Chapter 9

The regent did exactly what I expected him to do, which was the first time in three days that anyone in Kellbridge did.

At the ebb the next morning, they brought Maren Voss out onto the tidal flats in front of the drowned district and tied her to the stake of the old district buoy, which was the only thing still standing above the mud out there. They set a drum of tar beside her, in case the crowd needed to understand the plan. They put a garrison line across the flats between her and the city. And they waited, because everyone in Kellbridge knew that the barefoot girl who made the Wick burn had been hiding in the lighthouse with the old keeper, and they knew I would come.

The whole harbor came out to watch. That was the point. That was also my point.

I sent Fenn's wife, Peg Marrow, up the quay with the log bundled in oilcloth under her coat and her knife where she could reach it. I told her to stay on the high ground with the crew and not come down for anything unless I waved.

Then I walked out onto the flats alone.

The mud sucked at my boots and the air smelled of rot and low water, and the tide was at slack. My mother's house stood a hundred yards off to my right, red door drowned to a pink smear, and when I passed it I did not look at it, because if I looked at it I would stop walking.

The regent, Osric Pell, stood on a boardwalk they'd laid over the mud for him, in a coat too good for the wind, and beside him in plain gray stood Emmerich Sloane, and neither of them was looking at me. They were looking at the crowd on the quay.

"Stop there," Pell said. "You're the Calloway child."

"I'm the harbor-master's daughter," I said. "And you're standing on my father's street."

The crowd made a sound. It was not a cheer. It was the noise a lot of people make when they've all had the same thought at once.

"Take her," Pell said.

Nobody moved. Because Commander Elias Rusk had walked off the end of the garrison line and out onto the mud, boots to the ankle in it, and he had his sword still in its scabbard and his hands open at his sides.

"No," he said.

"You'll hang for this."

"Probably," Rusk said. "But not today, and not for you." He turned around to face the line of his own men, and then he turned further, to the crowd on the quay, and he reached into his collar and pulled out a cord with a signet ring on it and held it up over his head. "My name is Elias Rusk. Aldric Rusk was my brother. Fifteen years ago I took this ring off his body on that street behind you, and I have stood in this garrison every day since, taking orders from the men who put him there." His voice carried across the flat water like a hand striking a bell. "The regent is a hired keeper. The charter of this harbor belongs to the harbor-master's heir. And the tide record they've been signing is a forgery."

That was when the crowd came off the quay, and the dock crew came down the ropewalk stairs in a line with Peg Marrow in front, holding the log over her head like a lantern.