The attic didn't sleep, it breathed in whispers and soft mutterings, the worn rafters above flexing gently with the push of night rain.
Rin lay on her cot with her hands folded across her chest, staring at the ceiling as droplets tapped their rhythm into the boards. The smell of mold, straw, and cooled ink hung thick in the rafters, soaked into the wood after years of damp fog and ledger soot. She knew every water stain in the ceiling by shape. Tonight, they looked different, like maps leading out.
On her left, Sarrha twitched in her sleep, murmuring in a tongue that drifted between trade-speak and something older. The stump of her missing arm curled close to her chest like a secret. Issa, silent on Rin's right, lay perfectly still, only the occasional flare of emberlight under her eyelids suggested she hadn't drifted off fully. Emberbloods didn't settle the same way other folk did. Sometimes it seemed like they were just waiting.
The building below had finally gone quiet. No bootfalls in the stairwell. No muttered inventories from the foreledger's office. No Callun. His oil lamp had gone dark nearly an hour ago, and the fire in the ledger hall had long since given out.
Rin slowly sat up. Her breath caught. Nothing moved.
She slid her legs over the side of the cot, careful to shift her weight away from the bent crossbeam that always creaked. She reached underneath and retrieved a twine-wrapped bundle hidden in a hollowed-out support slat: a stub of charcoal, a bit of dried pear rind, and the sketch she'd drawn, the one with sails and knives and a girl who didn't look scared anymore.
She tucked the drawing into her tunic and looped the scarf twice around her neck, not for warmth but to cover the hollow in her throat where anxiety liked to perch.
If someone sees me..
She stopped the thought before it could finish. Like blotting an ink spill before it spread.
She moved.
Each step was calculated: heel to toe, weight on the outer edges. The attic sloped toward the east, which meant gravity wanted her loud. But she knew which floorboards sighed, which ones groaned, and which ones only gave way under Callun's bulk. She ducked past the half-loft beam that had nearly scalped her last month and eased open the narrow door leading to the servant's stair.
It wasn't much warmer below.
The stairwell curved, worn smooth by years of feet, hers among them. She avoided the center. Those steps squeaked. She took the left-hand side where the stone still held the faint chill of rain seeping in from the foundation.
One turn down. Then two.
At the third landing, she paused. Listened.
A shuffly scrape, too slow for boots.
The rat. Probably the same one that lived under the dry pantry and watched her copy manifests.
She exhaled. Kept going.
The final turn was wood. She pressed her palms against the wall as she descended, light, quick, barely touching the boards. In the dark, the familiar scent of the ledger hall wrapped around her like a memory: lamp oil, cold ink, and the leather tang of unwashed ledgers. She passed the broom rack, ducked beneath the laundry hooks, and slid sideways along the chalky rear corridor until she reached the side door behind the coop.
This one wasn't locked. Just latched from the inside, a simple brass pin.
She lifted it carefully, counting to five before easing the door open on its warped hinge.
Outside was a different world.
The fog pressed low to the ground, muffling even her breath. Moisture curled through her hair and clung to her sleeves. The courtyard stones were slick with algae, reflecting what little light leaked from high shuttered windows. Somewhere, a dog barked.
She slipped past the barrels lining the coop wall, ducking low behind a rotting wagon axle. The cold bit into her calves where her trousers had ridden up, but she didn't dare stop. Every second her lungs stayed free was a second she hadn't yet been caught.
She counted her turns: left, then right, then across the alley behind the stables.
The night smelled of salt and wet moss, with a hint of spoiled fish from the bonehouse on Dockwell Corner.
She reached the moss-slick plankway that led down toward the saltpier.
There, silhouetted in fog and starlight, stood the ruins of ships that no longer sailed, their spines reaching upward like the ribs of sea giants long dead. Tarpaulins snapped in the misty breeze. Lanterns guttered behind half-boarded windows.
Rin stood still for a moment, letting the chill seep through her, letting the world recognize her.
No ink-stained fingers. No chain at her wrist.
Just a girl in the dark, walking toward something that might finally belong to her.
The saltpier stretched like a wounded thing, hunched over the shoreline, all splinters and soft collapse. Fog clung to its bones, a mess of rotted docks, shuttered fishsmoke dens, and warehouses that sagged against each other like old drunks in the rain.
Rin's breath came shallow now. The farther she got from the ledgerhouse, the more the air seemed to open, wider, sharper, less forgiving. And less watched.
The pier itself had long since sunk at the edges, boards curling where nails had rusted loose. Salt-hardened ropes snaked across the walk like dead eels, and nets hung from half-poles, dry and tattered, still holding crab shells long gone brittle.
She stepped carefully, each bootfall softened by moss or the rot beneath.
One building leaned inward toward another, the two kissing at the upper stories like conspirators, their shared eaves dripping a quiet rhythm. A tavern sign clung to a single nail and spun slow with the wind, THE BRINE-BACK. Someone had once scratched a crude "M" over the "B," and the joke had yellowed under weather.
Here, the buildings didn't glow. They leaked, light spilled crooked through torn paper shutters, through warped glass and split siding. In the shadows beneath the stilts, she saw hints of movement: a hand passed a coin to another, a child with salt-pale eyes ducked behind a barrel. She heard the low clink of glass, a muffled argument, and something that might've been laughter or pain.
Her hands were sweating. She wiped them on her thighs, trying not to shake.
The sea was closer here, she could taste it in the air, heavy with brine and the iron smell of drowned wood. Something deeper, too: old fish rot, tangy oils, and scorched rope, the smells of a dock that once mattered and now didn't.
She paused under an overhang near a low-staired shack. Her eyes traced the curl of a broken weather vane, creaking on each loop as if caught in an argument with the wind. A worn shanty hook swung loose from the eaves, no longer used to haul anything but rainwater.
That's when she heard it.
Soft at first, a thread of sound, caught between gusts. A humming line, not sharp enough to carry, not clean enough to follow. But it had rhythm. And it was familiar.
Rin froze.
Not the words, those were blurred by drink or distance, but the cadence. It was the same line she'd heard dockside when the barrels fell. The same lilt. Her heart caught mid-beat.
She turned down the alley beside the crooked tavern, every board warped and damp. A candle guttered behind a cracked pane, casting yellow slivers across her path.
He's here.
She crept forward until the door came into view, old wood, bowed in the center, edges eaten by salt.
A window sat just beside it, the glass warped and bubbled like water trapped inside.
She peered through it.
The light was dim. Tables crooked. Mugs and bones and bits of netting scattered on the floor. And there, in the back corner beneath a leaning beam, sat the man.
The same man.
Coat frayed, beard salted, eyes sunk deep into a thousand yards of nothing.
He hummed the line again, low and aimless, staring into a chipped cup. The tune looped under his breath like it didn't belong to him anymore.
Rin's hand found the frame of the tavern door. She didn't knock. Didn't call out.
She just stood there, heart a hammer, breath caught tight.
She knew that face.
She knew that voice.
And she knew that song.
She slipped inside without knocking, the tavern's warped door letting out a sigh behind her like it disapproved of being disturbed.
The air was thicker on this side of the wall.
Smoke hung low near the rafters, and the warmth came from bodies and old fire. She stood just inside the doorway for a beat, letting her eyes adjust.
The tavern felt smaller now that she was in it, walls slumped inward, floorboards bowing, the entire place sagging like it was tired of staying upright. A film of oil shimmered across the plank floors in the candlelight.
She spotted him instantly. No need to scan.
He sat just where she'd seen him, under a lopsided beam in the corner, cup cradled like a relic in his scarred hands.
He still hummed. Still hadn't noticed her.
Rin moved forward, breath shallow, boots whispering across the sticky floor. No one else looked up. The tavern's few patrons remained lost in drink or slumber, a man asleep with his boots on the table, a pair dicing with empty shells, one with a bruised jaw mumbling into his bowl.
She reached his table.
When he lifted his eyes, it was like shaking off a long weight. His gaze didn't rise so much as slide upward, reluctant, flickering through the candlelight as if hoping to see no one there.
"You followed the wrong shadow," he rasped. "Unless you're lost. Then you're still wrong."
His voice was salt and soot, rasped over time, with an undertow of slurred consonants that spoke of ship decks and storm yelling.
"You sang a shanty," Rin said. "At the docks. When the barrels fell."
He took a drink. Set the mug down. Looked past her, toward the door she hadn't closed all the way.
"I sing plenty. Doesn't mean any of 'em want listening."
"But it worked," she said. "The water stopped."
That earned her a blink.
Just the one.
His grip on the mug shifted slightly, his thumb curling under the handle now instead of across. He turned it once, slow.
"That so."
Rin glanced at the others. Still unaware, still idle. Then back to him.
She leaned in just enough to speak softly, deliberately.
"When the ropes pull slack and the reef-bones grind."
She didn't sing it.
She spoke it. Exact cadence. Exact tempo. Words clipped tight, precise like a blade's edge.
The tavern didn't tilt. The lamps didn't flicker. No great magic burst from her lips.
But the mug between them trembled.
A tension in the table that made the wood pulse, the way rigging holds just before a storm hits. The liquid inside shifted and clung to the rim before easing back down.
A breeze kissed the back of her neck.
The man's eyes narrowed.
He sat straighter, spine uncoiling a notch. He set the mug aside with care.
"You don't know what that is."
"No," Rin said. "But I want to."
His gaze swept her again, more thoroughly this time.
Ink-stained fingers. Callused hands. Ragged hem. Smudged sleeves.
"You're ledgerhouse," he said. "Knew I smelled paper."
"Not anymore."
"It stays on you. Longer than chains."
"Ink doesn't scare me."
He gave a dry, sharp exhale that wasn't quite a laugh.
"It should. Ink kills slower than blades."
His hand drifted to his jaw. Rubbed at the spot below one cheekbone where an old bruise might've been, or maybe still was.
He sat quiet a while.
Then:
"Come back tomorrow. Same hour. If you're still this stupid."
"That's not a yes."
"It's not a no, either."
She started to answer, but he lifted a finger.
"One thing."
She stopped.
"Repeat that line outside this room," he said, "and the sea won't be what finds you."
The tavern door shut behind her with a whisper more than a creak, as if the place were relieved to be rid of her. Rin stood for a moment beneath the crooked lintel, the murky yellow lamplight spilling onto the mist-slick steps. Fog had thickened in her absence. It clung to her skin, soft as cheesecloth and cold as cellar stone.
Saltpier at night didn't sleep; it just held its breath. The tide was out, but the air stank of low water and things left too long beneath it. Street lamps were fewer here, their flames gone guttering in the brine-heavy air. Shadows melted across doorways. The rotted planks of the dockwalk groaned beneath her soles.
Somewhere above, the wind tugged on old rigging, making the masts creak like wooden bones. A fog bell tolled once in the distance, low and muffled.
Rin adjusted her collar and started back.
The buzz of adrenaline still lingered, electric and sour in her mouth. The words she'd said inside echoed through her, more powerful in memory than they'd felt aloud. She didn't understand what she'd awakened, not really. But something had changed. Something had heard her.
"Repeat that line outside this room, and the sea won't be what finds you."
His warning wasn't just threat. It was a weight. It followed her down the alleys like a third shadow.
She hugged the sides of buildings, navigating narrow gutters and plank-bridges that connected Saltpier's sagging structures. The deeper she went, the more the fog thickened. Some corners of the pier became almost abstract, nothing but smell and silhouette, dead fish, burnt grease, and the mildew that thrived between boards.
A few steps ahead, a tin lantern swung outside a rickety fishmonger's stall, its light drowned in the haze. And just beyond it, a flash of movement.
Rin froze.
The fog shifted. Something was wrong.
The shape hadn't been a cart or a dog or an off-duty sailor pissing against a wall.
It had paused.
She turned. Too late.
Something collided with her ribs.
Rin's breath punched out in a strangled croak. Her shoulder slammed into the slick wall behind her, and her knees buckled. A figure was on her, brutal in intention. She saw a flash of a wool sleeve, the glint of copper teeth in a grimace, and then pain blossomed behind her ear.
She hit the boards hard.
Her fingers scraped for purchase. A hand grabbed her collar. Another jammed against her hip, patting for pouches, tools, coin. She writhed, kicked, spat, but the grip only shifted, impersonal and searching. A voice cursed low.
"Nothing. Just a scribbler."
A knee in her side. The weight vanished.
Boots thudded away.
Rin gasped in the dark, cheek pressed to wood gone rough with salt-blister. Her ears rang. Blood matted the curls above her temple. The fog licked at her wounds with uncaring tenderness.
For a while, she didn't move.
Then her body shuddered once, and she rolled onto her back, teeth clenched against the wet boards. Her ribs screamed. One eye refused to open fully. She tasted copper. One of her boots was gone. Her fingers throbbed.
She used a rusted fish rack to pull herself upright. Her other hand shook as it reached for the railing.
The pier swayed.
Or maybe that was her.
She limped. Each step back toward the ledgerhouse was an act of spite. Just a refusal to stay where she'd been broken.
By the time she reached the ledgerhouse's rear stairs, her fingers had gone numb. She climbed without breathing. The stairs creaked once, but not enough to wake the mistress.
The attic door groaned open.
Sarrha and Issa slept beneath threadbare blankets. Issa faced the wall, arms curled like a child's. Sarrha's single arm clutched her tunic close, back to the others.
Rin didn't light the lantern.
She shuffled to her cot, not removing her boot, not bothering to undress. She sat heavily, shoulders hunched, blood still trickling past her ear.
The room smelled of ink, oil, mildew, and now blood.
Her hand went to her temple. She winced. Blotted the gash with a page torn from the ledgerhouse refuse stack. The blood seeped through quickly. She folded the sheet and stuffed it under her cot, teeth clenched.
She leaned back slowly, every joint stiff. Her ribs ached with each shallow breath. Her fingers brushed her cot frame, trembling.
Outside, a gull called once, sharp and distant. Somewhere beneath the ledgerhouse, the sea whispered through barnacled struts.
Rin didn't cry.
Didn't speak.
She stared at the ceiling.
The shadows there didn't flicker like they usually did. No lamp, no moon.
Just silence.
And pain.
She let it stay.