The Ash Market

In Kell the ash fell every afternoon, soft and grey and patient as snow, and every afternoon Iona Vell swept it off her table and set out the charms again.

Copper wire twisted into knots. Red thread and river stones. Little glass beads with a drop of something blue inside that she told customers was seawater from the old coast, and which was in fact ink. None of them did anything at all. She was quite sure of that, because she had made them.

“Against fire,” she said to anyone who slowed. “Against smoke, against sparks, against the mountain’s temper. Two coppers, three for five.”

Most people did not slow. The market was full of charm sellers, and the mountain had burned the eastern quarter twice since spring regardless, and people in Kell had begun to put their faith in buckets.

The stranger slowed.

He was tall and travel-stained and wore a coat that had been very fine a long time ago, and the ash did not settle on him. Iona noticed that the way you notice a missing step in the dark: too late, and all at once. It fell towards his shoulders and then simply wasn’t there.

He picked up the worst charm on her table, a lopsided knot of copper she had made on a bad day, and turned it over in his long fingers.

“Does it work?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Iona, who had said it a thousand times.

He put a silver coin on the table, which was more than the whole table was worth, and closed his hand around the charm. Behind him, at the far end of the market, the brazier outside the smithy coughed once and went out, and for the first time in three hundred years, nobody in Kell could smell smoke.