Master Oswin Prall

Master Oswin Prall keeps a small stall at the north end of the Parchmarket in Caldmere, under the arcade where the parchment-sellers once stood, and there, on the first day of every month, he pins up a fresh copy of the Crown-Shard Reward in his own careful hand. Two hundred marks, it says, for verified news of any shard of the Sundered Crown. He has been pinning it up, with only three missed months in the plague year of 288, for the better part of two decades. The stall is his, the ink is his, the candles are his. The money behind the notice is not.

The reward is Osten Mallory's, lord of Thornwick, whose steward has twice called the whole business a collector's whim when asked in the wrong company. Prall does not pretend otherwise to those who know, but he does not publish it either; the notice bears no house name, only his own. He is a declared Crown-man, one of that loose party of Ardent retainers and country gentry who hold that no succession to the empty throne is lawful until the Crown's pieces are found, and he attended the gentry's meeting at Harrowgate in the autumn of 311 AS. What the meeting resolved, if anything, the archive has no record of.

Early life and the trade of paper

Prall was born about 244 AS, the third son of a chandler of the Sull wharves, and apprenticed at eleven to a notary of the old imperial licence. He practised for thirty-one years, drawing marriage-settlements, barge-charters and wills, and was known for two things: a hand that never faltered and a memory for forged ones. He retired in 304 AS, or rather his clients retired him, for the market had turned to debts and offices and he had no stomach for either. His wife, a bookbinder named Esla, died in 299 AS; her estate carried debts he has never quite discharged, and the House of Quince holds forty-one marks against him still. He lives over a cobbler's shop in Bell Lane and takes his dinner at the same board most nights.

The work of sorting

His days run to a pattern. In the morning he reads what the month has brought: letters, mostly, some sealed, some illiterate and read to him by their bearers. He sorts them into three boxes, which he calls frauds, fancies and the rest. The frauds are the fewest and the most work. He checks seals against his old licence-book, weighs any metal offered against the regalia descriptions — a closed red-gold crown of over six pounds, four low arches, a grey oval centre-stone — and writes a short finding for each, which he keeps. Since the notice went up he has written some four hundred findings. All adverse.

The fancies are sadder and more numerous: old soldiers with lucky stones, widows with their husbands' war-gear, a man from the marches who brought a shard of black glass from the Glassmere's edge and wept when Prall would not pay for it. The clause in the notice that forbids claimants to publish where they searched, on pain of forfeiture, is Prall's own drafting; he says a crowd digging in the wrong place is worse than no digging at all. He remembers the last false shard, exposed as forgery in 289 AS, which cost the Thornwick goldsmith Master Hewell his hands under the old regalia statute, and he does not care to be the cause of another such sentence. In 307 AS he burned a clever glass forgery on his own brazier rather than return it to its maker, and entered the finding as destroyed, no charge laid.

I am asked why I do it, when the Council will not spend a penny. I answer that somebody must keep the door, and I would rather it were a man who charges nothing to open it.

Reputation

The Parchmarket calls him honest and dull, which in a notary is praise. The Crown-men call him their gatekeeper; their opponents call him Mallory's glove. He is in debt, he drinks no more than is ordinary, and he has never been found to have taken a bribe, though two have been offered that the market knows of. His fear, confided to his late wife's sister and by her repeated until it reached this archive, is narrower than politics: that a true shard will one day be laid on his stall-table, that every house and factor and mission in the Reach will know it by nightfall, and that the war the Crown-men say they prevent will begin at his own door, over his own boxes, with the ink still wet on his finding.

Unanswered questions

• What did the gentry's meeting at Harrowgate in 311 AS resolve, and why does Prall decline to speak of it?
• Whose was the third missed notice, in the winter of 309 AS, when Prall was away from Caldmere for a month on what he called family business?
• Prall keeps his four hundred findings in a locked box. Has anyone read them besides himself, and has any finding ever been less adverse than he admits?