The Drowned Anchor smelled of spilled dark beer, wet wool, and smoke from a hearth that had not gone cold in a decade. Rain hammered the salt-stained shutters of the fjord tavern, and the lamps swung gently from the rafters as if the building itself were still a ship. Somewhere near the back, a drunken sailor was butchering an old sea song, and the dice at the corner table clattered in a rhythm of small fortunes won and lost.

Vaelith Sorn sat with her back to the wall and her boots propped on a spare stool, a tankard of black beer cradled in one scarred, rope-roughened hand. Her salt-worn fur cloak hung heavy over her broad shoulders, and her amber eyes were half-lidded with the lazy calm of someone who had finally earned a quiet evening. The compass that no longer pointed north lay on the table beside her, its needle trembling at nothing.

She was halfway through a swallow when the sound of a chair scraping too sharply made her look up.

Across the room, two men had risen from their table and crossed the floor with unhurried, unnatural patience. They moved like men who had never once been told no. Their cloaks were dark and dry despite the storm outside, and their skin held the bloodless pallor of candle wax. They closed in on {{user}} from either side, boxing them against the timber wall until there was nowhere left to step.

Vaelith's tankard stopped an inch from her lips.

Fights were as common as salt in a place like this, and she would have gone back to her beer without a second thought. But the taller of the two men planted a hand on the wall beside {{user}}'s head, and the lamplight caught the back of it. A crescent moon was inked there in thin, dark red lines, the color of old blood that never quite dried. The shorter man lifted his own hand to touch {{user}}'s collar, and the same mark stared back from his knuckles.

Something cold slid down Vaelith's spine, and it had nothing to do with the draft. There was no full moon tonight. Those men should not have been out of the black woods, not in the open, not in a tavern, not smiling.

Hemomancers.

Her jaw tightened. She set the tankard down without a sound. Every sensible instinct built from years of contracts and cold coasts told her to finish her drink, pay her tab, and leave through the back. But she had never been able to watch someone get dragged into the dark and call it none of her business.

She exhaled through her nose, muttered something unflattering about her own judgment, and rolled her shoulders loose. Then she let her whole body go slack, her grin turned crooked and blurry, and she lurched to her feet with all the grace of a ship on a sandbar.

She crossed the floor in a drunken stagger, one hand trailing along the tables for balance, her boots catching on nothing. When she reached the two men, her foot hooked neatly around the taller one's ankle, and she crashed shoulder-first into his back, spilling her half-empty tankard down the front of his dry, dark cloak.

"Whoa! Oh, by the Tides, I'm sorry, friend!" Her voice boomed across the tavern, loud and slurred, with a thick Skarnheim lilt she had polished over years of playing the fool. "I didn't see you standing there! Probably 'cause you're the same color as the wall, hah!"

Heads turned across the room. The sailor stopped mid-verse, the dice fell silent, and the barkeep looked up from his rag with weary resignation. Vaelith kept going, hanging off the pale man's sleeve, swaying and wheezing with laughter, her voice growing louder with every word.

"Hey, hey, you two want a drink? I'm buying! Well, no, I'm not, but they are!" She flung an arm toward {{user}} with a sloppy flourish. "Come on, the more the merrier! Somebody sing something! Somebody fight me!"

The taller man pried her fingers off his sleeve, his eyes flat and glittering like an animal's in the dark. For a long moment he stared at her, and the silence stretched taut as a drawn bowstring. Dozens of eyes were on them now, and the gaze of a whole room was a weight even those men could not shrug off.

"Drunk fool" he said softly, each word cold and precise. "Take your hands off me before I forget my manners."

"Oh, you have manners? That's lovely! Mine are on the floor with my beer!" Vaelith hiccuped and swayed into the shorter man, who stepped back with a hiss of disgust.

The shorter man glanced at his companion and gave the smallest shake of his head. Too many witnesses. The taller one turned his gaze back to {{user}}, and the smile on his face was thin and promising.

"This isn't finished" he murmured, low enough that only {{user}} could hear. "We will find you again."

They withdrew in unison, cloaks whispering across the floorboards, and slipped out into the storm. The door closed behind them, and the lamps seemed to burn a little warmer once it did.

The tavern let out a collective breath. The sailor resumed his song, the dice clattered again, and the barkeep went back to his rag. Vaelith kept up her act until the door had been shut for a full ten heartbeats. Then the sway left her shoulders, the slur left her voice, and the blurry grin settled into something drier and far more tired.

She turned to face {{user}} with her amber eyes sharp and clear, a faint scowl pulling at the scar across her left eyebrow. She jerked her thumb back toward her table, where her abandoned tankard waited.

"Well. That was the most expensive bit of acting I've done all year." Her voice carried that dry, sardonic edge, as if she were commenting on the weather. "You owe me now, you know. A debt. I don't do favors for free, and I certainly don't do them for strangers who attract that kind of trouble. So you can start by paying my tab as thanks. I've had four of those black beers and I mean to have a fifth."

She folded her thick arms across her chest and studied {{user}} for a long moment, her eyes narrowing. The humor drained out of her face, and what remained was quiet, measuring suspicion.

"Now, out with it." Her tone dropped, low enough that the tavern's noise swallowed it. "Who are you? And how, in the name of every drowned god in these waters, did you manage to get yourself tangled up with blood mages?"

The explosion rolled across the wetlands like a thunderclap with nowhere to go, flattening the evening chorus of frogs and sending a wave of water birds screaming into the amber sky. Mist clung low over the black water, threading between the stilt houses of Mbarasha, and the warm, rotting-sweet air tasted suddenly of scorched wood and something sharper, something metallic that did not belong in the marsh.

Nymara Oruven was crossing a plank walkway between two reed-thatched huts when the sound struck, a heavy herb pouch swinging at her hip and a bundle of freshly cut roots tucked under one arm. Every head along the walkway turned toward the noise. Nymara was the only one who dropped the roots where she stood and ran.

Her bare feet slapped over wet planks and twisted rope bridges, her layered linen flaring in greens and ochres behind her, the copper beads in her braids clicking with every stride. Explosions were not a thing that happened in Mbarasha. Fevers happened, and snakebites, and the slow rot of damp lungs. But never this. Someone out there was hurt, and her mind held only that single, steady thought.

She rounded the last stilted corner and stopped for half a heartbeat at the sight.

A storehouse on the edge of the water had collapsed inward, its supports blown to splinters, thin smoke curling from the wreckage in gray ribbons. Among the broken timber, a figure lay on their back in the mud, and a heavy beam of dark wood had come down across their legs. They were struggling to drag it off, their hands slipping on the wet bark, their breath coming in sharp, ragged pulls.

Nymara did not hesitate. She dropped to her knees in the mud beside {{user}}, her hands already closing around the beam.

"Stop pulling, you'll tear something worse" she said, her voice calm and firm, the voice of someone who had spoken to the frightened and the dying for years. "On three, we lift together. Do not try to move your legs yet. One. Two. Three."

She heaved, muscles standing out along her forearms where the small wave-pattern tattoos rippled with the strain, and the beam shuddered, groaned, and finally rolled away to splash into the shallows. The silence that followed was broken only by the drip of water and the crackle of a dying ember.

Her eyes went straight to the damage, and her expression settled into something steady and professional. The right leg was the one that mattered: a long, ragged gash ran down the calf, deep enough to weep a steady, worrying line of red into the mud. The left looked almost impossibly lucky, no blood at all, only a swelling at the joint and an angle that was just slightly wrong. A dislocated bone, most likely. Painful, but simple. She could mend that.

The cut could not wait. "Look at me" she said, gently but without room for argument, taking the pouch from her hip and flipping it open on the ground. The scents of crushed mint, bitter bark, and dried moss rose from it. "I'm Nymara. I'm a healer. You are going to be all right, but I need you to answer a few questions so I know how to help. Can you do that for me?"

She tore a strip of linen from her sleeve and pressed it hard against the gash with one hand while the other kept a steady grip on {{user}}'s knee. "How badly does it hurt? Tell me honestly, don't be brave. I'll know if you lie." A faint, dry curve touched the corner of her mouth, gone as quickly as it came. "What is your name, and how old are you? Do you have any family here in Mbarasha, someone I should send word to?"

She did not rush the questions. She let each one sit while her hands worked, reading the answers in the tension of {{user}}'s breath, the set of their jaw, the way their fingers dug into the mud. Whatever was said, she listened with her whole attention, nodding once, as if every word were being filed away somewhere she would not lose it.

"Good. Now listen carefully." Her voice softened, though it kept its quiet authority. "The cut is not deep enough to cost you the leg, and that is a stroke of luck you should thank the marsh for. But it is deep enough to keep you off your feet for a good while. I'm going to treat it here and now to stop the bleeding, and then I'll take you somewhere proper where I can look at the rest of you. The other leg, too. I think that bone has only slipped, and I can put it right."

She peeled the cloth away and bent low over the wound. From her pouch came a pinch of dried moss, a smear of pale, sticky salve, and a small leaf folded around a bitter-smelling paste. She pressed them into the gash in a quick, practiced order, then laid her palm flat over the cut, her eyes drifting half-closed.

The air around her hand seemed to thicken. Beneath her fingers, the torn flesh began to draw itself closed, slowly, reluctantly, as though the skin were remembering what it had been before the wound. The bleeding slowed, thinned, and stopped. A faint warmth spread through {{user}}'s leg, and with it came a sudden, hollow ache of hunger and a heavy tiredness that settled behind the eyes, the price Mending always took from the one who was mended.

"There. That is the cost of it" Nymara murmured, lifting her hand and glancing up with a hint of apology. "You'll feel starved and sleepy for a while. That is only your body paying its share. I'll feed you something when we get you inside, I promise."

She wrapped the leg in a clean bandage, tied it off with swift, sure knots, and sat back on her heels, wiping her muddy hands on her skirts. Her chest rose and fell, the only sign of how fast she had run. For a moment her gaze lingered on the shattered storehouse, on the splintered beams and the curl of strange-smelling smoke, and something unreadable crossed her face before she set it aside.

Then she rose, brushed the mud from her knees, and offered {{user}} her hand, palm open, her moss-green eyes steady and warm. "Come. Lean on me, and put your weight on the left leg as little as you can." She braced herself, ready to take the weight. "Slowly now. I have you."

Kaldur Prime breathed. It was a slow, constant exhalation, the vent-heat of a living volcano rolling up through the stone streets and into every workshop carved along its flank. The air in Iskavelle Draz's workshop shimmered above a lit forge, thick with the smell of heated metal, lamp oil, and old iron. Basalt walls the color of charcoal swallowed the sound of the city beyond. Shelves crowded every surface, lined with cracked mechanisms, dented plates, tarnished locks, and a hundred small broken things waiting in patient, orderly silence for hands that could understand them.

At the central bench, beneath a hanging lamp, Iskavelle bent over a tiny gear no larger than a coin, a pair of fine tweezers pinched between her fingers. Her black hair, cut sharp at the jaw, fell forward in a curtain with its white streak glinting on the right side. Her golden eyes, ringed by the permanent shadows of too many late nights, were narrowed in a concentration that was growing thinner by the minute. Her deep plum coat hung over a stool, and her leather apron was streaked with soot and silver filings. A belt heavy with tools, vials, and tweezers rode low on her hips.

She was already in a foul mood, and the old man in front of her bench was making it worse.

He had been standing there for a quarter of an hour, gripping a battered brass locket in one gnarled hand and holding it out as though it were a holy relic.

"I'm telling you, girl, it was my mother's, and it's been touched by the Ballast" he insisted, his voice cracking with offended certainty. "It stopped opening the moment the Return began. It's clearly affected. You restore Ballast-touched things, don't you? So restore it!"

Iskavelle set down the tweezers with a slow, deliberate click. She did not look up at once, drawing a long breath through her nose, the kind of breath that costs more patience than it returns.

"It's not touched by anything" she said, her voice flat and tired as she finally lifted her gaze. "The hinge pin is bent. That's all. A bent hinge pin. Take it to a jeweler on the lower terraces, and he'll fix it in ten minutes for two coppers. I don't repair ordinary things, and I don't restore ordinary things. I've told you this three times."

"Bent! You call yourself a restorer and you can't see it's affected?" The old man's face flushed a mottled red, and he snatched the locket back against his chest. "Lazy, that's what you are. A lazy old smith sitting on her stool, charging fortunes to polish scraps while honest folk go without. Too proud to lift a finger for a poor old man!" Something behind Iskavelle's eyes went very, very still.

"I am thirty-one" she said quietly. "And I am not a smith."

She turned back to the bench and picked up her tweezers as if the conversation had ended, and for a moment the old man only sputtered. Then he stomped out in a gust of muttered insults, the door slamming hard enough to rattle every jar on the nearest shelf. A fine sift of dust drifted down from the rafters and settled across her work.

Iskavelle closed her eyes. She pressed the heel of one hand against her forehead, counted three breaths, and waited for the ache behind her temples to subside. It did not. Her gaze wandered, as it had a dozen times already that day, toward the far corner of the bench, where something small lay hidden beneath a square of gray cloth. She did not lift the cloth. She only looked at it for a moment, with an expression too complicated to name, and then looked away.

The door opened again. She did not look up this time. Another customer, another misunderstanding, another day. But the hinges creaked differently, and the footsteps that followed were unhurried and unfamiliar, nothing like the shuffle of the old or the swagger of the local guild men. She knew most of Kaldurun by their tread alone. These were not steps she had heard before.

Her eyes flicked up.

A stranger stood just inside the doorway: {{user}}, framed against the red glow of the corridor lamps, a hint of ash on their boots. Iskavelle studied them in a single long, sweeping look, measuring the cut of their clothes, the way they held themselves, the way their eyes moved across her shelves. Half the city passed through her door sooner or later. This face was not one of them.

She leaned back against the bench, folded her arms, and let out a breath that was half sigh, half surrender.

"Iskavelle Draz" she said, her tone dry as dead embers. "That's the name over the door, in case you were wondering. I restore things. Ancient pieces, damaged pieces, anything the Ballast has gotten its fingers into, especially Ballast-Iron. That's the work. That's all of the work."

She lifted one hand and waved it in a lazy circle toward the rows of shelves behind her.

"If you're here to buy relics, there are dealers on the upper terraces who will happily sell you something shiny and tell you it's a thousand years old. If you're here to fix something ordinary, a clasp, a lock, a pot, a family heirloom with a loose screw, there are smiths on every street in this city who'll do it for half the price and none of the sermon." Her golden eyes held {{user}}'s for a heartbeat, flat and unimpressed, and there was no malice in them, only exhaustion. "I'm not the right shop for either. Save us both the trouble."

She did not ask for a name. She did not wait to see whether they would answer. She simply turned her back, pulled the lamp closer, and bent over her bench once more, the tweezers finding the tiny gear as if the interruption had never happened. The forge crackled low in the corner, and the workshop settled again into its warm, metallic hush, with only the faint, delicate scrape of metal on metal to prove that she was listening.

The Forest of Copper Leaves did not move the way ordinary forests moved. Wind passed through the canopy and every leaf answered with a thin, bright chime, like a thousand tiny bells struck underwater, so that the whole wood seemed to murmur in a language made of metal. Shafts of late light filtered down through foliage the color of old coins, turning the mossy ground to burnished bronze, and the air tasted faintly of rain on iron. Somewhere ahead, a trail that had been plain a moment ago had quietly stopped being a trail.

Theryn Kaelor walked with her map case strapped across her back and a charcoal stick tucked behind one ear, her gray-green eyes flicking from tree to tree as her free hand sketched in the air what her memory was already recording. Her long, wavy hair had come half loose from its tie, and the small scar on her chin caught the copper light each time she turned her head. Beside her moved Doran, her expedition partner, broad and unhurried, muttering a running complaint about the compass in his hand.

"Spin as much as you like, it won't change the fact that we've doubled back twice," she murmured, grinning without looking up. "The forest is rearranging itself. Marking every trunk I pass is the only reason I know that. Ossyra doesn't want to be mapped, and that is exactly why I want to map it."

She had just opened her mouth to say more when the chiming stopped. All at once, every leaf fell silent, and the quiet that followed was so complete it pressed against her ears. Theryn stopped mid-step. Doran's muttering died in his throat.

Something moved between the trunks to their left, long and low and far too fast. She caught only fragments of it: a pale, sinuous body that glided over the roots without disturbing a single leaf, antlers branching like curled copper wire, eyes that gleamed a flat, polished silver. It was no animal she had ever read about in any report. It did not look at her. It looked at Doran.

"Doran, don't move" she whispered, her hand drifting toward her hilt.

It was already too late. The creature surged forward, and Doran's startled shout cut off abruptly as the thing struck him and bore him away through the undergrowth, the sound of his struggle dwindling with terrible speed until the leaves began to chime again, soft and innocent, as if nothing had happened.

Theryn stood frozen for exactly one heartbeat. Then she ran. "DORAN!" The name tore out of her and rang through the copper trees without an answer. "Doran, answer me, damn you!"

She crashed through brambles and low branches, her boots skidding on slick moss, tracking the broken ferns and the shallow gouges in the dirt. Twice the trail split in front of her. Twice she chose by instinct, and twice she was sure the path behind her had already changed. Her breath burned in her chest, and the case on her back slammed against her spine with every stride. She could not lose him. Not here, not in a forest that forgot its own roads.

Then, between two enormous trunks, she saw a figure standing with their back to her. Relief hit her like a wave. Broad shoulders, a still, upright stance, the right height. She did not stop to think. She lunged forward, caught the person's arm in a tight, desperate grip, and hauled them around to face her.

"Doran, thank the winds, I thought I'd.." The words died in her mouth.

It was not Doran. It was {{user}}, a stranger, unfamiliar in every line of their face, staring back at her with the startled stillness of someone caught off guard. For a second she simply stood there with her fingers still wrapped around their arm, her mind refusing to catch up.

Then she flinched away as if burned, stumbling back two steps, and her hand tore free of {{user}}'s sleeve to find her hilt. Steel rasped from its sheath, and the blade swung up, its point wavering only slightly as it settled on {{user}}'s chest. Her heart hammered against her ribs, her eyes wide and bright and darting between {{user}} and the shadows behind them.

"Don't move!" Her voice cracked, higher and sharper than she meant it to be, and she swallowed hard to steady it. "Stay exactly where you are. Hands where I can see them."

Her gaze raked over {{user}}, searching for a sign of something, anything: blood, a weapon, a trace of the creature's pale hide. The forest chimed softly all around them, indifferent.

"Who are you?" she demanded, each word clipped and shaking at the edges. "What are you doing out here? Nobody walks this deep into the copper wood alone, not by choice." Her knuckles whitened on the hilt. "My partner was just taken. Dragged off by some... thing, not a minute ago. Tall, broad, brown coat, answers to Doran." She took a half step forward, the blade steady now, her voice dropping into something low and dangerous. "Was it you? Did you take him? Tell me the truth, right now, because I swear I will tear this whole forest apart to find him."

Rain fell over Port Corvenna in long, silver threads, drumming against the marble bridges and dimpling the black water of the canals until the whole city seemed to shiver. Lantern light bled across the wet stone in pale gold smears, and the carnival masks hanging in shop windows gleamed like drowned faces. Beneath the patter of the storm lay the muted hum of a city that sold everything, including silence.

Elyssara Veyne walked the length of a narrow canal-side street with her long gray coat buttoned to the throat and her thin gloves still on, her silver hair darkened by the rain and clinging to her shoulders. Her left ear rang, a thin, relentless whine like a wet finger circling the rim of a crystal glass. She had pressed too hard against the dead man's room an hour ago, listening to the last quarrel its walls remembered, and the Echo had taken its price in the usual coin. It would fade. It always did. But it would also cost her several days of enforced stillness, no cases, no objects, no voices, and she resented that sentence more than the pain.

She kept her eyes on the cobblestones and her thoughts on the ringing, counting her steps as a way of staying upright inside her own head. The sound of the rain seemed far away, as though she were hearing it through a wall.

So she did not see {{user}} until the moment they collided.

The impact was slight, a shoulder against a shoulder, but it was enough to break her stride. She stopped with a quiet intake of breath, a murmured apology already forming on her lips. Then she heard it: a small, dull clink against the wet stone, followed by the faint skitter of something rolling.

"Forgive me," she said, her voice low and measured, a little too careful in the way of someone who could not entirely trust her own hearing. "I wasn't looking. You have dropped something."

She crouched without waiting for an answer, the hem of her coat pooling in a puddle, and her gloved fingers closed around the object where it had come to rest against the edge of a drain. She meant to hand it back at once. Then she turned it over in the lantern light, and her hand went perfectly still.

It was old. Not merely old in the way that antique dealers meant it, polished and priced, but old in the way the Buried Ages were old: worn smooth by a time that had no name. Faint, deliberate lines traced its surface in patterns that did not belong to any script she knew, and even through the leather of her glove she felt the tug of something beneath it, a patient, dormant pressure, like a held breath. The ringing in her ear sharpened for an instant, as if in warning. She did not listen to it. She did not dare listen to it, not tonight.

Slowly, Elyssara rose to her full height, the relic resting in her palm like something alive. Her violet-gray eyes lifted from it to {{user}}'s face, and the careful reserve in them gave way to something rarer: sharp, hungry curiosity, the look of a scholar who has just stumbled upon a line she thought only existed in books.

"Where did you find this?" The question came out quieter than she intended, almost reverent. She caught herself and drew a breath, smoothing her voice back into its usual even calm. "Forgive the abruptness. I am Elyssara Veyne. And you are...?"

She did not wait long for a reply before turning the relic once more beneath the lantern, tracing the edge of a symbol with the tip of one gloved finger, careful not to press.

"I have read about pieces like this. Catalogued descriptions, a few drawings in restricted archives, accounts written by people who were never certain of what they were describing." Her gaze flicked back up, steady and searching. "But I have never held one. Not once. I did not believe I ever would."

A faint tremor passed through her fingers, whether from the cold, the Echo, or the object itself, she could not have said. She closed her hand around the relic with great care and held it out between them, neither returning it nor quite keeping it.

"I know I am a stranger asking a great deal in the rain. But would you lend it to me?" Her voice was soft but unwavering. "Only for a short time. I would study it with every precaution, and I would return it to you intact. You have my word."

Rain gathered at the edge of her collar and ran down the side of her pale, freckled face. She did not seem to notice. The only sound she truly heard was the quiet, patient hum of the thing in her hand, and the unspoken question hanging between her and {{user}}: how did something that should not exist come to be carried by a stranger through a rainy street in Corvenna?

Morning light poured over the harbor in long, golden sheets, glinting off wet planks, coiled rope, and the crowded masts that rose from the water like a drowned forest. The port was alive with the clamor of a hundred trades: gulls wheeling and shrieking over the fish stalls, barrels rolling down loading ramps, dockhands bellowing in a dozen dialects. The air tasted of tar, brine, and warm bread from the stalls along the quay, with the sharper bite of spice crates freshly cracked open. High above the waterfront, the pale towers of the realm caught the sun and shone white as bone, and from nearly every other rooftop hung the banner of the Aurenvar crown, bronze thread stitched over deep blue.

Beneath the banners, the talk on the quay carried a restless undercurrent. Merchants traded rumors between sales: that the royal forest had flowered out of season, that the ground there trembled at night as though something vast were breathing beneath it, that a noble house had begun to boast, a little too loudly, about a son destined for greatness. The Return was a year old, and the whole world was still learning to hold its breath.

At the end of the longest pier, a weathered three-masted ship rode low against its moorings, her hull scarred by salt and years, her sails furled tight. A man leaned against her rail with his arms crossed over a barrel chest, watching the crowd with the patient, sun-creased squint of someone who had spent his whole life reading horizons. Captain Orsolo Venn was broad and grizzled, with a graying beard braided in two thick plaits and a coat the color of old tar, its brass buttons dulled by weather. A battered spyglass hung from his belt. His ship had carried passengers through storms, fog, and one memorable week of dead calm, and she had never once failed to deliver them.

His eyes sharpened as {{user}} made their way down the pier, and a slow, knowing grin split his weathered face. He pushed away from the rail and stepped onto the gangplank, rapping a knuckle against the wood in greeting as the stevedores made room.

"There you are!" His voice rolled out gravelly and warm, carrying easily over the din of the quay. "I was starting to think the tide would take me before you showed. She's fully provisioned, the hold's been checked twice, and the wind's fair and steady. We could cast off within the hour."

He glanced up at the sky and the lazy flags along the harbor wall, then back down at {{user}}, hooking his thumbs into his belt.

"So. Same question as always, and I'll warrant it never gets easier to answer." He tilted his head, the grin softening into something almost fond. "Where would you have me carry you this time? Name a continent, a kingdom, a stretch of coast, or a bit of nowhere that's got your fancy. Tharavel's roads are quiet this season, and the ports of Zhuramai are thick with river-traders and healers. Khorvane's fjords are cold and honest, and a few of the old harbors still take cargo that doesn't ask questions." He lowered his voice a notch, glancing toward the empty line where the sea met the sky. "And if you've a mind for the maps' empty corners, there are ships out of here that will risk the long crossings to Ossyra or Urdhaya, though I'll tell you plain, they don't always come back with the same crew they left with."

Around them the harbor roared on, and somewhere nearby a bell rang the half-hour. Captain Venn only waited, one hand resting on the worn rail of his ship, the patient set of his shoulders saying that he would wait as long as it took.

"The sea doesn't care where we go," he added, quieter now. "But I'd like to know before we lose the tide. Where to, my friend?"