Chapter 10

Three days after the Black Tide, Bellwether began to rebuild.

The lower district was mud and wreckage. The stilt markets had lost half their roofs. The salt palace had a crack in its eastern wall. But the city was alive. The Bell was silent. The Grief was gone.

No. Not gone. Changed.

I watched from beneath the water. I could see the city through the tide, blurred and golden. I could feel the Bell's hum in the stone. I could feel Lottie's footsteps on the dock above me. I could feel my mother's heartbeat in the palace. She was alive. She was human. She was free.

Maud Ferrier was arrested on the steps of the salt palace. The tide-ledger was opened in public. Pell had stolen it before he was stabbed, and though he was still recovering in the tide-priest infirmary, his mother had been released. The debt records showed years of falsified entries, stolen wages, children sold into rope houses. The city did not forgive her. They did not execute her either. They put her in the same debt prison where she had sent so many others. Her cell had a drain in the floor and a window too narrow for a body.

Pell lived. He came to the dock every evening with a lantern. He did not speak to me. He only sat and read the vow text aloud, practicing the release. I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to tell him that I had chosen this, that he should not carry the guilt. But my voice came only as a hum, and the hum made the water tremble, and the fishermen complained.

Elin came too. She stood on the dock with Lottie, looking out at the water. She was learning to be human again. She slept in the debt prison's old infirmary, where the nuns fed her soup and asked no questions. Sometimes she sang the lullaby. The lock remembers the hand that turns it. I hummed back.

Lottie was the one who kept the Bell dry.

She went to the cathedral every morning at low tide. She carried a bucket and a cloth. She scraped the barnacles from the bronze. She polished the gold crack. She talked to me while she worked.

"I'm going to read every scroll in the archive," she said one morning. "Pell is teaching me tide-script. He says I'm better than him already. Don't tell him I said that."

I hummed.

"Mother says the vow can be broken. She says it's not a cage if the lock is willing. She says I shouldn't try." Lottie wiped her nose with her sleeve. "But I'm going to try anyway. I'm your sister. I'm allowed."

I wanted to tell her no. I wanted to tell her to live a normal life, to grow up, to forget the water. But I had made my choice so she could have choices. I could not take hers away.

That night, the Bell rang by itself.

One note. Deep. Wrong. Right.

Lottie was on the dock. She had the locket in her hand. She looked down at the black water, and I opened my eye beneath her. The golden light caught the gold-filled crack. She did not scream. She smiled.

"I hear you," she said. "I'll find a way."

The Bell rang again.