The Chainwoman of Callow Water

About this book

In the Esk March, land belongs to whoever walks it. Once a Registry surveyor drags a sworn chain along a boundary and the line is inked into the Book of Bounds, crossing it without leave sickens the body. Marit Tolle has carried other men's chains for eleven years: limping, poor, the daughter of a hanged forger. Now, at forty-one and a licensed surveyor at last, she stands at a ford with a blackened brass chain at her feet. Children are dying downriver, men are gathering with picks, and her sister will not look at her. Marit means to walk her own line backwards, stone by stone, though the law gives her no leave from either side and the sickness may kill her. Why would a woman undo the work that made her? To answer, she must go back twelve years to the summer she held the chain alone.