The spare iron kettle
Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
The col-house has a second kettle: a small, squat iron one, black, with a rim of old scale inside, that lives in the cellar and comes up only when the road sends more travellers than the copper can boil for. By the south window there is a second hook in the stone, set there by some keeper long ago for a purpose nobody remembers, and for all of Toll's first five years it held nothing. The iron kettle is a working pot, plain and useful, and nobody looks for it from the road; that is the copper's job. But a working pot hung by the window says something too. Fill it at night, Marga says. Iron rusts dry.
