We found the boarding house the merchant had mentioned two streets back from the well, a tall narrow building leaning slightly against its neighbor for support in a way that looked less like an accident of construction and more like the two buildings had simply decided, at some point in the distant past, that standing alone in this particular valley wasn't something either of them wanted to do anymore. A woman answered the door before Savage had finished knocking a second time, wiry and grey-haired, with the kind of face that had clearly done a great deal of frowning over a great many years and had settled into the expression permanently as a result.
"Rooms are two coppers a night, four with supper," she said, before any of us had said a word. "No trouble, no questions I don't want to answer, and no bringing that thing inside." She nodded at Aki. "He can sleep in the shed out back same as everyone else's mounts, and he'll behave himself doing it or he'll sleep in the cold instead."
"He'll behave," I said, with more confidence than I entirely felt, and Aki, apparently choosing that exact moment to prove me right rather than embarrass me, sat down on the doorstep with an air of patient dignity that suggested he'd understood every word of the exchange perfectly well.
"You're Ilse," Savage said, once the coin had changed hands and we'd been shown into a low common room warmed by a fire that had clearly been burning most of the day already.
"Depends who's asking, and why," Ilse said, though there wasn't much real suspicion in it, more the reflexive caution of a woman who'd learned the habit young and never fully unlearned it since.
"We're looking for information about a family that used to work claims up here," Savage said. "Name of Marrow."
Something moved across Ilse's face at that, quick, and she set down the pot she'd been carrying toward the fire with a care that told me she was buying herself a moment to decide how much of whatever she was thinking she actually wanted to say out loud.
"That's a name I haven't heard spoken in this house in a long while," she said, finally. "Why would four strangers come all the way up here asking after it."
I could have lied. I thought about it, actually, standing there in the firelight with my whole chest gone tight and careful, weighing whether the truth would open a door or close one. But I'd told Namey back in Corvane that I'd rather have things ugly and true than gentle and half finished, and I found I meant it just as much standing in front of a stranger as I had sitting in a guild hall with people who already knew me.
"Because my name's Marrow too," I said. "Jon Marrow. Rennick was my father, if it's the same family you're thinking of."
Ilse went very still, studying my face in a way that made me acutely aware of every feature I might share with a man I couldn't actually remember, and whatever she found in the looking seemed to settle something for her, because the careful suspicion went out of her posture all at once, replaced by something a great deal older and sadder.
"You've got his chin," she said. "And something in the set of your shoulders when you're trying not to show what you're feeling, which he did constantly, and never once well." She sat down heavily in a chair by the fire, and gestured for us to do the same, and none of us argued with her about it. "Rennick Marrow. Lord above. I haven't said that whole name out loud in, what, going on eighteen years now."
"You knew him," I said, and heard my own voice come out smaller than I meant it to.
"Everyone up here knew him, once," Ilse said. "His family worked the same claim for three generations before him, up in the northern shaft, back when this whole valley still belonged to the families who'd dug it out with their own hands instead of some trading company's coin. Good vein, that claim. Not the richest in the valley, but steady, honest ore, the kind a family could live decent on for a lifetime without ever getting rich off it or poor either. Rennick ran it after his own father passed, same as his father had before him." She paused, looking into the fire rather than at any of us. "Then the vein changed."
"Changed how," Namey asked, leaning forward despite himself.
"Started running grey," Ilse said. "Deeper into the mountain than anyone in that family had ever dug before, past where the old honest ore gave out, they hit something new. Ashvein, folk started calling it, on account of the color, and it was strange stuff from the very first load anybody hauled up out of that shaft. Lighter than it should've been for its size. Warm to the touch on a cold morning, like it hadn't fully decided it was rock and not something else entirely. Rennick brought a sample down to show around the tavern once, and I remember holding it myself, and I remember it feeling, for just a moment, like it was holding me back."
A chill went through the room that had nothing to do with the temperature, and Aki, who'd apparently decided the shed wasn't worth the separation after all, pushed the door open with his shoulder and settled himself at my feet without anyone objecting to it.
"What happened to him," I asked, when Ilse didn't seem inclined to keep going on her own.
"Company men started coming around within the month," she said. "Buying up mineral rights on any claim that had struck the same vein, offering more coin than any of these families had ever seen in their lives for the privilege of it. Most of the old families sold outright and left for easier country. Rennick didn't, not at first. Held onto that claim like it was the last piece of his own father he had left, which I suppose it was, in its way. But the company kept coming back, kept raising the offer, and somewhere in there he started disappearing for stretches, weeks at a time, and coming back looking less like himself every trip." She shook her head slowly. "Last time I saw him proper, he had a look in his eye I'd never seen on a living man before and never wanted to see on one again. Gone somewhere behind his own face, if that makes any sense to you. Like the man doing the looking wasn't entirely the same one who'd been born behind those eyes."