Chapter One
The Man Who Came to Break a Promise
The man came in an hour before closing, which is when they always come, the ones who have decided to break something.
I knew before he spoke. You learn the walk. People who come to pour a promise walk like they are carrying a cake. People who come to break one walk like the floor might not be there.
“Is the pourer in,” he said.
“My grandmother is upstairs,” I said. “I can wake her. Or you can tell me, and I will decide whether she needs waking.”
He looked at me the way men look at seventeen year old girls in aprons, which is to say he looked at the furnace behind me instead. He was about fifty. Good coat, gone thin at the cuffs. He kept one hand in his pocket and I could hear the keep in there, faintly, the way you hear a wasp in a jar.
“I want to know the price,” he said. “Before. Not after.”
Nobody can tell you the price before. That is the first thing you learn on the cold side of the hill, and the second thing you learn is never to say so out loud, because the crown says otherwise, and the crown has a hall full of glass and we have a shop.
“Take it out,” I said.
He put it on the counter. A flat green disc the size of a plum, with a thumbprint of cloud already spreading at its heart, like breath on a window that never clears.
