The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  “I need to cross, please!” the boy shouted as the Ferryman approached. He barely waited for the older man to tie the Inferus up to the dock before he crouched as if to leap down onto the deck.

  The Ferryman caught the boy by the collar before he could jump and, stepping off the boat himself, hauled him back onto the pier. “Belay a minute, there.” He deposited the child on a bench on the dock and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Have you got payment?”

  The boy frowned. “How much does it cost?”

  “How much do you have?”

  The boy emptied his pockets and held out three cracked acorn caps. “I have three. Will three do?”

  The Ferryman sighed. “I don’t take payment in acorns, much as I might like to.”

  He considered the kid through eyes that had gotten very accustomed to evaluating potential passengers. Usually he could work out the entire story of a crossing in a matter of heartbeats: someone fleeing a dangerous spouse, a parent trying to find a child, someone seeking answers or changes they thought couldn’t be found without venturing into the deep unknown. There were endless variations, but those were all mostly motives for people crossing in the opposite direction, and they all involved some measure of desperation. Folks crossing into Nagspeake—or back into it, for that matter—were rare, and although he had said I need to cross rather than I want to cross, there wasn’t so much as a whiff of anxiety about this kid. Eagerness, yes. Fear, worry, or despair, no.

  “I will give you a token,” the Ferryman said at last, still puzzled, “but you’ll have to answer a question first.”

  “What kind of question?” the boy asked with an air of anticipation.

  “A riddle,” the Ferryman said, trying to think of a suitably easy one to ask.

  “Oh, all right.” The boy brightened. “I like riddles.”

  “Good.” And he meant it. The Ferryman was generally in favor of helping people get where they wanted to go, and though he couldn’t quite work out the particulars here the way he usually could, Knickpointe had no interest in making this crossing difficult. “There is a gent who came to me; he whistled tunes to pay his fee. With him aboard, I used no pole. Who is he?”

  The boy’s face fell, and the Ferryman rapidly worked out a clue he could give the child to help him figure out the answer. But when the kid spoke again, he replied in a voice that was confident but a little sullen, “The wind.”

  “Correct,” the Ferryman said, confused about the boy’s dissatisfaction but trying to sound grand about it all nonetheless as he reached into the vest pocket where he kept his small supply of trade tokens.

  “I know. I thought it would be harder, is all.” Still looking mildly disgruntled, the boy held out a hand to receive the Ferryman’s token.

  “You’re upset that you got the answer right on the first try?” the Ferryman inquired as he opened the lantern and blew out the light.

  “I’m not upset,” the boy retorted. Then he made a frustrated noise. “Can I please have another one?”

  “Another token?” the Ferryman asked, looking down at the circle in the child’s hand. It was a nice one, cut from a piece of very old, licheny driftwood. “A different one? It doesn’t much matter to me, but you’re only going to give it back once we’re across.”

  “Not a different token,” the child said, exasperated. “A different riddle. A harder one.”

  The Ferryman looked at him. “You want a harder riddle?”

  “You went easy on me,” the boy accused. “It wasn’t fair.”

  Under the circumstances, there didn’t seem to be much point in lying about it. “I did it so I could give you a token,” the Ferryman said, feeling like this was stating the obvious. “What part of that, exactly, do you object to?”

  “I like riddles, and I want to do the crossing properly,” the boy said. “That can’t be the only one you know.”

  “All right,” the Ferryman said. “Come aboard. I’ll think of another as we go.”

  “All right!” The kid leaped aboard. “But don’t make it too easy this time.”

  The Ferryman cast off his boat and took up his punting pole again. As he began to maneuver the Inferus into the Tailrace, he mentally ran through the riddles he knew. They fell into three general categories: simple ones, for when he wished he didn’t have to worry about taking payment at all; hard ones, for when he didn’t particularly want to make life easy for the traveler but didn’t feel it was his job to deny passage outright; and finally, a handful of riddles without answers, which he kept for special occasions. These last he used most often when the passenger was another roamer. Roamers generally knew better than to try to cross without payment, and could rustle up a coin from somewhere if they really needed it. But if the Ferryman had to find a way to give a roamer one of his tokens, he felt entitled to offer a special challenge.

  Within each category, the level of difficulty of the riddles varied. A not-too-simple simple one, then, he thought, and aloud he said, “Another gent I came athwart; he shook me down to pay his part. After that, the boat, it sank. Who was he?” It was the same sort of conundrum as the last, but Knickpointe had met plenty of adults who’d had trouble with it.

  The boy groaned. “A shoal.”

  “Still not thorny enough?”

  “Nooooo.” It was as much whine as word.

  “Fine,” the Ferryman said, then mentally switched baskets, and dug for a medium-difficult riddle. “Silver thimble with a tongue, might fit on a giant’s thumb.”

  At this, the boy actually stamped his foot. “A church bell. Why are you making this so easy?” he demanded, grabbing the side of the boat as it lurched sideways.

  “Good grief. Fine.” The Ferryman gave up trying to pull his punches. “I saw a jackdaw all in black, with silver eye and heavy pack.”

  “A thief escaping with his haul.” The boy’s face was pink with frustration.

  “Silver yarn a-fraying, eleven threads a-playing.”

  His cheeks went redder still. “The Skidwrack in the moonlight!”

  “I trust it in a sangaree but never underfoot.”

  “THAT’S ICE!” the boy howled, clenching his hands at his sides.

  Knickpointe ground his teeth at the noise. “And where has all the church plate gone?”

  The kid didn’t answer for a beat, but only because he paused to get his vexation under control. “With the thief to the bottom of the channel, where the ice wouldn’t hold,” he answered bitterly.

  The Ferryman rolled his eyes, kept punting, and went on throwing riddle after riddle at the boy, enduring the rising tantrum as his passenger answered every one correctly, until they reached the Nagspeake side of the Tailrace.

  When they arrived, the Ferryman fended the Inferus off the dock and whipped a line around the iron cleat in a neat hitch to make the boat fast. Then he turned to consider his small passenger. “Did you not actually want to cross at all?” he asked quietly.

  A tear slipped down the boy’s cheek. “I did, but only for the riddles.”

  The Ferryman looked at him in disbelief. “You only wanted to cross because you knew I would ask you riddles?”

  The child nodded. “Nobody else I know is any good at them. I thought you might have some I hadn’t heard before.”

  “What about your three acorn caps?”

  He shrugged. “I thought I should offer something.”

  The Ferryman pointed at the Nagspeake shore. “And what were you going to do when we got here?”

  “Ask to go back, and answer more riddles for passage,” the boy replied, as if this ought to be obvious. Then a thought appeared to occur to him. “Are you very angry?”

  “Why should I be angry?” the Ferryman asked.

  “I thought you might feel this was a waste of your time. I didn’t think of that before,” his small passenger admitted.

  The Ferryman sighed. “What’s your name?”

  “Caster. Cas for short.” He looked at the dock, and the shore beyond. “I s
uppose I have to get out here.”

  The Ferryman nodded. “But first, your token.” He held out a hand, and Cas put the carved driftwood coin into it. Then the boy climbed out of the Inferus and onto the dock. He and the Ferryman looked at each other.

  “Will you still take me back home?” Cas asked.

  “My job is to cross the river.”

  “But are those all the riddles you had?” The boy’s voice wavered with all the frustration and injustice that only a child who wants something and is being given everything but that thing can possibly feel.

  The Ferryman held out a token for the return trip, this one carved from a cross-section of an old stained antler. “Those were about a third of the riddles I have.”

  Cas took the coin and climbed back down into the boat. “You have more? Are they as easy as the other ones?”

  “Half of the remaining ones are too easy. The others . . .” The Ferryman smiled as he cast the Inferus off again. “Only you can say. They are riddles without answers.”

  The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Without answers? Then how does anyone answer them?”

  “I couldn’t possibly tell you.” The Ferryman pushed the boat away from the pier with one booted foot. “That’s the whole trick.”

  Cas sat on one of the boat’s benches, practically vibrating with anticipation. “I’m ready.”

  “Here goes, then. Take your time: Whisper and say where you find extra moons anytime you want them.”

  Finally, gratifyingly, Cas hesitated, and his brow furrowed. He tilted his head, then tilted it the other way, then dropped his elbows to his knees and his chin into his palms. The Ferryman watched this out of the corner of his eye as he navigated the rocks and the rapids of the Tailrace. About halfway across, Cas lifted his head, a look of delight on his face. “My fingernails,” he said, remembering to speak softly.

  The Ferryman considered, then nodded once. “I believe you’re right.”

  Cas laughed. Then he frowned. “But that means it does have an answer.”

  “It means you gave it one,” the Ferryman said. “That’s different. It has an answer now.”

  “Can I . . . can I have another?” Cas asked. “Not because that one wasn’t hard. Because it was fun.”

  They were passing the halfway point of the Tailrace. The Ferryman nodded. “You may. But only one more. We can’t go through all the answerless riddles I’ve got, or when we’re done, I won’t have any left.”

  Cas nodded. “All right. One more.”

  “Very well. I startled a cardinal off of his lectern. What did he say?”

  The boy settled into his thoughtful posture again and stayed hunkered down until just before the Ferryman brought the Inferus up to the dock.

  “I have it,” Cas announced. And by way of answer, he whistled four notes.

  The Ferryman took a moment to evaluate the response, worked out its meaning, and grinned. “Well done.” He held out his palm for the token.

  The boy handed it over and climbed out, radiating reluctance. “Thank you for the passage, Mr. Ferryman.”

  The Ferryman finished tying up the boat and offered his hand. “The name’s Isaac Knickpointe. And you’re welcome, Cas.”

  A flicker of violet-blue came to life on the dock they’d just left: someone summoning the Inferus from the Nagspeake side. The mist separated just enough to show the shape of a tall man standing on the pier. A flash of lantern light glinted off something shiny in the vicinity of his left eye, and Knickpointe recognized a passenger he’d carried before.

  The Ferryman sighed and started undoing the cleat hitch he’d just tied. Then he had an idea.

  “Cas, what are your thoughts on telling riddles?” he asked. “Fun or boring?”

  The boy sat up a little straighter, interested. “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “Think about it.”

  Cas scratched his head. His eyebrows knitted themselves together. Then he said rapidly, as if it had come to him all in a rush, “Silver sky, silver sea, silver road between the trees. But if you should hear a crack, silver death amid the wrack . . . I know they don’t have to rhyme,” he added, “but it sounds nice.”

  “It does, you know.” Knickpointe nodded, pleased. “That’s good.” He aimed a thumb over his shoulder at the light on the opposite bank. “Want to try it out?”

  “Absolutely, I do.” And Cas hopped eagerly back aboard.

  Rather to his surprise, Cas discovered that telling riddles was almost as much fun as answering them. He began to turn up at the ferry dock regularly after that, and Knickpointe found himself looking forward to seeing the emerald light flaring to life on the Fiddler’s Green side of the Tailrace. The boy, it turned out, had a knack for inventing new riddles to tell, although sometimes when he wanted to solve a puzzle or two himself, he would change things up and ask potential passengers to tell him one. Like Knickpointe, he developed a system: if the passenger was someone whose crossing they wanted to help along, Cas merely asked to be told a certain number of riddles. If it was someone who required more of a challenge, Cas would demand a hard riddle from the passenger. Very rarely—usually only with the approval of the Ferryman—he would demand to be stumped.

  The boy turned out to be a trickster of the first magnitude, in fact, but after that, it was never quite as easy to cross as it had been, for Cas loved riddles too much to tell an intentionally easy one as frequently as the Ferryman himself had done.

  One morning, when they’d been at this for a few weeks, Knickpointe surprised Cas at the wharf with a peaked hat the Ferryman had stitched with the words FIRST MATE, and he offered it to the boy with much gravity and pomp. Cas, of course, accepted, first with a yelp of delight and then with a much soberer “Yes, sir; thank you, sir.” And the two of them piloted the Tailrace ferry together for many years after that, the younger crewmate handling the riddles while at last the Ferryman got to do what he’d always wanted to: spend his retirement messing with his boat.

  INTERLUDE

  “I rather fear we’re going to need a Ferryman ourselves just to get out of here,” Jessamy said, kneeling beside Petra on the sofa and leaning over the back of it to face the windows that looked out over the river. Petra scooted just a tiny bit closer to the center to give her more room. Sullivan pretended not to notice. Tesserian and Maisie used a saint wearing a short tunic and holding a long sword and another with a miter-shaped hat and a curling, crooked staff to finish a new balcony. When it was completed, Maisie moved a wooden tiger from a lower perch up to this higher vantage.

  “No, indeed,” Mr. Haypotten said, taking the toasting dish from the fire by its ivory handle. “Water won’t rise past a blue stair, after all. The rain’ll stop overnight; you see if it doesn’t.” Blissfully unaware of Captain Frost’s rolling eyes, the innkeeper wrapped one hand in his handkerchief and, thus protected, opened the perforated lid of the covered dish. “Done to a turn,” he announced, relieved that it wasn’t remotely possible to tell that he’d had to resort to slightly stale bread and the last, mixed shavings of cheddar and rind to make the toasted cheese. They weren’t going to run out of things to eat, but the fresh stuff was nearly gone.

  As he served portions around, along with crackers and a plate of sliced, slightly winy apples, Sorcha spoke up from the hearth, where she was tending a second toasting dish. “May I tell one, sir?” she asked, directing the question at the innkeeper.

  He looked up, surprised. “Well, of course, my dear,” he answered, his reply nearly drowned out by the voices of his wife and a handful of the guests, all saying variations of the same thing.

  “Will it be a tale with fires?” Negret asked, his smile a flicker of brightness, like the first stick of kindling to catch.

  Sorcha’s cheeks flared, but sitting on the hearth as she was, she knew her face was already red, so she met his eyes despite the flush. “Perhaps. I can certainly think of more than one.”

  “You were raised with firekeeping traditions, weren’
t you?” Petra asked.

  Sorcha nodded. “With old ones from my mother’s ancestors in Scotland, and newer ones born here, passed down through my father’s family, who were Nagspeakers from all the way back. We were raised to know all the fires that burn, all the ways to conjure them and keep them, to learn from them and to live with them as neighbors.”

  “And fires can do so much more than people understand,” Petra said dreamily, tucking her feet up under her on the sofa and leaning back, almost but not quite into the hollow of Sullivan’s shoulder. (In his chair before the fire, Reever Colophon, who knew without having to ask that he and Sullivan were experiencing similar difficulties of the heart, saw this and stifled a sympathetic groan.) “More than lighting, more than warming, more than protecting . . .” She looked up at the ceiling as if trying hard to call something to mind. “What am I thinking of?”

  “Some sort of fire magic?” Sorcha suggested with a lift of her eyebrow. “Pyromancy, perhaps? People do lump that in with firekeeping.”

  “Something like that,” Petra admitted, laughing. “But not pyromancy. That’s fortunetelling, isn’t it? No, I mean the other thing. Fire-cunning, perhaps? A sort of . . .” She made an exasperated noise. “A sort of reckoning, isn’t it called?”

  The maid gave Petra a long, strange look. “Yes. Fire-kenning, my father called it, though I’ve heard fire-cunning as well. More properly it’s fierekenia: fire-reckoning.” She paused, curious. “People do know of pyromancy and other sorts of divination, but there aren’t many who I’ve ever heard talk of reckonings, by fire or otherwise.”

  “What’s a reckoning?” Maisie asked, shuffling through the unused saints for any shown with fire and setting those aside.

  Sorcha, still curious, nodded deferentially at Petra. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly define it,” Petra protested. “It’s just a thing I ran across somewhere. Probably heard a story.” She, in turn, looked to Phineas Amalgam. “Aren’t there stories about reckonings, Mr. Amalgam?”