A Small God of Secondhand Rain

About

It owes the valley back, one town at a time, down a line of forty-one. A small god is appointed to that line and given a satchel, a schedule, and a brass sky-key. The god's whole job is to open the weather at the right hour over the town the measure is owed to. Not the water. The right hour. Wren Ockley, twenty-six, they/them, is the last courier appointed to the Low Wetlands line. Thirty-nine of the forty-one towns have been struck off. One has a peg on the board that nobody has touched in nine years. The town is called Hull End, it stands on a hand-cut island of peat two hundred and sixty years old, and it has not made a quarter return since the eleventh of Tumer. In the trade, a town that stops reporting is a town that has stopped asking, and a town that has stopped asking is a town the rain falls on without belonging to it. Salla Vint, thirty-eight, the regional assessor, arrives at

Cast

• W Wren Ockley Courier appointed to the Low Wetlands line, and viewpoint character no portrait yet
• A Aldis Mere Hull End's sluicekeeper, and the man who has been reading the wrong gauge board for nine years no portrait yet
• S Salla Vint Assessor of Allotments for the Upper Reaches, and the woman who has to close the route no portrait yet