Market day brought the named families down from Merchant's Hill.

  Eiran noticed them from across the square, a woman in a blue wool coat cut in the city fashion, with a young man beside her who shared her sharp features and upright carriage. They moved through the crowd differently than everyone else. Not pushing, not hurrying. Just walking, and somehow the crowd parted around them.

  "Varenthorpes," muttered a vegetable seller near Eiran's elbow. "Come to inspect the provincial offerings."

  Eiran watched the pair stop at a goldsmith's stall. The woman examined a brooch, turned it over, handed it back with a slight shake of her head. The goldsmith's shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly.

  "Do they buy anything?"

  "Sometimes. When it meets their standards." The vegetable seller snorted. "Must be nice, having standards. Rest of us just have prices."

  The Varenthorpes moved on, the young man now carrying a small package. Something had met approval after all. Eiran tracked them as they crossed toward Craft Row, toward Havelock's workshop.

  He'd been sent to buy lunch provisions for the week. Havelock was keeping him late for the chronometer project, so meals needed to be portable. Bread, cheese, apples. Maybe dried meat if the price was fair. The usual calculations, the usual counting.

  But something made him follow the Varenthorpes instead.

  They entered Havelock's workshop. Through the window, Eiran could see Havelock straighten, set down his tools, adopt the posture of service. The woman pointed at something on the display shelf. Havelock retrieved it, one of the better barometers, the expensive ones with the silver-inlaid casings.

  Eiran couldn't hear the conversation, but he could read the body language. Havelock explaining, demonstrating. The woman listening with polite attention. The young man looking bored, examining other items without real interest.

  The transaction took less than five minutes. The woman handed over coins, royals it had to be, without counting. Havelock wrapped the barometer with careful hands. The Varenthorpes left, new purchase tucked under the young man's arm, and continued their circuit of the market.

  Two royals. Maybe more, for the silver inlay. A month's wages for most of Kettleford, spent without hesitation, without negotiation, without the small dance of price and counterprice that governed every transaction Eiran had ever made.

  He went back to the vegetable seller and bought his week's provisions. The counting was automatic now, running in the back of his mind like a second heartbeat. Four coppers for bread. Six for cheese. Three for apples. Two for dried mutton, because the price was fair and he needed something that would last.

  Fifteen coppers total. Just over one standard. He had five coppers left for emergencies.

  The Varenthorpes' single purchase could have fed him for two years.

  ---

  The Muddy Boot was crowded that evening, workers pressed elbow to elbow along the bar, conversation rising in a familiar drone. Eiran found a corner with his mug of ale, three coppers for the cheapest they served, and let the noise wash over him.

  "...heard the Thornton boy got into the city academy," someone was saying. "The one for instruments and machines."

  "Good for him. Good family connections, the Thorntons."

  "It's not about family. It's about talent."

  Laughter, rough and knowing. "Sure it is. That's why the Thornton boy's going and Pol Miller's son is sweeping floors. Because of talent."

  "Pol's boy is stupid."

  "Pol's boy is poor. There's a difference, but it only matters to people who aren't."

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Eiran drank his ale and listened. The conversation shifted, as tavern conversations did, moving through complaints about the weather, speculation about the upcoming harvest, gossip about who owed money to whom.

  "The Varenthorpes were in town today," someone mentioned. "Saw them at the market."

  "Buying up our best work to take back to their city friends. 'Look what we found in the provinces.' Like we're curiosities."

  "They pay well."

  "They pay what they think we're worth. Which is less than they pay their servants, I'd wager."

  A woman Eiran half-recognized from Craft Row, middle-aged, with the rough hands of a metalworker, shook her head. "It's the names that do it. Varenthorpe, Aldworth, Kross. Say those names in the city and doors open. Say mine and nobody knows what you're talking about."

  Aldworth. The same name as the order on Havelock's ledger, Eiran realized, a named family that apparently ran both a patent firm and a city instrument trade, among other things.

  "It's money, not names," her companion argued. "Money and connections. The names just mark who has them."

  "No. Because you can make money. You can build connections. You can't make a name."

  "My cousin made a name." The metalworker shrugged. "Made one up for her kid. Sareth, she called her. Never heard it anywhere else."

  "And where's Sareth now?"

  "Loading cargo in Hartmere. Breaking her back by thirty." A bitter laugh. "So much for unique names."

  Eiran finished his ale. The conversation continued around him, but he'd stopped listening. Sareth. The same cousin the metalworker had mentioned before, at the market. Still loading cargo. Still anonymous. A unique name, leading nowhere.

  "What about you?" The metalworker had noticed him. "You've got one of those odd names, don't you? Eiran, is it?"

  "That's right."

  "Ever wonder about it? Where it came from?"

  "The foundling home. The matron named us."

  "Hm." The metalworker considered this. "My grandmother used to say names carried weight. Old family names, she meant, the ones that go back generations. She'd talk about the Dreaming, too. How the old names touched something deeper."

  "The Dreaming?" Eiran hadn't heard the term used seriously.

  "Old stories. Grandmother stuff." The metalworker waved a dismissive hand. "People dream, and sometimes they see things, and their names determine what they see. Load of nonsense, probably. But she believed it."

  "My gran said the same," another drinker added. "Said the named families, the real old ones and not the new money, they know things the rest of us don't. Secrets about how the world works."

  "They know how to keep money in the family. That's the only secret."

  "Maybe. But then why do they care so much about the names? Why reuse the same ones, generation after generation? My neighbor works for the Kross household. She says they've got rules about naming. Real rules, written down."

  The conversation dissolved into argument around that, and Eiran stopped listening. He left another copper on the bar, a tip for Marda who kept the ale flowing and the peace maintained, and slipped out into the evening air.

  The named families. The Dreaming. Old secrets and older stories. He'd never thought much about any of it. Names were just names, handles for the world to grab you by. His meant nothing. Sareth's meant nothing. The only names that meant anything were the ones attached to money and connections, and those could be earned, supposedly, if you worked hard enough and long enough.

  Two royals for a barometer. Ten weeks of his savings.

  The math didn't lie. The math said names were just markers for who had and who didn't. Everything else was grandmother stories, comforting tales for people who needed reasons the world was unfair.

  ---

  Sleep came like falling.

  Eiran lay on his narrow bed in the Warrens, still counting. Havelock's forty royals. The Varenthorpes, spending without looking at the price. Ten standards a week, every week, and the numbers never closing the gap. His body was tired. His mind wouldn't follow.

  He was still calculating when sleep took him.

  What happened next wasn't like dreaming.

  He knew his dreams: the previous day reassembled wrong, faces saying things they'd never said. Ordinary. Forgettable.

  This was something else.

  Stone walls, rough-hewn, older than anything in Kettleford. Cold air with an unfamiliar smell, pine and something mineral, sharp. His hands in front of him, not his hands, larger, scarred across the knuckles, moving on something he couldn't quite see.

  Then he was awake.

  Dark room. The sounds of the building, footsteps above, the creak of old timber. His own hands gripping the blanket.

  Eiran lay still, breathing too fast. The image was already fading, the way dreams did, but it left something behind. Not a picture. A feeling. The specific, uncomfortable certainty that he had just been somewhere else.

  A dream, he told himself. Just a dream.

  But he was hungry. Desperately, strangely hungry, the kind that sat in the middle of him, like something had been used up that bread wouldn't replace. He'd eaten hours ago. There was no accounting for it.

  He lay there, hungry and awake, until the light came.

  In the morning he went to work. He shaped brass and practiced the chronometer balance and watched the mercury column on Havelock's wall without quite knowing why he was watching it.

  The feeling didn't go away.

  He'd told himself the grandmother stories were nonsense. He still believed that. Almost entirely.

  But his hands, his own hands, the ones he knew better than anything, had felt wrong against those other ones, in that other place. Foreign, in his own skin.

  He couldn't explain why that detail had stayed when everything else had faded.

  He didn't try to. He counted his remaining coppers instead, and went to work, and kept the feeling at the edge of his attention where it was manageable.

  For now, that was enough.