The Ferryman at Millgate

The ferryman at Millgate crossing had refused passage twice before. Once to a merchant whose coin went dark the moment it touched the water, the interior clouding like milk dropped in ink. Once to a child — which had caused some difficulty, since the child's mother was present and the child was clearly only a child — though the coin had produced a sound he had no word for, a sound like something trying to remember how to ring true and failing. The child had grown up to become the kind of man whose name you did not say near the river, so the ferryman considered that episode resolved.

The third refusal was different.

The man came at the hour before dawn, which was not unusual. People crossed at strange hours for reasons the ferryman had learned not to ask about. He was perhaps forty, perhaps older, with the careful stillness of someone who had spent many years ensuring he was not memorable. He wore good boots. He carried no visible weapon and no visible luggage, which told you something about either his confidence or his destination.

He produced his coin without being asked. This too was a kind of information.

The ferryman took it. Held it over the water as was custom, tilting it so the first grey light of the morning could pass through the glass. The coin's interior moved — they always moved, a slow weather of intention and history suspended in the blown glass — and what he saw was not darkness exactly, nor clarity exactly, but something he had never encountered in thirty-one years of crossings. The interior was simply still. Not murky, not bright. Absolutely still, like water with no depth.

He handed the coin back.

"I can't take this," he said.

The man looked at the coin and then at the ferryman with an expression that might have been curiosity, or might have been something that had learned to wear curiosity's face over a long period of careful practice.

"Is it unclear?" the man asked.

"No."

"Is it false?"

The ferryman thought about this for a moment. The river moved below them. On the far bank, a light was burning in the mill house, which meant the miller was already awake, which meant the ferryman was observed, which meant nothing except that he was observed.

"It's empty," he said finally. "I've never seen an empty coin."

The man nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he had suspected for some time. He looked at the coin for a long moment, turning it in his fingers, and the ferryman had the uncomfortable impression that the man was checking it for something he already knew was not there.

"Can a man cross," the man said, not quite asking, "who has nothing left to pay with?"

The ferryman didn't answer immediately. The rule was the coin. The rule had always been the coin. The coin held the truth of the transaction — the intent, the history, the nature of the exchange. A murky coin meant something told in darkness. A clear coin meant a vow kept. An empty coin meant —

He found he didn't know what an empty coin meant.

"Come back tomorrow," he said.

The man stood for a moment longer, looking across the water at the far bank with an expression the ferryman could not read and would not try to. Then he turned and walked back the way he had come, and the ferryman watched him until the dark took him, and then watched the place where the dark had taken him for a while after that.

He came back the next morning. And the morning after. Each time he produced the coin, and each time it was empty, and each time the ferryman said come back tomorrow, and each time the man turned and walked away with that same expression of a man who has confirmed something he would rather not have confirmed.

On the seventh morning he did not come.

The ferryman waited until full light. He waited while the miller crossed, and the miller's boy, and a woman with a cart who overpaid and seemed surprised when he gave her the difference back. Then he closed his hand around his own coin — thirty-one years of crossings, a deep amber at the core from the accumulated weight of all those accumulated transactions — and held it over the water.

He didn't know what he was looking for.

He found he didn't know what he was afraid of finding.

He put the coin away and took the first crossing of the day, and did not think about the man with the empty coin for the rest of the morning, and thought about almost nothing else for the rest of his life.

The Ferryman is one of the Major Arcana of the Land of Glass deck.