The Parchmarket

The Parchmarket is the oldest of Caldmere's markets, a broad cobbled square between the Mint and the river stairs, and it takes its name from what was sold there first: grain in the southern stalls, parchment and vellum in the north. The grain has thinned since the Long Winter and the parchment has not, which tells an archivist most of what he needs to know about the age. What the market sells now, beyond its sacks and skins, is paper of another kind — debts, offices, wardships, bonds and promises — and on bourse days the square does the quiet business that the Hall of Seven Hearths will only acknowledge a week later, if at all.

The square and its trades

The square is flagged with worn grey stone, treacherous in frost, and smells of wet vellum, sealing-wax, lamp-oil and the horse-dung the sweepers never quite reach. Stall-holders sell ink cake, quills, sand, starch and ribbon; chandlers work the west end, and a roasting woman named in the market court's rolls only as the widow's daughter has sold chestnuts at the same corner, winter and summer, within living memory. Goodwife Ansa Vell keeps the starch-and-wax stall nearest the board, and it is a commonplace of the Row that nothing said over her counter stays under her roof.

Along the west side runs a vaulted gallery called Notaries' Row, where some thirty licensed notaries keep desks under the arches. Here documents are witnessed, sealed and enrolled; the notaries charge by the line and by the seal, and the market's scribes will copy a letter for a penny or read one for two. Master Oswin Prall practised at the Row for thirty-one years, and though he retired in 304 AS his hand is still seen at the square each month. The Row's braziers burn all day; men warm their wax there, and sometimes other things. The archive notes without comment that a claimant's forged glass shard was destroyed on Prall's own brazier in 307 AS.

The Bourse of Nine Benches

On the first and third market days of each week, the square's centre is cleared for what the porters call the Bourse of Nine Benches — nine deal benches set around the market cross, each with its customary trade: grain futures, river tolls, offices and wardships, the houses' bonds, League paper, and at the ninth bench, which has no written name, everything else. Dealing is by voice and witnessed by standing notaries; a debt may change hands three times between the morning bell and the close. The bell itself, a dented brass thing called the Kettle Bell for its sound, is rung by the market beadle and its word is final on whether a bargain was struck inside the day.

How much of Varrow is traded here is a matter the Council would rather not have measured. The charter-houses of the Tidebound League buy Regency paper at a discount on the third bench; a League factor has watched the Regency's debts from the council hall itself since this year, but his principals' instructions are written here first. Border lords sell offices they have no clear right to grant; houses buy each other's marriage portions and each other's embarrassments. It is said in the Row — accounts differ as to who first said it — that the seven houses learn of their own alliances at the Parchmarket, and the archive has no record of the saying being denied by anyone with standing.

They rang the bell at noon and by dusk the Council had a new creditor, the marches a new captain, and old Lord Dunmore a debt he swore he never signed. All legal. All witnessed. That is the worst of it.

The great board

At the market cross stands the great notice-board, oak gone black with weather, where anything may be posted for four pence and the market seal. Here hang the standing rewards of the age. The Crown-Shard Reward, two hundred marks for true news of a shard of the Sundered Crown, is renewed on the first day of each month at Master Prall's own expense, and he is seen to copy it fair himself, stoop and all, before the beadle will seal it. Beside it, since late Ashfall of this year, hangs the Mallory Reward of House Mallory for 'metal of the old imperial forging', which every reader in the square understands and no one says aloud. Claimants, beggars, map-sellers and false witnesses gather beneath the board in all weathers; the market court fines those who post without the seal, but the fine is four pence, and the board is thick with paper.

Rumours

The square's talk is cheap and mostly wrong, which has never diminished its trade. It is said that League factors outbid each other for Mallory paper through the ninth bench; that Crown-men have bought every old map of the Glassmere roads the Row's stationers can find; that a notary of the Row keeps a private book of who sells what, and would sell the book itself if the market allowed it. The archive repeats none of these as fact. It records only that in Mistmonth, 312 AS, a clerk of the Row was seen counting League coin at the widow's chestnut stall after the close, and would not say whose.