Reading Stone

Madoc has read the stones of the western valleys for forty years, and he has one circuit left.

He is fifty-eight, a Reader of the Realm - one of twelve, answerable to no lord and no king, only to the ledger. Every autumn he walks his valleys, reads the ledger-stones, and declares each debt and surplus: the worker carves the price before the working, the stone collects with the rounding, and the ledger never lies. In the spring he will surrender his seals at Caer Arian and retire. He wants a clean ledger to end on.

Cwm Rhos will not give him one.

In Rhos there has been a taking with no carving at all - a working done in the dark, with no bound price, and the stone has taken what it wanted from whom it wanted. Forty lambs. A well. A rick. And at the turf line of the ledger-stone, a glyph in no hand Madoc knows, which he logs as an error - though he does not believe for a moment that it is one.

The trail leads to Sioned's wandering people, in the valley before lambing - Sioned the Uncut elder, who trained beside Madoc thirty-eight years ago and has not lied to him in thirty. It leads home to Cwm Derwen, to Eira the young carver and the honest debt she has been paying for years, to her husband Bleddyn's mill, to six-year-old Cai's pebbles and his questions. And it leads deeper still, to a debt three hundred years in the rounding, coming due at midwinter on all of Gwynt.

Book One of The Old Bargain: a lyrical epic fantasy of bargains kept and bargains broken - of what the land remembers, what the law demands, and what it costs an old man to finish straight.