Chapter 2

The union hall sat on the fish quay between a ropewalk and a chandler's, and it smelled of coal smoke, wet hemp, and men who had been working since before light. I came in through the side door like I'd been doing it for years, which I had, mostly to sleep.

They were waiting.

Nine or ten of them, dock crew, sleeves rolled, hands like harness leather. Corbin Hale stood in the middle with his arms folded. He was the steward, and he dressed the part: good gray coat, boots that had never been wet past the ankle, a silver watch chain. I'd never liked him, and I'd never been able to say why, which is the kind of feeling a person learns to keep.

Fenn Marrow was at the stove. He looked at me and then at the men and said, "She's the one from the market."

"The one from the market," Hale repeated. "The one the Wick answered."

The room went still. That's when I understood they already knew. Not me. The light. Every dock in Kellbridge had seen it, and every dock had a grandfather who said the same thing, that the Wick wasn't a lighthouse so much as a lock, and locks need keys.

I pulled the cord up over my head and held the fork out flat in my palm.

Nobody moved for a long moment. Then a woman near the back - Peg Marrow, Fenn's wife, arms like a stevedore - came forward and leaned down over my hand without touching it.

"Bronze," she said. "Spiral. My father told me about that. He said the harbor-master kept one on his desk and wouldn't let anyone hold it."

"Your father was full of stories," Hale said.

"My father worked the lower district for thirty years." Peg straightened up. "Where'd you get it, girl?"

"My mother gave it to me before she died. She said keep it hid."

"Her name."

"She never told me to say it."

Hale unfolded his arms. "Then you'll come with me to the regent's office and tell them the same story, and we'll all find out together what the Wick thinks it's doing."

"No," said Fenn.

That stopped him. Fenn Marrow was a quiet man with gut on his hands, but he said it flat and the whole room turned.

"The girl goes to the regent, they'll find her in the harbor with her pockets full of stone," Fenn said. "You know that, Corbin. You know it better than anyone in this room."

The silence after that had a shape to it. Hale looked around at the crew the way a man counts. Then he smiled, easy, and said, "Then we keep her off the street and send for Maren Voss. She keeps the Wick. She'll know what the girl is."

They put me in the back room with a bowl of fish stew and a wool blanket that smelled like a dog. It was the first hot food I'd had in three days, and I ate it with my back to the wall, watching the door, because that's what you do.

Peg came in and sat on an upturned crate. "Maren comes down for lamp oil twice a month. We sent a boy in the harbor punt; she'll meet you at the Wick at the next ebb. Tomorrow, near dawn, when the causeway shows." She looked at me for a while. "Fifteen years the Wick's been dead. Fifteen years, and today it lights up over a stolen fish."

"It wasn't planned," I said.

"No," she said. "That's what worries me. Things that answer you when you're not asking have been waiting a long time."

I slept two hours. I woke to shouting.

The garrison had come. Not a patrol - a full detail, twenty men, and they went through the union hall like a tide through a cellar. They broke the stove, dumped the rope bins, cut the nets down off the hooks. They put Halder, the old cooper, against the wall and took his thumb somewhere it wouldn't bend, and when Fenn tried to get between them they laid him out on the flags.

I got out through the coal chute with my shirt full of soot and my hands shaking, and I stood in the alley behind the chandler's and listened to them tear a room apart looking for me.

They were still there when I went down to the water and stole a punt.