Fenn Hallows caught the plank before it fell on his foot. The nail had rusted through again. He held the board against the stall post and squinted at the market beyond, where three buyers walked past without looking up. One of them laughed at something. Fenn was fairly sure the laugh was aimed at his roof. He was old, stooped, and patched at every seam. His stall was worse. He had built it himself thirty years ago, and it had leaned a little more each winter. Now the sign hung crooked over a counter of trinkets nobody trusted: bottled inks, bent keys, charms strung on wire. He wanted this stall to become the place where mortals and gods traded across the same counter. Today it could not even hold a shelf. A small white creature ran down his arm and sat on the plank. The luma squirrel had pale markings that glowed faintly along its back. It sniffed the rusted nail and chattered at him. "I know," Fenn said. "I know." He let the plank drop and walked out from behind the counter. He looked at the whole hut from the front, the way a buyer would. The roof sagged. The shutters hung open at wrong angles. A rope of charms drooped so low it brushed the dirt. No one would bargain here. No one would even stop. He took the strings of charms down. He took down the bent keys, the cracked bowls, the tin cups. He piled everything on the ground and stood in front of an empty counter. Then he started over. He pulled the leaning post straight and wedged a stone under its base. He tied the crooked sign flat with fresh cord. He arranged only six things on the counter: three inks, two charms, one small carved box. He swept the dirt in front of the stall until the ground was clean enough to stand on. The luma squirrel watched from the roof beam. When Fenn stepped back, it hopped down onto the counter and curled beside the carved box, tail bright against the wood. A woman passing with a basket slowed. She looked at the squirrel. Then she looked at Fenn. "How much for the box?" she said. Fenn's hands were shaking. He put them flat on the counter to hide it. "Depends what you'll trade." She set down a copper coin and a folded paper. "Coin, and a message. I need it carried past the split arch by dusk." Fenn looked at the paper. Past the mossy basalt arch was a half day's walk, and the fungi there made people sick. He thought of the sagging roof behind him, and the empty months. He picked up the paper. "Done," he said. The woman took the box. The luma squirrel chittered once, sharp, as if it already knew what the paper would cost him.

Fenn stood at the edge of his stall with the folded paper in his hand. The copper coin sat warm in his palm beside it. Past the split arch by dusk. He had seen men come back from that road with skin gray as ash, coughing spores for a month. He had no mask, no salve, no charm strong enough. He would not last the walk. He closed the stall early. The luma squirrel rode his shoulder as he walked out past the last houses and into the treeline. He needed help, and he knew only one person who lived close to that road and did not fear it. Juno Brass kept a garden in a clearing beyond the town. She was a demigod, tall as two men, with mossy antlers and hooves for feet. People whispered her mother had been a forest spirit. People whispered her name had been struck from the old stories. Fenn had traded her seeds once for a jar of ink and she had not cheated him. That was all he had to go on. He found her kneeling among low green plants, pulling weeds with hands the size of shovels. She did not look up. "You're off your path, merchant." "I need to cross the fungal ridge," Fenn said. "By dusk. I'll be sick before I'm halfway." She kept weeding. "Then don't go." "I took the trade. I keep it." She sat back on her hooves and looked at him. Her eyes were brown and steady. "What are you offering?" Fenn set the copper coin on a flat stone between them. Then he lifted a small charm from his robe, one of the ones he never explained, and set it beside the coin. "This too. It wards against drowning. You live near water. It's honest work." She picked up the charm. She turned it over in her fingers. The luma squirrel chittered on his shoulder. "A god would take the coin and give you nothing," she said. "You know that." "You're not a god." Something shifted in her face. Not a smile. Close. She stood and walked to a shelf of dried bundles hung under a lean-to. She pulled down a wad of pale leaves and a stoppered clay jar. "Chew three leaves before you enter. Three more at the arch. Rub the paste on your nose and mouth. It won't stop everything. It will stop enough." She dropped them into his hands. "Walk fast. Don't sit down. If you sit down, you sleep, and if you sleep there, you don't wake." Fenn folded the leaves into his sleeve. "Thank you." "Bring me back word that you lived," she said. "That's the rest of the price." He nodded. He turned toward the low road with the paper in his fist and the squirrel tight against his neck. The sun was already halfway down.

Fenn walked the low road with the leaves already bitter on his tongue. The sun sat low. The paper in his fist named the split arch by dusk, and the arch was still hours ahead on foot. He would not make it. He knew it the way he knew the weight of a bad coin. His legs were old. The paste stung his upper lip. The luma squirrel dug its claws into his collar and would not settle. He stopped where the path bent past a briar hedge. A goat stood in the gap. It was cream-colored and curly-fleeced, with horns tilted back like a lord's hat. It watched him with the calm of something that had been waiting. Fenn had traded with farmers long enough to know a working animal from a wild one. This one wore no rope. It chewed nothing. It only looked at him. "You belong to someone," he said. The goat took two steps toward him and turned its flank. It was broad across the back. Sturdy. It stood. Fenn understood offers. He had made his life on them. He knelt slow on his bad knee and opened his palm. He had one thing left on him worth trading, a small brass button stitched inside his sleeve that hummed faint when weather turned. He cut the thread with his teeth and held the button out. The goat lowered its head. Fenn tied the button into the curls behind its ear. The squirrel chittered once, sharp, then went quiet. He climbed on. The goat's back took his weight without a shudder. It started walking before he had his balance. Its pace was steady and quick, faster than his legs had moved in ten years. The hedge blurred. The squirrel flattened against his neck. The fungal ridge came up gray and wet. Fenn chewed his second three leaves and pressed more paste to his mouth. The goat did not slow. Its hooves clicked on stone the fungi could not seem to touch. Bulbs the size of fists glowed purple and orange on both sides. Spores drifted. Fenn held his breath in long pulls and let it out through the paste. They came out the other side while the sun still cleared the trees. The split arch stood in a clearing, two shafts of dark basalt cracked apart down the middle, moss along their tops, strange fungi glowing at their feet. Fenn slid down. His legs held. The goat waited. He stepped through the gap and set the folded paper on the flat stone between the two halves, as the note had told him. He did not stay to see what took it. He turned back to the goat. It was gone. The button lay in the dirt where the goat had stood, clean of any curl of fleece. Fenn picked up the button. Dusk was still an hour off. He had made the trade. Now he had to get home, and someone had wanted that paper delivered by a stranger for a reason.

Fenn tucked the button into his sleeve and started the walk home. The paste on his lip had gone dry. The luma squirrel sat up straight on his shoulder, watching the road behind them. He had delivered the paper. He had survived the ridge. Now he wanted his own bed and a cup of anything hot. He had gone maybe twenty steps when a woman was walking beside him who had not been there before. She was small and dark-haired, in purple and gold robes, with a heavy necklace of mismatched coins across her chest. She matched his pace exactly. The squirrel did not startle. That told Fenn more than her clothes did. "You did the work," she said. "I'm here to walk you back." Fenn kept his eyes on the path. "And who are you to me?" "Penny. Goddess of commerce." She tapped one coin on the necklace. "That paper you left on the stone was mine. The goat was mine. You held up your end." Fenn stopped. His knees were glad of it. He had spent years wanting a god to speak to him plain. Now one did, and his mouth was dry. "You could have carried it yourself," he said. "No. I couldn't." She did not explain. They walked. The low road smoothed under his feet in a way roads did not usually smooth. The fungal ridge was already behind them, though he did not remember passing it. Dusk held off. He understood he was being escorted, and that the trip home would cost him nothing he could count. His stall came up out of the trees before he expected it. The weathered hut with its charms and hung trinkets, the stall front piled with bottles and boxes. His door. His step. Penny stopped at the base of it. "I need to hire you," she said. Fenn set his hand on the rail. "Hire." "Someone stole gold from my treasury. I cursed the gold to come back on its own. It hasn't. The thief knew a counter-magic almost no one remembers." She touched the coins at her throat. "That gold holds up every fair trade in this world. Without it, the scales tip. I've already felt it." "Why me." "You buy and sell what other traders won't touch. Cursed gold will pass through a stall like yours before it passes through a bank." She looked at him straight. "Name your price. I'll meet it." Fenn's chest went tight. This was the thing he had wanted. A god at his counter, waiting on his number. He thought of the coat traded for a blessing that cost nothing. He did not want that trade. He wanted the other one. "My price is a standing arrangement," he said. "Gods come to my stall and bargain by my rules. Starting with you." Penny's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "Agreed," she said. "Start looking tomorrow."

Fenn slept four hours and woke stiff. Penny was gone, but the deal she left behind sat on him like a wet coat. Before he could chase cursed gold for one god, he owed a report to another. Juno Brass had given him the paste that kept the fungal ridge from killing him. In return she wanted him back at her door, alive, with the story. If he made her wait, she would take back the goodwill he needed to bring gods to his counter at all. He fed the luma squirrel a nut, shut the stall, and walked out past the town to the herb woman's edge of the woods. Juno was on her knees in the yarrow, hooves folded under her, antlers dragging a low branch. She did not look up when he stopped at the row. "You took your time," she said. "I took a day," Fenn said. "I came as soon as I could stand." She pulled a weed and set it aside. "Sit. Talk." Fenn sat on a stump. He told it flat. The paste had held on the ridge. He had reached the split arch by dusk. He had left the paper on the stone. A cream-colored goat had carried him across and vanished after. The goddess of commerce had walked him home and hired him for a second job. Juno's hands stopped in the dirt. "Penny," she said. "Penny." "You took her coin?" "I took better than coin. A standing arrangement. Gods bargain at my stall by my rules." She looked at him then. Her eyes were the color of wet bark. He could not read what moved behind them. "That was the trade you wanted your whole life," she said. "Yes." "And now you've told me." She wiped her hands on her dress. "Debt closed. Paste paid for. Ward paid for. Your survival witnessed." Fenn's shoulders eased. "Then we're square." "We're square." She pulled another weed. "Fenn. A word, free of charge." "Go on." "Penny's gold is older than most of the gods who'll come sniffing at your counter for it. Whoever took it knew a counter-magic. That means someone with patience. When word gets out you've made yourself the place gods deal, you'll get the thief too. Dressed as a customer." Fenn thought about that. The squirrel shifted on his shoulder. "Why tell me?" "Because I liked being paid on time." She bent back to the yarrow. "Go home. Open the stall. They'll come." He walked back the way he came. The goodwill was kept. The debt was shut. But Juno's warning walked with him now, heavier than the paste jar had been. Somewhere out there, a customer with a counter-curse in their pocket was already deciding when to visit his counter.