Nine days later, the moon rose full and yellow as a bladder of lard before the sun had quite gone down behind the sea-wall, and by ten of the clock the river had emptied itself out of the land as if someone had pulled a bung from the bottom of the world.
Nell stood at the timber sluice behind the boiling house, checking her gear by the thin beam of a shuttered horn lantern. Even the main creek, where the salt-boats floated at half-tide, was nothing tonight but a deep gash of glistening mud with a thread of fresh water trickling down its middle over old oyster shells and green stones. The air was dead calm and bitingly cold. Hoarfrost had already formed a white crust on the thatch of the turf-shed, though out beyond the last tide-stakes the bank of sea-fog lay waiting on the flats, low and grey under the moon.
She wore two woollen shifts under her kirtle, her father’s heavy calfskin greaves strapped over her stockings to the knee, and thick sheepskin mittens with the wool side turned in. Around her waist she had buckled a leather belt with an iron turf-spade thrust through the loop; across her shoulder hung her canvas satchel containing a coil of hemp line, a second tallow dip, and the fresh salt loaf she had pressed that morning from the sweetest middle-drawing of the pan, wrapped tight in its oiled cloth.
Inside the house, she could hear her father’s slow, rasping breath from the box-bed where he slept after she had put three drops of poppy-syrup into his evening small beer. She had not lied to him since the night of the coin; she had simply stopped talking where he could hear, and let him think she had arranged a loan from the fish-curers at the harbour.
She slid the tin shutter over the lantern’s horn pane until only a blade of yellow light fell at her toes, took her six-foot ash pole in her right hand, and stepped down into the bed of the creek.
The mud was stiffer tonight, chilled into a greasy crust by the frost, though beneath the top two inches it still shifted like porridge under her weight. Nell kept to the gravel ridges that only showed themselves twice a year, at the vernal equinox and at Martinmas, following the skeleton ribs of an ancient timber causeway whose oak piles had rotted down to black stumps centuries ago.
As she crossed the ditch into the King’s Reach, the fog slid over the moon.
The cold deepened at once, taking the breath in her nostrils and turning the edges of her woollen hood stiff with rime. No curlews called here; even the marsh-rats and the crabs had gone down into their burrows with the retreating tide. The only sound was the dry whisper of dead reeds and the rhythmic chock, pull, chock, pull of her ash pole in the mire.
She did not need to count her strides tonight. Ahead of her in the mist, something was glowing with the faint, greenish pallor of dead gurnard scales in a dark cellar.
When she reached the lip of the Black Pool, the water was gone.
In its place lay a wide, bowl-shaped hollow of black peat-slime, twenty feet across and six feet deep from the surrounding reed-banks. The bottom of the bowl was not flat; it sloped down toward a ridge of grey river-shingle in the centre, and standing beside that ridge, with his wet cloak hanging motionless around his calves, was the king.
“You keep good time, salt-girl,” Oswy said. Without the water under him, he looked older, the lines beside his mouth carved deep as drainage ditches, the green weed in his beard stiff with frost.
“Tide waits for no man’s boots,” Nell said, sliding the shutter of her lantern all the way back and setting it on a flat elder stump at the rim of the pit. She pulled the iron spade from her belt and tested the slope with her pole. “Where do I dig?”
Oswy pointed a pale finger at the gravel hummock between his feet. “Two spades deep on the north side of the stones. My horse lies deeper, under the clay. Do not strike too hard with the iron; my ribs have grown brittle.”
Nell braced her heels against a sunken willow root and stepped down into the basin. The slime here was colder than the creek mud, smelling fiercely of old iron and bitter kelp, and it sucked at her calfskin greaves with every move. She drove the blade of the spade into the shingle north of the ridge, put her boot on the shoulder of the iron, and heaved.
The first turf came up heavy with black gravel. The second brought a tang of rusted mail and a curved, yellow-brown slat of bone that crumbled at the edge like rotten driftwood. Nell set her jaw, muttered a brief marsh-prayer under her breath, and cleared the loose silt away with the side of her blade.
Her iron struck something just below the surface on the left side of the trench, shallower than the gravel bed. Not gold; it gave a dull, hollow clink like thin brass.
Nell knelt on the plank of her ash pole laid flat across the muck and reached in with her mittened hand. Her fingers closed around the bail of a small, six-sided horn lantern, its panes long since burst in, the brass frame green with corrosion. Wedged beside it in the mud were the white, clean bones of a man’s forearm, the finger-bones still curled upward toward the surface as if he had died scratching at the roof of the mire, and around the wrist-bone hung a rotten leather cord strung with a round token of carved cow-horn.
Nell wiped the thumb-sized bit of horn against her knee. Three notched circles round a pin-prick hole: the tally-mark of the Gannet saltern before the great gale took their roof down sixty years ago.
She looked up through the fog at the tall figure standing two yards away.
“Mother Gannet’s brother,” she said, her voice flat. “You told me nobody had lifted the crown.”
Oswy looked down at the white radius bone sticking out of the silt. His grey eyes did not waver, though his jaw tightened under the wet beard.
“I told you the crown still lay beside my bones,” he said quietly. “The boy came at the Martinmas ebb sixty years ago. He was strong, and he wanted the silver to roof his sister’s house. We went toward the beach together. Before we reached the shingle, his heart failed him and he turned back into the dark. The flood caught him in the reeds, and the mire brought his bones back to the deep hole over the winters, as it brings everything that dies in the Reach.”
Nell stared at him for a long moment. Then she slipped her knife from her belt, cut the rotten leather cord free of the dead boy’s wrist, and tucked both the horn token and the ruined little lantern into the side pocket of her satchel, carefully separated from the linen-wrapped salt loaf by the canvas partition.
“He broke the bargain, then,” she said, returning to her spade. “Turned back before the surf. I don’t turn back once I’ve struck hands.”
She dug six inches deeper into the gravel between the ancient ribs of a mail shirt that had rusted into a solid cake of black iron and pebbles. The tip of her spade grated against metal that did not rust.
Nell laid the spade aside. Working both hands into the freezing water that was already seeping into the bottom of the hole, she took hold of the circlet and lifted it clear.
It was heavier than lead. Even through the thick sheepskin of her mittens, the cold of it bit straight to the marrow of her knuckles, a dry, fierce cold that made her teeth ache in her gums. As the mud slid off the square green stones and the thick band of pale river-gold, a low vibration ran up her wrists, like the hum of the great six-foot pan just before the brine broke into the first rolling boil.
And with the hum came a thought, clear and warm as a hearth-fire in the middle of the freezing marsh: Put it on. Your hands will be free to use the pole if you set it on your head. Put it on, and the mud will never touch your hem again.
Nell jerked her chin back as if a horsefly had stung her nose. She lowered her arms until the heavy ring hung at the level of her apron, her elbows locked.
“No you don’t,” she muttered at the gold in her fists. “Stay down where you’re carried.”
“Keep your mind above its whisper,” Oswy said from the bank above her. “It was forged in the north before my grandfather’s grandfather took the ship-throne, and it does not like to go without a brow beneath it. Look to your left, salt-girl. Take your wages before the water rises.”
Half buried in the clay beside the ribs of the dead horse sat an oak chest bound with straps of green bronze. The wood had turned black and hard as bog-iron over the centuries, and the bronze hasp had been wrenched open long ago by some old frost or a dead boy’s spade.
Nell could not set the crown down to use both hands. Clamping the freezing gold band tight against her hip with her left forearm and mitten, she reached into the split chest with her right hand.
Silver coins lay packed together in cakes of grey mud. She did not scoop them up in handfuls. Bracing her knee against the wood, she counted them out by weight and size, reckoning each heavy piece at Pell’s two shillings, checking each piece between her thumb and forefinger before dropping it into the outer pouch of her satchel.
“Take more,” Oswy said, watching her count. “The chest is no use to me when the sea has my bones, and the mire will close over it before dawn.”
“Thirteen marks, eleven shillings, and four pence,” Nell said between her teeth, her left wrist already cramping from the dead weight and the cold of the crown. “Ninety-three of your heavy pieces, plus four for the turn of the goldsmith’s scale at High Ford. That’s the debt. I don’t carry extra weight across the Reach on a rising tide.”
She dropped the ninety-seventh coin into the pouch, buckled the flap with three stiff fingers, and took the crown in both mittens again. She had to leave the iron spade in the hole and hook her lantern over her left wrist by its wire bail; her ash pole she tucked under her right armpit, dragging its butt behind her as she scrambled up the greasy wall of the basin.
Down in the bottom of the pit, a bubble of grey water welled up through the gravel with a soft plop.
“The ebb is spent,” said the king. “Walk fast, Nell Tarrow.”
They went west toward the sound of the surf, though for the first quarter-mile the fog muffled even the breaking waves into a dull, steady thud like a fuller’s hammer miles away.
The crown was a live thing in her hands. Every fifty paces it seemed to gain a pound of lead, dragging at her shoulders until the muscles beside her neck burned like scalded skin, and all the while that small, sweet hum crept up her arms: Rest your wrists. Set me on your braids. One touch and the cold will stop.
To drown it out, Nell counted her steps out loud and talked to the dead man walking beside her.
Oswy kept pace on her left, his boots moving silently over the wet bladderwrack and the widening ribbons of the gut-creeks where Nell had to wade to the shin and kick her way through the sucking silt.
“Why did you ride into the marsh at all?” she panted, hauling her right boot out of a crab-hole with a lurch that made the lantern swing wildly on her wrist. “High road to the coast runs along the chalk ridge three miles north. Even a northern man knows chalk holds a horse better than reed-fen.”
“The earls held the chalk ridge with four hundred spears,” Oswy said. He looked ahead into the mist, his grey profile calm and strangely gentle now that the sea-smell was growing stronger in the wind. “And I had twenty men left of my household, and a pack-mule loaded with the autumn tallage. A king at thirty thinks his crown and his silver are the realm itself. If I had left the mule in the reeds and swum my horse across the upper river without my mail, I might have lived to grow old in a fishing hut and watch my hair turn white in the sun, instead of in the dark under six feet of mud.”
“Bad reckoning,” Nell grunted, shifting her thumbs round the square stones of the circlet. The sheepskin of her mittens had frozen solid to the metal; she could feel the damp wool stiffening like board against her knuckles. “When the pan cracks in the middle of a drawing, you rake out what salt you can save and let the rest run into the ash-pit. You don’t climb into the fire to hold the lead together.”
For the first time, something like a laugh rustled in the king’s throat. “My chancellors gave me worse counsel in five hundred words of court-speech, Nell. Mind the bank ahead; the water is in the ditch.”
A creek four yards wide lay across the track, already brimming with black flood-water that spun with pads of dirty yellow foam. Nell had no free hand to lean on her pole. She set her teeth, stepped down onto the submerged timber ford she knew by the two crooked willow stumps on the banks, and pushed through with the icy current swirling round her thighs.
As she heaved herself up the far bank, her sodden skirts dragging like lead weights at her knees, a second lantern-beam cut through the fog twenty paces ahead on the shingle spit.
A man stood on the high spine of stones where the marsh path narrowed between two bottomless slime-pits, a short crossbow crooked in his left elbow and a brass bull’s-eye lantern in his right hand. His neat grey cloak was pinned back from his boots to keep the mud off the wool.
“Good evening to you, Mistress Tarrow,” Master Pell said pleasantly. “You keep late hours for a debtor.”
Nell stopped dead on the edge of the ditch, the water sluicing from her greaves. Beside her, two paces out on the surface of the brimming creek, King Oswy halted as well.
Pell’s eyes flicked once toward the tall shape in the mist on the water, widened for half a heartbeat, and then snapped back to the dull yellow gleam between Nell’s mittens. Greed and a hard, dry ledger-courage won out over fear in his narrow face; he did not raise the crossbow, because a man who kept accounts knew that you did not shoot the mule before it had carried the pack onto dry ground.
“Step up onto the shingle, girl,” the factor said, his voice tight and rapid. “Give me the satchel and that piece of work in your hands, and I will write your father’s discharge in full upon the spot. The crown jewels found upon the foreshore belong to the lord of the manor by right of wreck.”
“Wreck is what washes above the tide-mark, Master Pell,” Nell said, her breath coming in white clouds past her chattering teeth. “I dug this out of the low mud with my own iron, and the only thing you’re getting from me is ninety-seven silver pennies at noon tomorrow. Stand out of my path. The flood’s behind me.”
“That circlet is worth forty salterns and the whole village of Saltwick thrown in for kindling,” Pell snapped, stepping down from the shingle ridge to block the narrow neck of firm turf. He slung his lantern onto his belt-hook and reached out with his free right hand, his bare fingers greedy and pale in the mist. “Give it here, you stubborn baggage, before I leave you in the ditch for the eels!”
“Don’t touch it!” Nell barked.
She tried to twist her shoulder away, clumsy with the pole wedged under her arm and the frozen weight in her grip, and Pell’s right hand clamped down hard over the upper rim of the crown between her mittens.
He did not pull it from her. The moment his warm skin met the green-stained gold, a sound came out of his throat like a hare caught in a wire.
Frost raced up his wrist in a white flash, visible even in the yellow lantern-light. The heavy ring seemed to lurch downward in Nell’s grasp, suddenly three times its own weight, driving Pell’s knees out from under him as if an unseen anvil had been dropped onto his shoulders. His boot heels slipped off the narrow turf bank and he went backward with a choked scream into the black slime-pit on the right of the path.
The crust broke like rotten ice. In two heartbeats the mire had him to the thighs, then the waist, sucking him down with slow, gluttonous pops as he thrashed with his frost-blackened right hand and clawed at the sedge with his left. His crossbow vanished into the muck without a splash.
“Walk on,” King Oswy said beside her. His voice was cold and flat as the rising creek. “The flood is ten minutes behind us, and the Reach takes its own.”
Pell’s neat grey head was barely two feet above the black ooze now; his mouth was open, slimed with mud where he had tried to bite the reed-stalks for purchase, his small eyes fixed on Nell in silent, animal terror. Every time he heaved his chest, the silt rose another inch up his waistcoat buttons.
Nell looked at the open shingle ridge ahead, and then down at the factor.
“Damn your accounts, Pell,” she snarled.
She did not let go of the crown; she could not. Keeping her frozen mittens locked around the gold ring, she dropped to her knees on the tough root-mat of the bank, let her ash pole slide down from under her arm so its thick butt shot out across the slime within reach of Pell’s left hand, and wedged her heels against a willow stump, pinning the upper half of the pole under her own ribs and knee.
“Take the ash!” she shouted at him. “Left hand, you fool! Don’t jerk it, pull steady against my knee!”
Pell’s frantic fingers locked around the wood. His dead weight nearly dragged Nell face-first into the pit; the crown ground against her collarbone as she threw her weight backward, her teeth bared, her calfskin boots furrowing the frost-crust until they hit solid gravel. Inch by slow, filthy inch, the mire gave a long, obscene sigh and yielded up the factor’s waist, then his knees, then one boot; the other stayed behind in the deep mud as he dragged himself like a half-drowned dog onto the shingle bank.
He lay on the stones on his side, clutching his right hand against his chest. The fingers that had touched the crown were dead white to the second knuckle, stiff as tallow candles, and he was weeping without a sound, his face smeared with black peat.
“Get back to the high causeway while the gravel’s still dry,” Nell panted, struggling to her feet and leaving the mud-caked ash pole where it lay because she had no strength left to tuck it up again. “Follow my heel-marks and don’t stop till you hit the wharf.”
Pell did not answer. He scrambled up onto one boot and one stockinged foot and went lurching and hobbling back the way he had come, never once looking behind him at the crown or the tall figure waiting on the water.