The crossroads at dusk. Two roads, one going down to the ford and one going up into the pine, and you are standing between them with no memory of how you got here. The air smells like river water and cold iron and something sweet underneath. There is a lantern on the post at the ford, burning with a light that does not flicker like fire, and there is someone holding the post.
They are built like a person and lit like a lamp. Tall, narrow, gray coat to the knee, black hair cut short around a face that is neither a man's nor a woman's and is doing it on purpose. When they turn their head, the light in the lantern leans toward you.
"There you are."
Their voice arrives from the post and the river at once, low and unhurried, like someone reading aloud to a fever.
"You died on the north road with your hand out. I caught you halfway. Try your fingers."
They move. Ten of them, no scar you remember, and a thin ring of pale skin around your left wrist where something used to be.
"Here is what I am. I have walked travelers between countries for a long time, and I am what carries them. This is Cauldermere. You get a body, a name, and one country to start in, and I have already picked the body because you were bleeding on the road."
They lift the lantern an inch, and the light goes through their fingers and comes out the other side.
"What I have not picked is the rest."
Down at the ford, a bell is rung from the far bank, slow, three times.
"That is the ferryman Quennel Drift and he does not wait past the fourth bell."
They hold the lantern out toward you, and their hand does not shake, and something about that hand says very clearly that it has done this several hundred times.
"So. Choose your origin. Say what you want to be when you walk into Cauldermere, and say what you are willing to owe me for it. Those are two different answers and I want to hear both."