Chapter 8

The log was under the lamp-room floor.

Maren had told me in the dark of the Wick three nights running without saying it once: the lamp and the bells, two mouths, one voice, oaths kept in oiled leather. When I came up the causeway at the last of the ebb with the fork in my fist, she was already on her knees with a pry bar, and she handed it to me without a word.

The floorboards under the lens cradle had been cut and relaid so neatly that you'd never find it unless you were looking. I got the bar into the seam and lifted, and the board came up with a shriek of old nails, and there in the joist cavity, wrapped in oilcloth, sat a book bound in oiled leather the color of a wet seal.

I opened it. Pages and pages of a hard, slanted hand. Wind. Water. Times to the quarter hour. And the week of the flood: readings that made no sense as weather, a tide that came in two hours early and higher than any moon could pull, and in the margin, in the same hand, a note.

Ships in light. Ships out heavy. If the water comes, it was not weather.

I had it. I had everything.

The alarm went off when I lifted the book clear.

I never saw the wire. Maren said later it was strung under the third board, thin as a hair, running down the wall to a bell on the outside of the tower. It made a sound like a struck pot, and out on the black water, in the dark, a lantern answered it.

"It's the whole harbor detail," Maren said, and shoved me hard toward the stair. "Go down the sea door."

"I'm not leaving you."

"You'll do as you're told for once in your life." She was already taking her coat off the hook, and she took the lamp and lit it, and she put my hand flat on the log and looked at me with those milky eyes. "I kept the oath for fifteen years. You don't get to throw it away because you've got a soft heart. Take the log. Get to the flats at the ebb. And if the bells speak -" She stopped, and something in her face let go. "They only speak for the blood. You'll know what to do."

They took her on the causeway.

I watched from the north rock shelf, in the weed again, freezing again, while a line of garrison men walked my only ally out along a strip of black stone with the sea coming up on both sides of her. She didn't look back. She walked the whole way with her back straight and the wind pulling at her wool cap, and when they got her to the quay they put her in a boat and took her up to the bluff.

I got back to the city with the log inside my shirt against the fork, swimming the last hundred yards because the punt had gone out with the tide, and I crawled up onto the mud behind the ropewalk and lay there with my teeth knocking and the log under my chest, and I thought about four hundred houses and a red door and an old woman walking a black causeway with her back straight, and I decided I was done being told to leave.