“I do see the distinction,” Masseter said, sounding mildly annoyed nonetheless.
Petra looked thoughtfully at him as she slipped her stocking feet out of her shoes and folded them up underneath her on the sofa. “I have been thinking of your question of peddlers, and I have remembered another tale in which the peddler is not the villain.” The dragonfly in her hair caught the firelight as she turned and glanced over her shoulder at Sangwin, the printmaker, who had stayed by the window overlooking the river from which he’d chucked his cigar. “It’s the one you mentioned, the day you arrived.”
“I don’t recall.” Then Sangwin’s face shifted through quick realization into discomfort, and then confusion. He frowned sharply at Petra, the lines on his face blending with the shadows cast by the rain on the window beside him. “But . . .”
“Yes, you do,” she said, ignoring the printmaker’s disquiet. “You remember. It was Phineas’s tale of the uncommon keyway that brought it to mind, but I’ve been hesitating because I confess I wasn’t sure whether I might offend Mr. Masseter by telling it. Then it popped into my thoughts again with Madame’s story of the miraculous box. It was a tale you did the illustrations for, I think you said.”
“Why would it offend me?” Masseter asked. “You’ve just said the peddler in this story isn’t a villain.”
“It isn’t that the fellow in question is a peddler,” Sangwin said cautiously, still looking at Petra. “It’s that he loses an eye. And of course, yes, there is a peddler in it, but that’s a different character.”
A strange shifting passed around the room as each person within it tried with varying degrees of success not to look directly at the russet-colored patch that covered Masseter’s left eye. All except Petra, who laughed. “Oh, I had thought they were both peddlers. You must tell it. Clearly I’d get it all wrong.”
Sangwin looked dubiously from Petra to Masseter.
“Put your mind to rest, Sangwin.” The peddler smiled thinly. “Does the fellow in your tale at least lose his eye in a spectacular fashion?”
Sangwin considered. “It’s somewhat the point of the story, the losing of the eye, and yet I don’t know if I can answer that question.”
“Tell it, then,” suggested the still-smiling peddler, “and we shall decide.”
The printmaker inclined his head. “Then I will.” One last curious flick of his dark eyes at Petra, then he glanced at Maisie, who sat with her knees drawn up to her chest watching the two of them with open curiosity. “Do you know what is a hollow-way, young lady?” he asked.
Maisie shook her head.
“It is a passage through trees,” Sangwin said. “But a hollowway is more than that, too. A hollow-way is a sunken road, a place where the track has been worn down so that it lies below the level of the land around it, and the trees on all sides form something like a canopy overhead. To pass along a hollow-way is much like traveling through a sort of forest tunnel.” He glanced out the window at the drowning woods on the far shore of the rising Skidwrack. “They are very old ways, and old ways often lie differently on the landscape, leading to places other than where you think they ought to if you merely look at them on a map. Strange things can happen on roads such as these.”
He turned to face the room, leaned his back against the windowsill, and laced his brown fingers together before him. “Of course, I can picture the woodcuts I made for the pictures perfectly well,” he murmured, looking up at the blackened exposed beams in the ceiling. “It was forty years ago now at least—one of my first journeyman projects. I made so many versions—with different trees in the drawings, different woods for the printing blocks, then different inks made from more trees still. The words, though . . . but of course, it’s a poem. Let me just remember the first line, and I ought to be able to recite the rest.”
On the floor by the fire, Tesserian handed Maisie a knave with a single visible eye.
SEVEN
THE HOLLOW-WARE MAN
The Carver’s Tale
THE SUN doesn’t fall on the hollow-way, not even when branches are bare.
The trees knot and tangle around it;
the bracken and vines curl about it;
the leaves whirl and crackle all through it—
it’s always deep twilight in there.
Folk hereabouts shun the hollow-way if another road might do as well.
They say that it’s more than just dark there,
that uncanny creatures oft walk there,
and good folk who chance it get lost there,
and find themselves halfway to hell.
So it’s mostly deserted, this pathway; we avoid it whenever we can.
Except every autumn emerges
a figure from out of the birches.
From the mouth of the hollow he lurches:
the traveling hollow-ware man.
The hollow-ware man is a peddler, his wares an assortment of tin.
And kettles and teapots he’ll sell you
of copper and nickel and brass, too;
buckets and silver-plate cups, too:
all things that are empty within.
Now, the hollow-ware man is a strange one, but his wares, they are wondrously good.
He peddles such strikingly sweet things,
gleaming and bright filigreed things,
uncommonly well-made and neat things
that hold more than you think that they should.
And other things, too, he will sell you, whatever you can’t do without.
The rarest of things you can get here—
uncanny and wondrous things had here—
miraculous
things can be bought here
when the hollow-ware man is about.
Unbelievable hollow-ware wonders he crafts with his hammer and flame
that he only will sell in the hollow-way,
on his way out of town, in the hollow-way.
But they come at a cost in the hollow-way:
not everyone comes back the same.
One day into town came a stranger, a man with such cold eyes of blue.
He said, “I’ve come in search of a box, here,
a particular, finely wrought box here,
a box I can fit to this lock here,”
and he showed us
