Chapter 1The Debt Collector

The salt clock had been running for three hundred years, and in all that time nobody had thought to ask what it was counting down to.

Wren Ashby stood in the keeper’s hall with her coat still wet from the harbour road and looked up at it. Two glass bulbs the size of grain silos, joined at a waist she could have walked through if she stooped. The upper bulb was nearly empty. What remained inside moved with the slow, grudging patience of something that had been falling since before her grandmother’s grandmother learned to read.

“You’ll want to sign,” said the clerk.

He had a ledger open on the lectern and a pen already inked, and he did not look at the clock at all. Wren had noticed that about Grayhollow in the four hours since the coach set her down. Nobody looked at the clock. They arranged themselves around it the way you arrange yourself around a dog you have been told is friendly.

“Sign what?”

“Acceptance of the keepership. Your uncle’s post, now yours.” The clerk turned the ledger a few degrees toward her, which was as close to helpful as he seemed prepared to come. “It’s a formality.”

“My uncle drowned.”

“Yes.”

“In four feet of water.”

“Yes,” the clerk said again, in exactly the same tone, and Wren understood that this was not new information to anyone in the building.

The ledger was older than the hall. She could tell by the way the binding had been repaired — three times, in three different centuries, by three people who had each decided the pages inside were worth more than the cost of the leather.

She read the first entry standing up.

Grayhollow borrows against the season. Repayment in kind. Witnessed by the keeper.

The hand was small and even, and the ink had gone the brown of old blood. Beneath it, six hundred more entries marched down the page and onto the next, each one a season, each one a borrowing, each one witnessed by a keeper whose name was written and then, sometime later, crossed out.

The last name was her uncle’s. It had a line through it.

The line was fresh.

“What does the town borrow?” she asked.

The clerk was putting away his pen with great attention. “Weather, mostly.”

“Weather.”

“Fair springs. Gentle winters. A harbour that doesn’t take more than it’s owed.” He closed the drawer. “You’ll have noticed we’ve had a run of good years.”

Wren looked at the upper bulb again, at the thin remaining column of salt, and did the arithmetic that anyone would do.

“And when it runs out?”

For the first time since she had come through the door, the clerk raised his eyes to the clock. He held them there for a moment, the way a man checks a debt he has been carefully not thinking about.

“Then someone comes to collect,” he said. “Sign, Miss Ashby. The last three keepers left it late.”