its mouth opening and closing against the brown water, snapping at the shadow of the bare pole.

Cyrus watched it. His good eye widened slightly, the black iris dilating until it nearly covered the white.

“Look at him,” Cyrus muttered. “Foolish grey bastard. Nothing on the stick. No worm, no fly, no scrap of fat. Just the shape of something he thinks he wants.”

The fish lunged. Its snout broke the surface with a wet plop, its yellow-rimmed eye catching the pale light for a fraction of a second before it missed the wood and turned back into the silt.

Cyrus began to laugh.

It started as a twitch in his dry, soot-caked throat, then expanded into a loud, hacking rattle that shook his broad shoulders. He laughed until he began to cough, spitting a thick gob of grey mucus into the mud between his boots. He hauled the sallow pole back out of the water, looked at the bare, wet tip, and then brought it down hard across his knee.

CRACK.

The dry wood snapped with a sound like a pistol shot.

He didn’t look back at Kellan. He didn’t look at Yvaine or the clattering skeleton with its blue clay home. He simply tossed the lower half of the pole into the mud and dragged himself up from the ironwood stump. His broadsword clunked against the salt-sack as he hooked his thumb through the eel-skin belt.

“Watch the lower reach,” Cyrus said over his shoulder, his voice dropping back into that dull, dry grind. “The water’s rising. Calcium crust’s coming down from the cuts, and the fish are all going blind.”

He turned and pushed his way through the thicket of stunted alders, his heavy pig-skin vest scraping against the gray bark with a sound like dry husks being rubbed together. Within ten paces, the grey grey-green scrub swallowed him whole, leaving only the smell of cold soot and old lye hanging in the damp air.

Kellan stood still until the sound of Cyrus’s boots breaking dry twigs had died away completely.

“Mad,” Master Sarix declared, his skull clicking against the mouth-grate. “Completely turned. That’s what happens when you spend forty years looking at yellow glass without a pair of horn spectacles. Kellan, lift me up higher on the frame. The strap’s digging into my chin.”

Kellan didn’t move to adjust the straps. He walked to the edge of the slate sheet, his leaking boot squelching in the silt, and looked down at the river.

The top half of the sallow pole—the thin, peeled twig that had hovered over the dark water—was caught in the eddy near the roots. It turned slowly in the brown foam, bobbing against the split bark, before the current finally pulled it clear and dragged it down toward the bend.

Yvaine came down the bank, her sackcloth hood rustling against her shoulders. She didn’t look at the river; she looked at the woods where Cyrus had vanished.

“He had no iron on his boots,” she said.

“He doesn’t need iron,” Kellan said. He flexed his fingers, feeling the itch under his skin where the glamour was starting to thin near the nails. “Come on. The sun’s dropping, and I don’t want to be near this water when the lime settles.”

They turned away from the stream, the frame creaking, the skull rattling inside its ceramic walls, while behind them, the broken willow twig floated downstream into the dark.