Corren’s instructions authorized him to renew the river treaty, provided he promised nothing.
He had ferried the river for twenty-three years. During the last flood he had carried the governor’s carriage horses across, separately, while the governor shouted instructions from a roof. Now he possessed a velvet coat, authority to negotiate, and a letter forbidding him to promise any money.
On the opposite bank, the fae delegation arrived with six carts of young trees. Their roots were wrapped in wet felt. Behind them stretched a procession of people carrying smaller plants, kitchen pans, and mattresses rolled into long grey sausages. They crossed each spring to work the orchards on the human bank. This year the ferry landing had washed away.
The old stone bridge had surfaced instead.
It stood low in the water, green with weed, its central arch bowed downward. Corren’s grandmother had used it. Nobody living on his bank knew why it had disappeared.
The fae envoy came across the upstream ford to meet him. She wore a coat the colour of vinegar and kept rubbing one cuff between finger and thumb.
“Thist,” she said. “My government offers its assurance that the bridge is safe.”
“Will your government stand on it?”
“My government sent me.”
Corren liked her a little against his will.
Her assistant, Wesh, was already on a narrow ledge beneath the far end. He scraped weed from a stone with a kitchen knife. Thist explained that he had crossed the bridge as a boy, before the treaty lapsed. He thought the renewal words were written below the parapet.
Corren read his instructions aloud. His government required a toll, collected from every fae cart, to pay for repairs. He omitted the sentence about not promising money.
Thist required free passage. Her families supplied the orchard labour and paid rent on the human side. If they also paid the proposed toll, some could not afford to cross.
“Then the orchards won’t be pruned,” Corren said.
“Yes. That was going to be my next sentence.”
They sat at a table placed on the human bank, close enough to see the bridge and far enough to avoid demonstrating confidence in it. Corren’s clerk had brought two copies of last year’s ferry charges and nothing else. Thist had brought the original treaty in a tin cylinder.
The parchment was too brittle to unroll. Through a crack in its outermost turn, Corren could read only as jointly undertaken. The rest flaked when the clerk tried to lift it.
“We have a copy,” the clerk said.
“Where?”
“In the archive.”
The archive was four days away. The clerk examined the cracked parchment as though it had deliberately withheld useful information.
Below the far parapet, Wesh called that he had found words.
Thist went to the water’s edge. He read aloud: “We open the way for those who follow. We keep the way we open.”
“That sounds affordable,” said the clerk.
Two oval hollows appeared on the bridge’s first stone, one on either bank. Corren could see the nearer one fill with a blue light the size of his palm.
Thist looked back at him. “Shall we at least see what it does?”
Corren went to his hollow. Thist took the long way round through the ford to reach hers on the far bank. Together they repeated Wesh’s words.
The bridge rose.
Water streamed from its sides. Under the weed, the paving shone white. The carts’ drivers cheered. For a moment Corren felt the joy he had felt as a young man when his first ferry took its weight and floated properly.
Then the central arch split.
Wesh’s ledge tilted. His knife fell into the river. He caught the parapet above his head, but the lifted bridge had carried it out of reach of Thist’s bank. Water boiled through the crack beneath him.
“Nobody cross,” Corren shouted.
He ran to his ferry. It lay pulled up beside the broken landing, its bow resting in mud. He and the clerk could not shift it. Two of the fae cart drivers came across the upstream ford on foot, bracing each other against the current, and helped them launch it. The ford was too deep for the carts. The clerk climbed in with Corren; one driver took the second oar. Thist stayed on her bank, calling to Wesh.
They approached from upstream. Corren knew this current: the smooth patch beyond the arch was worse than the foam. He kept the boat beside the bank until they were level with Wesh, then let the river carry them down to him.
Wesh could not let go of the parapet. His hands had locked.
The clerk stood up.
“Sit,” Corren said.
“He won’t jump.”
“I can see that. Sit.”
The clerk sat, white-faced. The driver held the boat against the stone while Corren reached up and put Wesh’s heel on the gunwale. With somewhere to put his weight, Wesh could lower himself. He landed across the clerk’s knees.
“You’ve got mud on the treaty,” the clerk said, and began laughing. He stopped when the ferry turned sideways.
Corren and the driver pulled them clear. Behind them the bridge sank to its former level. The blue hollows went dark.
They landed on the human bank. One driver fetched his cart blanket across the ford, and Thist came with him, carrying a basket of roots to rest Wesh’s feet on. Wesh lay under the blanket, furious with his hands. Thist knelt beside him. She asked what he had seen beneath the stone.
“More words. While it was up.”
She fetched paper. Wesh dictated slowly. Corren stood behind her shoulder and read as she wrote.
The human bank was to supply iron ties and masons. The fae bank was to supply living stone, carried in root-bound baskets. Together they were to repair the bridge each spring before opening it. Beneath the clauses were the names of two people, neither a ruler.
“Builders,” Wesh said. “My father knew the second one. She used to come to supper smelling of wet stone.”
Corren looked at the basket beneath Wesh’s feet. Small pale pebbles lay among the bundled roots.
Thist saw him looking. “The trees grow around them. We bring them for the orchard walls.”
“Would they repair this?”
“Given masons who know what they’re doing. It grows in wet joints, but it needs iron to bind it. And time.”
They returned to the table. The clerk tried to smooth his muddy trousers under it.
Corren crossed out the toll proposal. He wrote a requisition for iron and the wages of four masons. He signed it with the name he used on his ferry licence.
“Your instructions permit that?” Thist asked.
“No.”
“Mine don’t permit giving away stone intended for the orchards.”
“Can you buy more?”
“Next year. These trees must survive until then.”
She called the drivers over. They argued for ten minutes. One cart owner refused altogether. The others agreed to leave half their baskets by the bridge if the human bank supplied replacement soil and ferried them across meanwhile.
Corren looked at his one small boat, then at the mattresses and pans.
“Three days,” he said. “Perhaps four.”
“Put four.”
He put four. Thist signed beneath him.
They did not repeat the opening words. Corren took off the velvet coat and gave it to the clerk, who held it away from his muddy trousers. He ferried Thist back to the fae bank, then waited there while she arranged the passengers. The first were a woman with two mattresses and the cart owner who had refused to part with his stone.
Thist came down to the boat.
“I dislike him,” she said quietly.
“He paid for those baskets.”
“I know. That’s why I dislike him quietly.”
She put one of the mattresses aboard. Corren pushed off.
Halfway across, the woman asked if he was the governor.
“For another hour, probably.”
“Good,” she said. “The landing on this side is a disgrace.”
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