Chapter 7

The union hall had been put back together the way poor people put things back together, which is to say badly, with rope.

Broken stove, mended. Cut nets, spliced. Halder's thumb strapped and useless. Fenn Marrow sitting on a crate with his jaw the color of a plum, and Peg beside him, and twenty more of the dock crew jammed into a room that smelled of coal and anger.

I put the manifest on the table and unfolded it flat.

"Soon as I saw it I knew what it was," I said. "It's the grain fleet schedule. Every ship, every dock, every load, six weeks out. There's ships in there that don't come into Kellbridge at all - they come into the deepwater anchorage and lighter out to the Vantree warehouses, and none of it's in the harbor register."

Silence. Then Fenn leaned forward and put one thick finger on a line.

"That's the Mary Lunt," he said. "She's been going out heavy all winter. If she's loading off the anchorage, then half the grain in this city is leaving without a tax stamp on it, and the almanac's been signed by men who never saw the tide."

"Then we take the fleet," Hale said.

He'd been standing at the back the whole time with his arms folded and his good coat buttoned to the throat.

"Tonight," he said. "We've got twenty crews. We go down to the docks at the change of the watch, we take the grain ships, and we hold them until the regent repeals the harbor charter."

"And then what?" I said. "The garrison comes down the bluff with muskets and calls us mutineers, and every man in this room hangs, and the grain fleet keeps loading out of the anchorage the next week."

"Then what's your plan, girl?"

I looked at the room. Twenty faces, and every one of them had fed me at some point without being asked.

"The trial," I said. "The charter of this city says the harbor-master holds the tide record, and the harbor-master's office answers to an assembly of the harbor, and the assembly meets at low water on the flats where every man can hear it. That's old law. That's before the consortium, before the regent, before any of it. We hold the trial at the ebb, out on the flats under the drowned district, and we produce the harbor-master's true log against the regent's almanac, and we let the whole quay watch the regent explain a missing page."

"That's a lot of law for a city that's got no law," Peg said.

"It's the only law the garrison can't shoot without admitting what it is."

Hale looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "And where's this true log?"

"Safe."

"Safe where."

"Where it's been for fifteen years." I met his eyes and did not blink. "I'll have it at the ebb tomorrow."

The crew started talking, and it went the way I needed it to go, because dockworkers will always choose the plan that makes the garrison explain itself. Hale argued, and lost, and when he saw he'd lost he smiled and clapped Fenn on the shoulder and said, "Then we do it at the ebb."

Later, going out the side door to fetch water, I saw him in the alley with a boy of about twelve, a runner, and I saw him bend down and say something into the boy's ear, and I saw the boy take off up the quay at a jog, uphill, toward the bluff.

I could have stopped it. I could have grabbed the boy's collar and dragged him back in and put the crew on Hale, and maybe half of them would have believed me, and the other half would have thought Rusk's niece had turned on the union.

So I let him go. I let the regent hear about the trial at low water, because I needed him there, in front of the whole harbor, with his mouth open.

I just hoped I knew what I was doing.