Chapter 4

They missed me. Barely. I lay in cold weed up to my chin while a boat rowed past close enough that I heard one man complaining about his boots, and then the wind took them back toward the city and I climbed the rock shelf and got into the lighthouse through the sea door with my teeth chattering hard enough to make noise.

Maren put a blanket around me and a cup of something terrible in my hands and told me to drink it and stop being a fool.

Then somebody knocked on the front door.

Not the garrison knock. Three slow, spaced, deliberate. Maren's face changed. She went down and opened it and Commander Elias Rusk walked into the Wick alone, in a plain coat, no escort, and shut the door behind him with his own hand.

"You brought the whole garrison down on my quay," he said to me.

"You shot at my friends," I said.

"I've done a lot worse than that." He stood in the middle of the dark room with the water sounds all around us. "Maren. Give us a moment."

"No," she said. "I swore an oath in this room. I'll hear what you've got to say."

He nodded slowly, like he'd expected it, and then he sat down on a crate and looked at his hands, and for the first time he looked old.

"I knew your mother," he said. "I knew your father. I stood at their wedding on the quay when the district was still a district, and I was there the night it went under, and I did what I was told, and I've been doing what I'm told ever since." He reached into his collar and pulled a cord out and lifted a ring off it: a heavy signet, worn smooth, a harbor mark cut into the face. "This was his. I took it off the body before the consortium's men could."

"Whose body," I said. But I already knew. I'd known since the fish market, some part of me, the way you know a storm by the smell of the air.

"Aldric Rusk," he said. "The harbor-master of Kellbridge. My brother."

The fire in the stove popped. Maren said nothing at all.

"You're my -" I stopped.

"I'm your uncle," he said. "And I've spent fifteen years pretending I wasn't, because the man who signed the order to kill Aldric Rusk still sits in his mansion on the waterfront with a consortium factor at his elbow telling him what to eat." He turned the ring over in his fingers. "The regent is a puppet. Osric Pell doesn't own the grain fleet; the Vantree Consortium does, and when they wanted the harbor-master's office, they drowned four hundred families to get it. They called it a storm surge and the city believed it because the almanac in the regent's office says so, and the page for that week isn't in it."

"So get the page," I said.

"The page that matters isn't a page," he said. "It's your father's log. He kept his own tide readings for the harbor, every day, for twenty years. The week of the flooding, the real readings show a surge that couldn't have come from weather, and the ships that were in the harbor that night came in light and left heavy." He looked at Maren. "You have it."

"I have an oath," Maren said.

"You have it," Rusk said again, "and you'll give it to this girl at the right hour and not before, because the second we show it, Hale will run to the regent with the news."

"What's Corbin Hale got to do with my father?"

Rusk stood up and put the ring back under his shirt.

"Nothing, before. Everything, now." He took a key out of his coat, brass, old, with a worn shaft. "This opens the harbor-master's strongroom, third door past the ice house under the fish market. Everything Aldric kept that he didn't trust to the office is in there. Go tonight. Don't take the union steward with you, and don't tell him where you're going."

"He's got my crew."

"He's got a watch chain and a good coat," Rusk said, "and this morning he sent a runner up the bluff before the garrison ever knocked on his door. I checked. Now he's got something to sell and someone to sell it to."

Maren said, quietly, "I never trusted that man."

"Then we agree on one thing, old woman."

Rusk put his hand on the door and stopped. Somewhere out in the black water a bell buoy was tolling, and the tide was coming back over the causeway, which meant I had a punt and half an hour and a rising sea.

"Pell will burn the quay to find you," Rusk said. "He'll call it a search for a thief. You have until dawn tomorrow and then you have nothing." He opened the door. "Be past the walls."

"People keep telling me that," I said.

"People keep trying to save your life."

"People keep trying to save themselves from having to."

He stood there a moment with the wind in the doorway, and then he went out into it without another word, and the light of Maren's lamp followed him down to the water and back toward the city.