Dawn found Rowan awake.
Not fully—caught between the dream's undertow and the raft's gentle cant—his breath still coming in shallow pulls that thought they were drowning. The boards were cool beneath his palm. Overhead, the sky had the color of pearl scraped thin. Lanterns hung dark on their hooks.
A warmth pressed along his side.
"Another one?" Luna's voice was sleep-soft, rough where it met morning. Her head lay near his shoulder on the shared blanket, hair splayed like ink on coarse sailcloth. She hadn't moved much in the night; she slept close, as if to anchor him when the waves in his head turned mean.
He swallowed. "Yes."
She didn't ask what it was. She never did unless he offered. Instead, she lifted her hand and set two fingers along his jaw, a touch light as breath. "You were very far away," she murmured. "Come back."
He let out the air he hadn't realized he was holding. The raft creaked, a baby cried somewhere across the ring, a gull shrieked with the rude certainty of gulls. Near his right hand, the water in a shallow clay bowl shivered—Midg cutting tiny, frantic circles, silver flashing quick as thought.
"Easy," Rowan said, dragging the pad of his finger through the bowl. The minnow rushed to meet it, bumping skin with a soft insistence until the circles slowed. "It's all right."
Luna pushed herself up on one elbow. "He knows when you go," she said. "Sometimes I think he tries to follow."
"He's braver than I am," Rowan said. It came out lighter than he felt.
"Mm." Her mouth tilted. "He's very small. It lowers the cost of bravery."
He turned his head. They were close enough that her breath warmed his cheek. Close enough that the salt at the corner of her mouth could have been his. The privacy felt improbable out here among two dozen rafted decks, and yet it existed—as if the hush between them made space where none should fit.
"You should sleep more," she said.
He reached for a grin and found a frayed one. "I was about to say that to you."
"Liar," she said, fond, and tucked herself closer for a moment, cheek against his shoulder, their sea-cords brushing—a shell bead against a shell bead, two knots snugged firm. He felt the small, simple shock of contentment: not a grand feeling, not prophecy—warmth, weight, the quiet agreement of shared breath. Hints of a life you could live when the world wasn't ending.
She drew back first, practical even here. "We'll be late for first nets."
"I'm the Keeper. I think that means I can declare morning later."
"Keeper," she said, deadpan, "you are very brave." Then she rose, the blanket falling from her shoulder, the morning air touching skin that had spent the night under his arm. He looked, not for long—long enough to smile at a bruise he recognized as his doing, hidden where only he would see.
They ate standing: heel of bread, dried kelp, a strip of smoked fish Luna pretended not to notice him slipping to Midg's bowl like a bribed godling. The fleet uncurled around them. Nets hauled up, men swore cheerfully. The Thalriss hammered a cleat back into a stubborn seam. On a distant raft, someone tuned a stringed instrument and found two good notes and one bad.
Out beyond the ring, the sea lifted as if something pressed gently from beneath. A ridged spine broke the surface, scales serrated with salt. Tani traced a slow, wide circle—no hurry, no threat—an old god on morning patrol. Rowan felt the hum before he saw the eye, the low thrumming in his ribs that was not heart and not thought and felt like both.
"Tani," he said, nearly to himself. The golden eye slid briefly above the waterline, fixed on him, blinked.
Luna watched the dragon watching Rowan. "He waits for you," she said.
"I don't make him," Rowan said.
"That," she said, "is one of the reasons he waits."
They crossed the narrow plank-lashed bridge into the council ring as the sun climbed. Twelve rafts made the platform, their seams weeping saltwater in tiny beads. The Islanders had laid woven mats that smelled faintly of smoke and sweetgrass; the Thalriss had set their low stools in a half-moon, armor burnished to a dull shine, helms on knees. The braziers were already lit, the smoke a thin sting under the nose.
Elder Kahe sat with her ink-stained fingers folded on her lap. Commander Vesk leaned on his knees, beard rings clicking when he shifted his jaw. The murmuring had the taste of argument even before words sharpened.
Rowan and Luna took their place together—no ceremony, but visible. Lyra drifted up on Rowan's other side with a driftwood slate tucked under her arm and the expression of someone who enjoyed watching other people step on rakes.
Kahe began with patience and the numbers. "Shoals at South-Three and South-Five are thinning. Nets from dusk showed slime on the lead lines, rot-slick by midnight. We burned two."
Vesk's mouth tugged in a direction that wasn't a smile. "My crews ran out of salt two nights ago. We are boiling broth and calling it dinner." He lifted his eyes to Rowan—tired, direct. "If the pact is real, Keeper, it must feed."
"It will," Rowan said. He felt Luna's quiet weight just at the edge of his shoulder, Lyra's glance sliding across him like a measuring line. He looked around the circle, letting his gaze rest, not dart. "We rotate: Islanders at dawn, Thalriss at dusk. Shared watch at the turn—no boat alone after nightfall. If a net fails, the next three mends go to them first; if one side pulls fat, the other pulls lean and we balance by morning."
"You will balance air into fish?" a Thalriss elder said, not quite scoffing.
"We can stop pulling where the sea's gone bad." Rowan kept his voice low. "Tani can smell it before the rot shows. He'll lead night patrol. We will mark foul water and leave it to suffocate on its own."
One of the Islander captains made a face. "Leave it? It creeps."
Lyra finally cut in, voice mild and dangerous. "So do drunks and arguments. Poking them doesn't help."
That earned a few reluctant snorts. Kahe's mouth twitched toward approval. Vesk lifted a palm. "We'll try your rotation. If my people starve, I will come howling."
"I've heard your whisper," Rowan said. "It's louder than my howl."
That earned a real grunt that might have been a laugh. The mood shifted half a notch toward possible.
A young Islander—barely whiskered, eyes too bright—blurted, "And him?" He jerked his chin toward Luna, then flinched at his own boldness. "Is she—does she speak for… him?" He meant Tani and didn't know how to say it.
"She speaks for herself," Rowan said, even as Luna's fingers folded warm around his wrist where the sea-cord lay. He felt the bead press his pulse. "But when she speaks, I listen."
The young man flushed and looked at his feet. Luna saved him by turning her attention gently toward the room at large. "You don't have to like each other," she said. "You have to feed children and not drown."
"This is very inspiring," Lyra said under her breath. "We should stitch it on banners."
"Stitch it on your mouth," Luna said back, as soft, and Lyra's grin appeared and vanished.
They marked the pact in cords—Island knots small and neat, Thalriss knots wide and stubborn—and looped it over the pegged mast as if the mast itself were listening. Vesk took the ladle from the simmering pot, poured broth into three cups, and handed them down a line—Kahe to Rowan to himself. They drank without toasting. Anything with teeth was best not tempted.
The council broke into the work of the day. The noise returned, but not the heat. Rowan exhaled and only then realized he'd been holding his ribs tight against it.
"Your voice didn't shake," Lyra said, falling in beside him as they crossed back to the central raft.
"It did," Rowan said.
"Then you're lucky the sea was louder."
They walked the boards. Midg's bowl bumped Rowan's palm with each step, the water inside a small private ocean catching the light. Tani kept his slow circuit, an eyelid pulse of gold from time to time, like a lighthouse turned private. Near midday, the fleet settled into that brief, deceptive quiet that lives between what you can fix and what you can't yet see.
Luna snagged Rowan by the belt and pulled him into the lee of a hanging sail. The cloth flapped and set a wind-hum between them. She stepped in and tipped her face up, studying him. "How is the pretending?"
He huffed. "Believable?"
"Handsome," she said, which was not the same thing. Her thumb traced the scar at his cheekbone he never remembered earning. "You don't have to be older to lead. You have to be kind. People don't need statues. They need hands."
He looked at his hands—rope-burned, nicked, salt-dried. A man's hands. A boy's worry inside them. "The dreams," he said before he could stop. "They're getting worse."
Her expression shifted—softer, edged with the ache of recognizing a wound you can't close for someone else. "Do you want to tell me?"
He opened his mouth. Callen's name rose and sat like a hot coin on his tongue. For a second he saw silver in the seams of the sailcloth.
"Not yet," he said, and hated the way it sounded. "I don't know what anything means in there."
"Mm," she said, not hurt, and laid her forehead to his shoulder. Her voice, when it came, was small enough for the space between two people. "When you want to say it out loud, say it to me first."
He curled an arm around her and felt the strange sense of being heavier and lighter at once—the weight of being held, the lift of being believed. His chin rested against her hair, tasted of salt and smoke. The cloth of the sail breathed against their backs, in and out, a living thing.
"Keeper," Lyra called too brightly from beyond the sail, "be sure to keep. We have a net to mend that's trying to eat itself."
Luna didn't move. "We were keeping," she said, unimpressed.
"Keep faster," Lyra said.
They worked. Rowan let the old woman with needle-quick fingers bully him off the delicate parts and settled for hauling and splicing. He listened more than he spoke. Vesk's lieutenants were good at taking orders. The Islander grandmothers were better at giving them. The cord at the mast acquired new knots, small as teeth, each a promise to be reckoned with at sundown.
When heat burned off the boards and the afternoon wind came—the one that always smelled faintly of iron—Rowan wandered to the bow with the excuse of checking lines and the true intent of standing where he could see an unbroken horizon. Tani rode just beneath the surface, turning the sea to dark silk above his back. Rowan extended his hand—not command now, an invitation. The dragon rose until the brow ridges split the water. Gold regarded him.
"Show me again," Rowan said, soft.
He didn't pull. He leaned. A slight shift to the right, palm opening, his breath timing to the slide of weight under the skin of the sea. Tani mirrored, a fraction left, a fraction up. The raft lifted imperceptibly with the displacement, a breath drawn and let go.
Lyra drifted up and crouched with the patience of a heron. "You're finding it."
"It?" Rowan said.
"The place where you stop trying to be bigger than the water," she said. "It's nice there. I visit sometimes."
"Is it always so difficult to be insufferable?" Luna asked, arriving with Midg's bowl balanced in her hands.
"Practice," Lyra said.
Midg flicked a crescent in his little sea and stilled, the tip of his tail trembling with attention. Rowan lifted his free hand and let his fingers hang over Midg's bowl. The minnow nuzzled the skin, turned, nuzzled again. When he moved his other hand above Tani's brow, both creatures followed—the tiny and the vast—like he had become briefly the hinge between two scales of the same thought.
A child's shout cut across the deck. "Dragon!" A chorus of shushing followed, but the word was already loose, running along the planks. Tani ignored it. Rowan tried to. He tasted the name Luna had teased into the fleet the way she teased knots into cord: Taniwha, shortened to Tani by people who needed to say a name fast in a storm.
He whispered it as a test, not of Tani but of himself. "Tani."
The dragon's eye narrowed. Approval. Or attention. Or simply the fact of being seen.
By late afternoon, the counting began. Nets up, nets down. The cord on the mast shifted—two knots moved from Islander to Thalriss. Shared. No one cheered; the day had taught them not to tempt balance with noise.
Rowan stayed on his feet until the light went to copper and the braziers made long fox-tongues of flame. Only when the evening meal came—a thin broth, a hunk of something bread-like, a wedge of pickled something else that made his mouth water and eyes sting—did he sit.
They ate together on the stern, thighs pressed, bowls warm between their palms. Midg took his ration of broth with the seriousness of a priest. The fleet's chatter blurred into a steady low tide of sound that made Rowan's chest ache with a feeling he didn't have a good name for. Not safety. Not yet. A rehearsal for it.
"You held them," Luna said after a while, quiet enough that the words sat on his skin rather than cutting into it.
"They held themselves," he said.
"You were the knot."
He looked down at his wrist. The sea-cord lay snug where she'd tied it, shell bead resting on his pulse. "Tell me if I pull so tight I cut off blood."
"I will," she said. "And I will tell you if you go slack."
He huffed a laugh that remembered how. "You'll tell me either way, won't you?"
"Obviously."
He set the empty bowl aside and let his arm go around her almost without permission. She shifted into the space the way a wave fills a hollow. The sky darkened. The first star pricked like a nail through cloth. Out beyond, Tani's spines wrote brief black script against a band of bruised light and vanished.
He didn't mean to say it. The words simply found a place where breath could carry them. "If I fall," he said, "will you be angry with me for falling?"
She was quiet a long beat. When she answered, it was without drama. "Yes."
He turned, stung, and found her watching him with something fiercer than softness. "Because you're not allowed to fall?" he tried, half brittle.
"Because you would have fallen alone," she said. "And that is the one thing you're never allowed to do again."
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he kissed her—no hurry in it, no show, just the slow, deliberate press that says we are still here. Somewhere a pot clanged. Someone laughed too loudly. Lyra wolf-whistled and then pretended she hadn't when Luna glared in her direction without breaking the kiss.
Night lifted out of the water. The fleet settled into its rope-sighing, plank-shifting conversation. Rowan and Luna spread the same blanket as the night before. No one looked twice. No one had time to build shrines to other people's warmth.
He lay on his side, facing her. She touched the back of his knuckles. Midg drifted in a slow, satisfied spiral, belly pale as if holding a moon.
"Tell me about your brother when you're ready," Luna said into the near-dark.
The name thudded somewhere under his sternum. "I will," he said, and meant it, though he did not know when the meaning would become action. "When I can find words that don't feel like drowning."
"Then I'll bring a rope," she said, and tucked her forehead under his chin, and he would have married her on a creaking board with a fish bone ring if such things made any difference to the sea.
Out on the black water, the Leviathan turned once and stilled as if taking the fleet's measure. The night did what nights do: it made room for what wanted to haunt and what wanted to heal. Rowan's eyes closed. The dream waited. So did the hand on his ribs and the minnow's small tide and the old dragon's hum below the planks.
Keeping, he was learning, was not a single act. It was a thousand quiet ones, done in company.
He slept.