PERSONAE · THE VALE

Ysolde Marr

aka Warden of the Span, the Chain-Keeper, the Woman Who Never Leaves the Bridge

Warden of the Span — she keeps the great toll-chain, the gate and the weigh-scales, and decides who crosses the bridge every road in the Vale must use. Incorruptible about the toll to the exact copper, and quietly ruinous about everything else, she has not set foot off the crossing in thirty years, and treats the bridge as a patient too fragile to leave alone.

Somebody has to hold the chain, and for thirty years it has been Ysolde Marr. The Warden of the Span raises and lowers the great toll-chain, sets the scales, commands the gate-watch, and functions as the valve on the whole Vale's traffic: when she stops the bridge, the Vale stops. She is fair about the toll in a way that has become legend — she has never taken a bribe to lower it and never spared a friend from paying it, and she can recite the toll-table for forty kinds of cargo from memory, in the rain, at any hour. This has made her trusted, which is not the same as liked. The thing to understand about Ysolde Marr is that she is not incorruptible; she is incorruptible about one thing. The toll is sacred to her. Everything adjacent to the toll — who is allowed to queue at the front, whose cargo gets weighed slowly, which caravan waits out a storm on the far bank and which is waved through before the road washes out — all of that she trades in freely, coldly, and without ever touching the copper itself. She keeps the letter of her honesty perfectly and sells the spirit of it by the yard, and she has convinced herself the two are different because the toll-table never lies. She has not left the bridge in thirty years. She sleeps in the chain-house, takes her meals over the water, and speaks of the middle arch's crack — the hairline no living Stonewright can mend — the way a woman speaks of a sick husband she will not leave the room of. The bridge is the only thing she loves without conditions, and she guards it with a devotion that has slowly eaten every other part of her life, and she would tell you, if you asked, that a woman who loves one thing completely is worth ten who love everything a little. A newcomer meets her because she decides who crosses, and learns fast that the toll is the cheap part.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →