Book One – Chapter 19

Before he could set his mind to it, Yu found himself circling the workbench again, the same path, the same practice as before. With each step, he looked beneath. At each corner, he opened and closed the cupboards that doubled as the table’s legs. There was nothing in there. Only bowls, plates, and silence. Like that, he completed the circle and came back to the hearth. Still too restless, he turned again, but in reverse, clockwise. This time, he searched for something to remember himself by. He also searched for something to drink. His stomach was still sick with stew.

Left of the entry, on one of the upper shelves, he found several bottles of four repeating kinds. Their glass caught the orblight in dull shades of brown and black. Yu recognised two of the labels. Among them was Grainthistle Black.

 It made him pause,
   because it made him remember.

They called it The Trader’s Pride. It was a real thing, the pride. Those who brewed it boasted their bottles like trophies, front and centre for all to see. It meant they had seen it all, because real Grainthistle demanded ingredients from every corner of the Barnstreams, from the dead and deserted Northlands to the streaming south, and as far as the first white reaches of the Albweiss where the selder settled in the west. It took endurance and calculation, coin and connections to conquer distance and decay. You needed to gather everything in time and in the right order of harvest, so that the first ingredients did not rot while you were still hunting the last. There were no shortcuts and no substitutes. So if you made Grainthistle, it meant you really made it, as a trader. It was reputation in a bottle. Not just the traders acknowledged this, but all the regular people knew. To the common customer, a front-row Grainthistle promised an experienced, well-stablished merchant who had mapped the settlements through his own exhaustion and returned with a wide variety of news and novel wares from all over. It meant he had crossed the wastes and survived them; that he had negotiated his way through ruin and returned with the taste of distance preserved in glass. And he would offer you a glass, first thing. Before you bartered and bought anything, you tasted the drink.