I crouch so low I feel the tall blades of grass begin to tickle my scalp, through the curly black strands of my hair.
The stalks of grass are taller than I am, each blade slick with a silver seam of morning dew. Between them I can see him: Kaid—red hair bright as a buoy, freckles spilled across his nose like someone shook a pepper tin too hard. He's whistling, which is how he always gives himself away, and dragging a stick through the seedheads like he's painting the wind. He was probably waiting on me to show up for morning fishing, but I had a surprise.
I inch forward. The field creaks as I hold my breath long enough to hear my own pulse—the slow, patient sound of the tide far off—and then I burst out of the green.
"Tag!"
Kaid yelps so high the gulls complain. I catch him in the ribs and we tumble, grass in our mouths, the world a spinning laugh. He scrambles up first, points his stick at my chest like a sword, and declares, very formally with dramatic acting, "Betrayal."
"War crimes," I agree in laughter, and run.
We both bolted through the last of the field, slid down a sandy cut, and hit the boardwalk with more speed than sense. Saltmere wakes around us: shutters thumped open, nets unfurled on hooks, the smell of last night's brine turning into this morning's hope. Old Thom, who mends pots by the door of his shop, lifts a hand to swat me and misses on purpose. Sela the baker shouts, "Mind your boots!" even as she hides a smile behind a tray of twist-loaves.
"Watch it, you minnows!" a fishwife hollers when we slide between her barrels.
"Sorry!" Kaid sings back, not sorry at all.
They know us. They know me. Some laugh. One or two cluck their tongues because boys are supposed to walk like anchors and not like wind; but their scowls are bent in the middle, the way a scowl gets when it's trying not to become a grin. I wave at everyone who pretends not to see me and they pretend harder and then wink when I pass.
We reach the docks just as the tide turns its shoulder. The planks thrum with the river under them. I leap the last coil of rope, victorious, and fly straight into a wall that is also a woman.
"Enough," Mother Ysolde says, one hand on my shoulder and the other on Kaid's ear. She is taller than any mast and twice as sturdy, her hair pinned like a map of storms. "You two want breakfast? Nets first."
"Yes, Mother Ysolde," we say in the voice every orphan learns—half chorus, half prayer.
She steers us toward the long skiff and the roll of seine stacked like a sleeping serpent. Kaid rubs his ear and mutters, "She never knows where your ear is."
"She can smell the mischief behind yours," I tell him. "It's like herring."
"I take offense," Ysolde says without turning around. "Herring is better behaved."
Kaid punched my shoulder as I held back laughter.
We pushed off into the harbor mouth. The skiff humming with old work; the oarlocks speak in a language of wood. The morning has that clean edge it keeps for a few breaths before the sun commits itself. Ysolde gives the oars a long pull, then another, and points me to the coil.
"Cast when I say," she tells me. "Not when your bones get excited."
"My bones are calm," I say, which is a lie, but only a small one. A white lie, I believe the adults call it.
We line up with the shadow of the east pier, where the current lips over a shelf and the fish forget themselves for a heartbeat. "Now," Ysolde says, and I throw.
The net opens like a word I've practiced in secret. It kisses the water without slapping, sinks in a slow, sure ring, and the skiff drifts with it. Kaid whoops like he's the one who made it beautiful. I lean forward, eyes on the dark, listening.
The water is never silent. It chatters about stones and temperature and the gossip of reeds. Today there's a seam in it, a silver lane knotted with intention. I don't pull hard. I only set my hands where the rope belongs and wait for the lane to roll into the circle we've made.
Affinity for current guidance increased slightly — eddies settle at your touch.
I don't hear a voice. I feel the sentence arrive, as if the boat itself agreed with me.
"Haul," Ysolde says.
We do. The net comes up thick with life—silver backs beating light, tails arguing with air. Kaid's eyes go dinner-plate wide. Ysolde's mouth does not move into a smile, but her shoulders loosen a fraction and I count that as victory.
"Again," she says.
We cast and haul until the skiff rides lower than Ysolde likes. She grunts, "Good job, Caliad." satisfied and reluctant at once, and points us home. On the return glide the town leans closer to see what we've brought. Sela leaves her oven long enough to make a sign against envy. Old Thom mutters, "Good tide," like a benediction.
At the dock, the other children swarm with baskets. We sort fish for the orphanage pot, fish for the market, fish for the old who can't mend their nets anymore. Ysolde's rule is simple as a knot: first we feed ourselves; then we feed those who taught us how; then we feed the rest if we can.
A fishmonger named Hargan waits by the scales with his thumb already heavier than it should be. Ysolde carries the market baskets to him without blinking. I drift nearer with Kaid and pretend I am only there for the thrill of the weights.
"Short morning, Mother?" Hargan says as if the skiff were empty. "I can take it off your hands before it spoils."
"It hasn't decided to spoil yet," Ysolde says. "And it's not your hands it trusts."
He lifts a fish, drops it, and the scale behaves like a tired mule. The counterweights on his beam gleam new where he's filed them wrong. Kaid makes a face. I cough and step exactly so the light from the window catches the edge where the metal isn't true.
Hargan's eyes flick to mine. I don't look away. I don't scowl. I only hold him there in the easy, patient way I would hold a skittish animal until it remembers the path.
Presence deepened — crowds hush when you raise your hand.
He clears his throat and reaches for the proper weights—the ones he keeps under the table like a conscience. The scale speaks the truth this time. Ysolde does not thank him. She ties up the coins in a blue cloth and hands two bread tokens back across the stall.
"For your mother," she says. "She's not well."
Hargan looks like someone took the top plank off his chest so the soft came out. "Aye," he says, small. "Thank you."
That was the thing about Ysolde. Yeah she was built like a muscles muscle, and had a rough accent, but she was the most gentle and compassionate person in the village on the inside. She had a way of knowing how to lighten the weight on anyone's shoulders.
__
We ate at the market edge: bread Sela traded us, fish grilled on a crate stove, an apple Kaid swears he paid for. Ysolde bites the apple in half with a sound like a verdict and keeps the larger piece for me. "You cast clean," she says. That is how Ysolde says I'm proud.
Kaid wipes his mouth on his sleeve and elbows me. "Race you to the pylons."
"After we rinse nets," Ysolde says, without looking, which is her other magic.
We rinsed. We coiled. We hang the seines where the wind can read them. The day warms its shoulders and the gulls begin making terrible decisions as usual. A squall shows its teeth off the point and then thinks better of it. Old Thom falls asleep upright and does not drop his pipe from his lips. Even I, to this day, can't accomplish that but somehow that old lazy coot does it everyday. It's like he's in the flow state of pipe smoking. I tried doing it with a stick once, they wouldn't let me use the pipe for some reason.
A woman I don't know waits by the bell rope when we return to Harborlight. She holds her shawl like it's the only polite thing keeping her together. A little boy clings to her dress and tries to be invisible and fails.
"Mother Ysolde," she says. "He—his father went with the last boats to the sandbar and didn't come back. I can't… the tithe… I can't keep him warm."
Ysolde's face doesn't change. "What's his name?"
"Perrin," the boy says into his mother's skirt. He is missing a shoe and pretending that's a choice.
"We have cots," Ysolde says. "We have hands. We always need hands."
The woman's shoulders shake once, like a net dropping water. "I'll work," she says. "Anything."
"You'll rest first," Ysolde replies. "Then we'll see what anything is."
I kneel in front of Perrin so his eyes have somewhere safe to land. "I'm Caliad," I tell him. "There's stew if you're very brave and terrible tea if you're wise."
"Both," he says, suspicious of the trick.
"Good," I say. "We like both."
I take him to the basin and show him how to scrub without thinking about the cold. He watches my hands, then copies them exactly, all the way down to the fierceness that makes skin glow. When he's dry I give him my extra socks and pretend they were always his.
Affinity for protection blossomed — strangers feel safer at your side.
Kaid appears with two bowls he definitely didn't sneak and grins like he invented generosity. "You're awful," I tell him as he grins, and we eat until the bowls remember they're empty. Full off stew and camaraderie.
Afternoon leans toward evening. Ysolde counts coins, then counts them again, then tucks them where no thief has the patience to look and it's not her arse. We mend a tear in the orphanage roof with tar and good intentions. Kaid falls off the ladder twice on purpose because the girls clap when he does.
When the first lamps blink on along the wharf, I carry the last basket of fish bones to the midden and stand for a while where the harbor opens its throat to the sea. Out there, somewhere beyond the black seam of the horizon, is the world I can hear if I am very quiet. People. Not their words—those are small things—but the shape of their needing.
I close my eyes and listen.
A cart axle will crack tomorrow on the road to Aguador if nobody reins the mule before the rut. The baker's middle child will burn her hand unless someone moves the cooling rack closer to the window. The tide will run faster than the boys expect at noon, and a dare will look like a good idea until it doesn't.
These aren't prophecies. They are the ways a place talks when you let it. I tuck them away to remember in the morning.
"Counting stars?" Ysolde asks behind me.
"Listening," I say.
"For what?"
"For people."
She stands beside me, hands on her hips, the whole town reflected in her eyes. "That's a lot to listen for."
"It's loud," I admit. "But it's not bad. It's a burden I find comfort in."
She stares at me for a second before she bumps my shoulder with hers. "For four year old, you sure talk like man of wisdom. Come on, fish-heart. Soup's waiting."
We cross the yard together. The windows of Harborlight glow the way a story glows when it knows how it ends and has decided to be kind anyway. Inside, Kaid is already telling the new boy a version of our morning that includes dragons, and for once I don't correct him.
Before I go in, I look east, past the last roofs, where clouds sometimes catch a coppery light I don't have a name for. The wind brings me the faintest smell of river yeast and lamp oil, the scent of a city I've only met in dreams.
Not yet, I tell it. But soon.
And the tide, as always, answers by turning.
__
The next morning began the same. Kaid and I played around a bit before being scolded by Ysolde. I fixed a few of the problems the patterns in the air told me about last night.
We didn't have to go fishing this morning however as the yield from the day before was that large.
We would probably be eating fish stew every meal for the next 3 days, but I wasn't complaining, Ysolde was a wizard in the kitchen.
Due to the free time, Kaid and I decided to play around at the docks. I created a game not too long ago that came to me instinctively when I was bored. It's called freeze tag. Us and some other kids from around Saltmere played it together.
I was naturally faster and more agile than the rest of the kids in Saltmere so none of them could catch me. As expected, I dominated. Sigh, I must say it's hard being this great...and this humble.
Kaid and I sprawl on the edge of the pier, feet kicking over green water, trading the kind of talk that doesn't have to go anywhere to mean something.
"Perrin ate three bowls," Kaid says. "He's going to sink like a stone."
"He'll float," I say. "Soup is mostly hope."
"That why you had four?"
"Research," I say, deadpan.
He snorts, then tries to whistle with a mouth full of crumbs and almost falls in. I catch the back of his shirt without looking. We've done this rescue so many times our hands know the choreography.
"You ever think," he says, squinting at the sky, "we'll get a boat of our own?"
"Ysolde will make us sign a treaty first," I say. "Nets before glory, dishes before treaties."
Kaid bumps my shoulder with his and I bump back. We sit there long enough for the sun to feel like it belongs to us.
I'm about to say something unimportant when the hairs on my arms lift. I look up. The blue is too clean, the breeze too polite.
"A storm is coming," I say.
Kaid follows my gaze to a flawless sky. He hesitates—the part of him that trusts me tugging on the part that loves a joke. "Right. A clear, sunny storm. You're cracked, Cal."
"Completely," I say, and I can't help the chuckle. We unwrap the last of our bread and eat with our heels drumming the pier and the gulls pretending they don't care.
—
By afternoon the horizon is a bruise. The air tastes metallic and charged from the static. Ysolde's voice carries over the chop of the wind and crack of thunder in the background—"Up from the docks, now!"—and every child in Saltmere obeys that sound like it's a law.
Kaid shoots me a look, halfway between apology and awe.
I lift my chin at the sky as if to say told you, and let the smug smirk sit there just long enough to be funny.
Then something tugs behind my ribs. I turn to the mouth of the harbor.
A sloop staggers into view, canvas thrashing, the mast lurching wild with each slap of swell. She's running ahead of the squall, trying to beat the black wall to the pylons. On the ramp, three of our youngest—Perrin among them—are herding baskets uphill as fast as their legs can manage.
The angle is wrong. One more yaw and the mast will scythe across the ramp exactly where they'll be in five heartbeats.
"PERRIN!" Kaid bellows, voice cracking to the rafters of the sky. The kids freeze, then scramble, then freeze again the way small animals do when every direction looks like teeth.
I stand, hand rising without thought.
I don't shove the boat. I don't grab the mast. I find the seam in the water—today's silver lane, knotted with its own kind of fear—and offer it a better path. The gust that was going to shove becomes a shoulder. The eddy that wanted to trip remembers it's safer to carry.
Affinity for current guidance increased slightly — eddies settle at your touch.
The mast swings. Not a lurch, not a miracle anyone could point at—just a clean, inevitable arc that misses the children so neatly it feels rehearsed. The hull kisses the outer pylon, skates, and settles into the cradle of water where boats remember how to be boats again.
For a heartbeat the whole dock holds its breath. Then everybody exhales at once and the world starts speaking again—ropes, shouts, the slap of wet canvas, Ysolde already assigning hands like a general.
Kaid stares at me. I tap his shoulder.
"Let's go before the rain hits the shore," I say, and we run for the steps as the first fat drops of rain find the wood and make it sing a melancholic, rustic tune.