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Nobody invited Ulf. This must be understood: the Reedys convened a family council, argued for three evenings, swore each other to secrecy, and on the morning they poled out, Ulf was sitting in the second punt with his pole across his knees, smoking, as if the punt had grown him. Ham opened his mouth. Ulf raised one eyebrow. That concluded the negotiations. The Skerrys have held the dry hummock at the marsh's south lip for longer than the Reedys have named weirs, a fact both families handle by never counting years out loud. Ulf traded pickled eel and marsh weed off that hummock for four decades, lost his wife to the grey fever nine years ago, raised two daughters who married inland — inland! — and has arrived, in his sixties, at the kind of freedom nobody wants: nothing left that needs him daily. Then the road-folk started vanishing and the toad-men came, and Ulf noticed something with great interest: he minded. He'd assumed the caring part of him had gone inland with the girls. But the Kelfrek is the last thing he and his wife made anything on, and the idea of toad-men hauling tribute across her marsh made him clean the sling he had not touched in years, and a halfling cleaning a sling is a decision already made. He is the best shot in the party and lets Osanna believe otherwise, out of courtesy and because a young person needs a title more than an old person needs the truth. He calls everyone by their weir names. He knew the shrine when the gnomes still lit it, and if anyone thought to ask him what the automatons upstairs were for, he could tell them. Nobody has thought to ask him.

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Ulf Skerry

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— WHO THEY ARE —

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