Chapter 2

They dragged me out of the cathedral by my hair.

The enforcers were not gentle. They did not have to be. Debtors had no legal standing, and I had just become something worse than a debtor. I had become interesting to the Regent. Interesting things were kept close.

They took Lottie somewhere else. I screamed for her until my throat tore. Maud's captain hit me once across the mouth, and the taste of blood mixed with salt. They wrapped my hand in iron. Not because I was dangerous. Because the Bell had touched me, and Maud wanted to see if it would let go.

The salt palace sat on the bluff above Bellwether, all white stone and green glass, built from the bones of the old forest that had drowned beneath the city. I had seen it from the mudflats my whole life. I had never been inside. They put me in a room with a drain in the floor and a window too narrow for a body. The tide smell came through it, low and sour.

Maud came at dusk. She had changed into a gray gown, no crown, no gloves. Her hands were bare and pale. She looked almost human.

"Where is Lottie?" I said.

"Safe. For now." She sat in the chair across from me. There was no other chair in the room. She had brought her own. "You have questions."

"You have answers you want me to hear."

Maud smiled. "Your mother was the last Warden of the Bell."

The room tilted. I kept my face still. I had learned that in the debt prisons, when the guards tried to make you flinch. "My mother was a dredge-diver."

"Elin Callis was a dredge-diver. She was also Warden. Six years ago, she took the vow. The Bell was weakening. The Grief was waking. She went into the cathedral and she did not come out."

"You told me she drowned."

"She did. In a manner of speaking."

I tried to breathe. My locket was gone. They had taken it with my coat. I felt its absence like a missing tooth. "What do you want?"

"To save Bellwether." Maud leaned forward. "The Black Tide comes in three days. You have seen the eye beneath the cathedral. That is the Grief. It is old, and it is angry, and it will swallow this city if it is not bound. The Bell is the binding. Your mother knew that. She failed. You will not."

"I don't know how to bind a leviathan."

"You don't have to know. The Bell knows. It rang for you. Warden blood calls to it." Maud's eyes were flat. "Ring it again at high tide. Speak the words the tide-priests give you. The Grief will bow."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then Lottie goes to the debt prison. She is eight. The Salt Guild has a quota for small hands in the rope houses. She will last a year, perhaps two. You will hear her cough through the wall."

I wanted to kill her. I had never wanted to kill anyone before. The wanting was cold and clear. But Lottie was in her hands, and the Bell was in mine, and I did not know enough to refuse.

"I can control it," I said. "The Bell. I felt it. It knows me."

Maud's smile widened, just a little. "Good. Then you will be the city's savior."

She left. The guard brought me bread and water. I did not eat. I sat against the wall and hummed the lullaby my mother used to sing, the one with the tide-tongue phrase in it. The lock remembers the hand that turns it. I did not know what it meant. I only knew that when I hummed it, the Bell's hum returned, faint and far, through the stone.

The next morning, they brought Pellian Voss to me.

He was nineteen, thin as a reed, with ink-stained fingers and anxious eyes. He wore a gray tide-priest robe with a salt-stained hem. He carried a satchel of scrolls and a bone stylus. He introduced himself as Archivist Pell, then immediately told me to call him Pell.

"I am supposed to translate the ceremony for you," he said. "Also I am supposed to report everything you say to the Regent. I am telling you that because I am bad at lying."

"Then why are you here?"

"My mother is in the debt prison." He looked at the floor. "I do what Maud says."

"Then we have something in common."

He unpacked his scrolls. One of them was a rubbing of the Bell's rim. I saw the gold crack, the same one that matched my locket. Beside it, in old tide-script, were words.

"What does it say?" I asked.

Pell hesitated. "The official translation is 'The sea gives a protector.'"

"Official?"

He lowered his voice. "The older translation is 'I am the lock, not the door.'"

The Bell hummed in the walls. I felt it in my teeth. For the first time since the cathedral, I felt something other than fear. I felt the shape of a lie.