Her Own Mark

Ilse is forty, and the shop she works in has only ever used one mark.

It is her father’s: an ash leaf the size of a barleycorn, struck on the underside of everything that leaves by the front door. Thirty years of it, and nobody has ever come back to complain. That small leaf is the reason a stranger will walk in off the lane, hand over a moonstone that belonged to her own mother, and walk out again without asking for a receipt.

Now there is a brooch on the bench with Ilse’s name on the ticket. A bride’s piece — the setting, the finish and the catch, all hers, due in six days. She wants one thing out of it, and it is smaller than anyone would guess. She wants the catch to close true on the first try, with nobody’s hand laid over hers to steady the work.

The trouble is what goes on the back. His leaf on her setting would not be a lie, exactly. And an apprentice of forty — young, for an elf — has no mark of her own to put there.

So she tries to make the piece look like his — his angles, his finish, his longer stroke on the file — and somewhere in the borrowing her attention leaves the room, and the drill goes a hair off true, and a hairline opens at the hinge where a hinge should show no line at all. What she does about it takes a scrap of tool steel, one night, and a decision nobody else was ever in a position to make for her.

Her Own Mark is a warm, quiet, deeply hands-on cozy fantasy short story — about forty minutes’ reading — set in the elven village of Nine Ashes, where the stakes are proportional, the tea arrives without comment, and nothing is ever solved by raising a voice.

The Nine Ashes Short Stories are standalone stories set in the world of the nine Nine Ashes novels. No reading order required. Start anywhere.

For readers who loved Travis Baldree, T. Kingfisher, Becky Chambers, Sangu Mandanna and Heather Fawcett.