The book

In the March, water comes sealed in jars, with the number pressed inside the wax where you read it only after paying, and a strip's date holds only until someone cuts a newer one across it. Pell keeps pricing out loud anyway. He shares a spilled jug at three mouthfuls each, writes "Not small" under a bounty sheet hung beside a hide as long as a grown person lying down, and pays for a third word, wind, with a season under a brine woman's water cask. He learns that breath grows, and that a word past your breath still kills. At a broken ford he locks his pulse to hold up a sliding water wagon, and he says the price himself: ten heartbeats off the end.

Brask stands across every den mouth and doorway. Omber makes honest metal and talks to it more kindly than to most people. Yez makes jokes that point at the weather. A sand-dog den the clerk swears has one mouth turns out to have two. Then a man in a clean gray coat asks the clerk for the party by the knife, and for the first time Pell turns his strip inward.

This is a warm, clear-eyed coming-of-age fantasy told in three dated parts, from twelve to eighteen. It is about prices hidden and prices said aloud, friendship that holds through years of road work, and what a ruling is worth in a country where anyone can cut a later date.

Read the opening

The road out of the coast did not bother to say goodbye. First it stopped being a lane with walls on either side. Then it became a track between dry hedges, and after a while a track between nothing at all. The smell of the sea went thinner behind them, until Pell could not have sworn it was there.

Pell was twelve, and he had never in his life walked far enough to lose the sea. He noticed the loss the way he would have noticed a missing step on a stair he knew, with a small jolt in the foot. He did not mention it, since a smell was not a job and nobody had asked him to keep it.

The four of them walked in the order they had gone through the yard gate that morning, because nobody had thought of a better one. Pell went first, with the knife in his right hand and its strip turned outward, so that anyone who looked would read the price before they read the blade. Omber came next, carrying the roll of honest wraps in the crook of one arm as carefully as other people carry babies. Yez walked third, holding the water jug in both hands and watching its lid as though the lid had been known to wander off. Brask came last, at the back, where Brask always came, with a light coil of rope over one broad shoulder and the pale stripe on their cheek gone dull with dust.

"I have a question about this road," Yez said, after a long stretch of nobody saying anything.

"Ask it," said Pell, without looking round.

Back-cover copy

The March does not say its prices out loud. Water comes in sealed jars, and you read the number inside the wax only after you pay. On a crossroads doorpost, Pell finds a toll strip whose date has been cut short by a second one, and the clerk shrugs: whoever cut last, wins.

Pell, Brask, Omber, and Yez guard salt caravans on the brine roads, where sand dogs run toward fire. A brine woman named Olun sells Pell the word for wind, and the price is a season carrying her cask. He learns to count his breath, and to say a lock's price aloud himself.

Then a man in a clean gray coat comes to the post asking for the party by the knife. He is polite, and he keeps the law exactly as far as the law reaches. For the first time, Pell turns his strip inward.

The Second Date

Reading order

The book

Read the opening

Back-cover copy

Portraits

Package

Continue the series, or inquire with the desk.