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The Road and the Word

for one who swore to no hall
the Marker's words - spoken the same way in every village of the borderlands
"In summers of old, the king or queen would gather their noblility on the borderlands to push into the wild and settle the lands. We await the monarch and their nobility once again. Until that day when they arrive again, we hire marked adventurers to keep the wild at bay. Adventurers, we ask that of you now."

Then they read out what is wrong and what they will pay. Never before. Always in that order. A Marker who muddles it will be corrected by the whole room.

the ballad of Corin Ashe, sung badly and often, chiefly as a warning
Corin Ashe would not wait for the others,
Corin Ashe knew the trade,
Corin Ashe went in at first light
and by noon the price was paid.

They found his boots. They found his coin.
They never found the man.
So drink your ale and wait your turn
and go in like a band.
what the marked tell each other, unprompted, on first meeting

You do not go alone. Not because anyone forbids it - nobody forbids you anything, that is rather the point of the life - but because everyone in the room has buried somebody who did. It is the one piece of wisdom the trade agrees on, and the reason strangers will take a contract together on a night's acquaintance and never ask each other's history.

the customs of villages, which you will meet everywhere and should not take personally

Lodging at the edge of the settlement, never the middle. Payment on completion and on proof - bring the head, the hide, or the hand, or bring nothing. The two-finger sign made at your back, which nobody will admit to making. And afterwards, always, the polite suggestion that the road is good this time of year.

They are not being cruel. Their grandparents did exactly this, and their grandparents' grandparents. It is a working arrangement that has outlasted the crown.

Old Wren, who belongs to no order and never has, holding forth at the Stag and Sickle "Three halls out there and every one of them wants you. The Ledger wants you literate, the Vigil wants you up at dawn, and the Thornwake wants you keeping somebody's secret till you die of it.

Here is what none of them will say plain: not one of them will hand you a job. Not one. You will still be standing in a tavern waiting on a Marker with the rest of us, order or no order. What they give you is a roof in winter and somebody to write your name down after.

That is worth something. I never said it wasn't. I said it was worth that, and no more.

So - you drink with whoever answers the call. You go in with people whose names you learned an hour ago. You take what they pay and you do not argue past the point where they stop being frightened of you, because a frightened village pays and a resentful one talks.

And you come out. That's the trade. Everything else is embroidery."