The Hearth Ledger

The last parcel of the night weighs two pounds, seven ounces: a small wooden box for a widow in Ashfen who has waited three weeks for her son's remains. Elian Voss has worked the night window at the Kaldrast post office for six years, and the mail train leaves at four.

So when the ink on his brass cancellation drum turns silver, moving like mercury and spiraling counterclockwise around the rim like a ledger being unwritten, he skips all twelve procedures the manual lays down for misbehaving postal equipment, thinks about the widow, and presses the drum to her box anyway.

The box turns to snow. The post office stretches thin as paper held over a flame, and Elian lands waist-deep in a drift outside an inn called the Hearth and Hollow, the drum glowing in his hands like a banked coal. Maren Kald, the short, broad innkeeper with a poker in her fist, tells him he's late; she took him for her new lodger from the south road. Over hot spiced cider she explains where he is. Kaldrast.

But her Kaldrast has no post office, only a courier station by the south gate that has been shut since the Compact was signed, and no one comes or goes without the Guild's leave. Elian has spent six years getting other people's parcels where they need to go. Sending himself home is another matter.