You carry water until your arms are itineraries.

Pottage: grain, onion, a little fat, no tomato pretending it belongs in a Lynford pot. Hop practices the word badge. Jennet sleeps sitting up. A man from a long way off says the relic at Holmewell is a comb, or a bone, or a story with a well attached; Pernell says walk first, argue later.

“Hospice,” she tells you when the room is a field of breathing, “means guests. Hospital, hostel, hospitality—cousins. We keep people. The Painted Staff keeps people for pennies, which is also a way to keep them. Send overflow to Hawte with a sentence that is not a sneer.”

Dawn, or the next hour, leans. The inn is on the east bank. Aelric’s parchment still wants ink.

You learn who snores and who has a blister and who thinks relics do the walking for them. Pernell puts overflow names on a scrap for Hawte. “Duty and bill,” she repeats, because mixing them makes thieves and martyrs, both exhausting.