DUSTGATE, THORN MARCHES — The stockade gate opened at the ninth bell with four hours of light left and the ridge the color of a dry trough. Jory Fen walked out on a hip that does not take a long step. He had a split hoof wrapped in stockade linen, a water skin two-thirds empty, and a map printed for the roads out of Gray Pier. The cart that brought him had covered nine hundred miles. He was foaled in Osier Reach.
The map ends in a blank fold. Osier Reach, where Fen keeps a mother and a flooded field, sits off the sheet to the northwest, past two passes the courier lanes still price and one the lanes stopped pricing when the snow took the posts. No road on the paper joins Dustgate to that field. The legend certifies distances inside the Harbor Circuit. The Thorn Marches rented the Circuit a row of cots and a ditch.
Fen was on the cart four hundred and thirty-one days ago. The Harbor Removal Desk at Gray Pier marked him for exit after Osier Reach declined the landing papers and the Desk declined to keep him on the pier. The contract with the Thorn Court calls the Marches a placement realm. The bounty board by the lower well filed the job as Opportunity Walk No. 19, in the Desk's own phrase. The purse went to the cart crew when the Dustgate gate shut behind him.
Inside, the count was dawn and dusk. He slept on a plank. The ration came in Harbor tins stamped with a gull. A pair of thorn-dogs worked the outer fence in the last light, drank where the kitchen runoff sweetens the ditch, and left when the bucket chain knocked the post. Fen's name on the intake slate was punched under the only heading left open, "miscellaneous." The origin list offered harbors, two mountain towns, and a blank the clerk would not initial.
"I asked, the first week, which kingdom the tin was from," Fen said. "The pony with the keys said the tin was from the contract. I kept the gull. I ate the rest."
Nessa Kite came down from the tree line when she heard the bolt. She keeps a shed where the thorn breaks, six miles from the stockade, and she walks this ditch in both seasons with packs no board has priced. She took the map and looked at the hoof.
"Three hours if the haze stays high," Kite said. "That royal road on the sheet is the ditch. The goats have already cut it up, so the ditch will take what is left of the footing. Drink at the second cut, left of the pale stone. Eleven miles in the groove. He can make the stone before dark. Osier Reach is not on this walk."
The release paper is Thorn Court stock. It grants Fen the freedom of the Marches and one night at the Dustgate hostel, cot assigned, paid by a voucher that names the Harbor Desk as host. The paper carries no Gray Pier pass and no Osier seal. Warden Tull Meadow read the note aloud at the gate.
"We held what we were sent," Meadow said. "The order this morning was to open the door. I turned the key they issued with the cot."
Penny Ledger, who keeps the removal books at Gray Pier, sent the Desk's line by the evening courier bird. The bird reached the well before Fen did.
"Arrival was logged the day the cart cleared Dustgate," the slip read. "The docket was closed the same afternoon. We don't keep a column for after."
In the wet month a touring party from Banner & Banner had stood at the same gate and had a picture drawn for a broadsheet. The caption calls the stockade a partnership outpost on Opportunity Range. The sheet is tacked inside the hostel, over the cot the voucher buys tonight. The window above that cot faces the plank yard.
Kite folded the Harbor map along the blank and put it in her satchel. The hostel cot is a mile back toward the lamps. The stone is eleven the other way. The voucher pays the mile.
At dusk the board keeper took Opportunity Walk No. 19 down, marked the purse paid, and pinned the card on the completed hook. The hook hangs over a barrel. The barrel holds the walks whose names never came back to sign.
