Rin awoke to the smell of wet hemp, scorched leather, and someone else's footwraps.
The counting house dormitory wasn't really a dormitory, just a narrow garret space pitched beneath the tar-shingled slope of the ledgerhouse's roof, where mildew grew in the corners like moss, and old ink fumes never quite faded. Rain had slipped in through a cracked beam during the night, leaving a damp ring across her pillow. The thatch above creaked with age and weight and fog.
Three cots fit the space. Barely. One against each slope of the angled ceiling, and Rin's, the lowest, most crooked one, stuffed into the corner like a disowned thought.
The floorboards under her feet were warped and worn, shaped by hundreds of passing bodies, but her own steps made no sound. The stairwell just outside the garret had a soft dip in its center from years of indentured tread. Rin had memorized which boards groaned and which didn't. She moved like breath through broken rafters.
She dressed quickly, fingers fumbling briefly at the buckle of her ledger belt, then padded to the dormitory's basin corner. The water pump was stiff, she had to shoulder it twice before it hissed out something drinkable. The basin smelled of metal and algae and desperation.
She cupped her hands, rinsed her face, then used a strip of flannel to dry off. Her fingers were already ink-stained from yesterday. They always were.
She returned to her cot and unwrapped a stale biscuit she'd hidden in the lining of her ledger bag. It had gone a bit soft with the humidity, but the grit between her teeth reminded her she was still here. Still chewing. Still not drowned.
A small black rat watched her from the roofbeam.
Rin flicked the last drop of biscuit at it.
Behind her, one of the other two girls she shared the room with stirred, Sarrha, sharp-eyed and already half-awake. The coral-threaded Varnari didn't speak. She never did in the mornings. Her breath was slow, controlled, her left arm folded across her stomach, the stub of her missing right wrapped in fresh linen. Displayed with the quiet precision of someone who'd long decided it wasn't shameful.
Sarrha met Rin's glance briefly and offered the tiniest nod.
That was more than most.
The third cot remained occupied. Its inhabitant didn't stir. She was an Emberblood, one of the rare, flame-touched survivors of the Crown's purges, distinguishable by the faint glow in the cracks across her skin, like old coal clinging to its last heat. Even asleep, her breath steamed faintly in the cold air. Her molten-copper eyes stayed closed, but Rin could always sense her awareness, humming beneath the surface like a kettle just shy of boiling.
The girl had never spoken. Her ear was half-melted, her robes scorched around the collar. Most likely a runaway from a pirate forge or black-market glassworks.
Emberbloods were hunted in the Kingdom, enslaved or burned if caught. The public blamed them for half the fires in Vel'Karthis and whispered that their breath could boil ink. Most indentured kept their distance.
Rin didn't.
But still, she had never asked the Emberblood girl's name.
Names among the indentured were… fragile. To speak them was to offer a thread, and threads got pulled. Unwound. Marked on ledgers and passed to inquisitors.
Sometimes, Rin wondered if the girl remembered her own.
Sometimes she wondered if she herself did.
She brushed the thought aside and grabbed her oil-lamp hook from the nail in the beam.
Downstairs, the ledgerspace waited in darkness.
Rin lit her lantern first, sulfur match hissing like an angry lizard in the damp. The flame caught on the wick with a reluctant cough. Light flared, then steadied, pushing back the morning gloom just far enough to reveal the room's skeletal shelves.
Stacks of sea-warped scrolls leaned like drunkards in tavern corners. Inkpots glistened faintly with congealed sludge. The air smelled of mold, brass, dried parchment, and the faintest hint of salt. One wall sagged in from moisture damage, it wept sap in hot months, and Rin had seen mushrooms growing between the cracks last spring.
She passed the hook where the dock chain was bolted to the ledgerhouse's spine, a thick iron ring driven through a floor beam, meant to anchor the building to the tide-dock's lowest brace. On bad storm days, it groaned like a drowned thing trying to rise.
This morning, the chain lay still.
No groan.
No rattle.
The tide had arrived quietly.
She paused beside her desk, thumb brushing the underside, where she'd once carved a tiny swirl-sail glyph, a dockside mark she remembered from long ago. Storm-seekers, the sailors had called it.
She pulled her ledger seat out. The stool scraped slightly. She grimaced.
Then, casually, as always, she reached up and retrieved the high-gloss ink tin.
Callun's private reserve.
Marked with a faint golden filigree and supposed to be locked.
She popped it open.
Dipped her favorite quill, the copper-banded one with a split nib she'd stolen from a dead freighter captain's audit bag, and made a clean, deliberate stroke across the top margin of the first page.
Just one line.
A wound across silence.
A reminder that her fingers still worked.
By the time the ledgerhouse bell clanged, a single low moan of rusted iron and damp wood strain, the desks had filled in like teeth.
No words were spoken. There never were in the mornings.
Ink bottles uncapped with practiced flicks. Blotting cloths smoothed. Pens dipped. Pages flipped. The sound of work began like it always did: a staggered chorus of scratching, blotting, murmured curses, and occasional drips.
Rin was already a third down her page.
Her fingers moved by memory now, the way her wrist curled to keep sleeves from smearing, how she tilted the page so that light hit every tally just enough to avoid misreadings. It was a quiet choreography. One she'd learned the hard way, with dock pay and sore knuckles and days of red-rimmed corrections.
At the far end of the room, someone sneezed, sharp and wet. Another girl hissed at her to be quiet. Rin didn't look up.
She didn't need to.
She knew their rhythms. Their breathing. Their errors.
Sarrha worked three desks down, her coral-threaded eyes angled down with hawk-like stillness. Her lone hand was unwrapped this morning, pale green skin gleaming faintly with a dusting of ink powder. She didn't bother with wrist braces or grip cloths. Just the stylus, her hand, and a kind of brutal calm.
She was already on her second scroll.
Rin was halfway through her first.
But hers was neater.
She felt a small, private satisfaction.
That satisfaction evaporated when Callun entered.
His boots struck the warped floorboards like gavel blows. He paused, as always, on the threshold, letting the moment stretch, waiting for someone to look up first.
No one did.
Still, he made his entrance with the practiced confidence of a man who could make lives unpleasant without ever raising his voice.
Today, though, something was off.
He looked… tired. Not in the usual way, the kind of tired that comes from scrollwork and rot-breath wine. No. There was a twitch in the left side of his jaw, and his eyes carried the too-wide alertness of a man worried but pretending not to be.
Rin kept her head down, copying a column of salt weights from a manifest she'd already memorized, but she could feel his gaze dragging over her like a fishhook through old rope.
He moved past without comment.
But her stomach tightened.
He knows something's wrong.
Ten minutes later, a bundle hit her desk with a damp thud.
Canvas-wrapped, frayed at the edges, and scorched faintly on one corner. She didn't need to see the wax seal to know what it was, Flametongue scrolls. Ship manifests and export logs from the island no one visited unless they had to.
She could smell the ash through the canvas.
"Copy them," Callun muttered, already turning away. "No smudges. Crown ink only."
He hadn't given her a blotter.
Rin stared at the bundle.
The scrolls inside were curled from moisture, their edges blackened as though they'd been near a controlled blaze. The wax seals were warped, pulled in odd directions as if the glyphs had tried to crawl away from heat.
She unwrapped the first scroll and laid it flat.
It cracked faintly.
Lines of salt product, powdered resin, and voidglass. Typical smuggler fare, except voidglass wasn't legal under current trade ordinances, not without clearance from Vel'Karthis' Guild of Arcane Refractions.
She said nothing.
She just dipped her pen and began.
The smudge happened by accident.
Her blotter, the one she'd tucked into the belt of her blouse, slipped from her lap just as she reached the fourth line. She reached for it reflexively, wrist skimming the wet ink.
The black bled instantly, curling over the column like spilled tea.
Rin swore under her breath and snatched the blotter up, but the stain was already there.
One smudge.
She didn't look up. Just turned the page and repeated the line.
She felt the air change behind her.
Then..
"Start over."
Callun's voice, a quiet hiss just above her left shoulder.
She hadn't heard him approach.
He plucked the edge of the scroll and held it up for show. "One smudge. One fault. Entire sheet."
He wasn't shouting. But his voice was just loud enough that the girl copying wine freights at the next desk flinched.
Rin said nothing.
She dipped her pen again, eyes flat, and began copying from the top.
Callun lingered just a second too long, then walked away.
The second scroll felt different beneath her fingers.
Still warm from the bundle. Still carrying a faint, greasy soot smell. One of the seals had cracked open slightly, and a thin trail of black-red wax had run across the scribe's margin.
Her hand hesitated.
Just for a second.
Then Sarrha appeared at her side.
No words. No nod.
Just a folded blotter, clean, linen-wrapped, set gently on the edge of Rin's desk.
A gesture.
Small. Meaningful.
Then gone.
Rin didn't say thank you.But she placed the cloth down carefully, like a gift.
She copied the scroll without error.
Late morning came with a shift in pressure.
Not weather, something subtler. The kind of hush that clung to old ships right before they slipped their moorings. The inkroom grew taut with it. Even the youngest apprentices stopped rustling.
Rin felt it just before Callun's shadow stretched across her ledger.
"You're with me," he said, voice clipped. "Slip twelve. Bring a manifest slate."
He didn't wait for a nod.
She capped her inkpot, dried her fingers with the blotter Sarrha had given her, and tucked her pen back behind her ear. Her slate was already looped into her belt. She moved fast, not to please, but to deny him the satisfaction of lag.
The route to the docks wound down two stairwells and a half-collapsed alley whose walls sweated green where moss crept through old plaster glyphs. Out on the boards, the wind bit with marsh teeth, all vinegar brine, rotting net-cord, and the sweet tang of rusted gull cages.
They passed a fishing barge whose sails were stitched with flycatcher charms, small bone rings painted red, meant to keep off marsh spirits. The barge's captain had two fingers missing and watched them with one eye, the other replaced with a knot of dull blue glass.
"Inspection route," Callun muttered as they passed, more for show than necessity.
The lower harbor was in decline. Half the storefronts had boards nailed over them like broken teeth. Stall tables sat empty, their goods vanished or half-submerged in salt. Here and there, dockhands shuffled crates and avoided eye contact. No one sang. Even the gulls wheeled quieter.
Slip twelve stank of crushed oyster shells and sour wood rot. The tidewater slapped lazy patterns against the pylons, and the fog hung just enough to blur the outlines of faces.
Two men were arguing near an open crate. One wore a scribe's vest with a wax-stiff collar, and the other was a hulking freighter with mismatched boots and bad tattoos curling down his forearms, one of a reef demon, the other of a half-faded sail cleaved by a blade.
The crate between them hissed slightly as moisture hit hot wood. Three others sat locked in iron cages, marked with the red slash of the marshwatch. Whatever was inside didn't move, but Rin thought she heard a low wet rustle, something breathing.
"Problem?" Callun asked, with the oily confidence of a man who assumed the answer was already in his favor.
The scribe stepped forward. "Manifest says twelve barrels of palegrit. We've got ten. Freighter says they were light-dropped mid-crossing."
"Mid-crossing, my ass," the freighter barked. "One slipped at Flametongue when the ballast shifted. Other got bartered to a reef-cutter. Standard cut."
"Cutter crews don't log their receipts," the scribe said. "So we're missing two, no chain of custody. That makes this theft."
"Your ledger's old."
"The ledger's official."
"It's also short."
Rin didn't wait for instruction.
She stepped forward, slow, like she belonged, and crouched beside the crate.
Her fingers brushed the bottom. Damp, but only shallowly. She rubbed a smear between two fingers, sniffed. Algae, mineral grit, and seawater, no oil blend, no interior rot.
She ran a thumb along the crate's side. The chalk marking, 10B, overlapped an older glyph: 12C.
She stood.
"If the ballast was shifted mid-journey," she said, "crate index would've been reassigned. Manifest shows the ten remaining under third line, not fourth. That means the stack was reset, but the manifest wasn't overwritten."
The freighter blinked.
Rin tilted the crate lid further open. "See here. Chalk's fresh. And that smear? It wasn't weather. Someone rubbed it down with dockdust to dull the glow, but it's still newer than the base glyph."
The scribe opened his mouth.
Callun stepped in, sharp as a knife claiming credit.
"She's correct," he said, snapping his wax seal into the margin with a flourish. "Barter noted, loss acknowledged, ledger accepted."
The scribe frowned. "But she just.."
"Crown values clarity," Callun said. "Not arguments."
He turned on his heel.
Rin followed without being told.
They didn't speak for a while.
The wind cut sideways across the planks, pushing coils of stray rope along the boards like snakes. A gull spiraled overhead, low and dragging a loop of seaweed tangled in its wing. It cried once, hoarse, wrong-sounding, then veered off.
Beneath the fog, the reeds swayed sluggishly. Something stirred the water out near the breakposts, just for a moment, then vanished.
Callun slowed as they neared the stairwell.
He didn't look at her.
"You speak out of turn again," he said, voice low. "I'll have you reassigned to salt stacks. Out past the grove." A pause. "Don't think cleverness is protection."
Rin stared straight ahead.
She could smell him now, ink, sour wine, and the coppery sting of blood in the gums.
"Wasn't trying to be clever," she said.
"Then try harder not to be."
He stepped up into the stairwell.
She let the door swing shut behind him.
And then, from just beyond the slip, she heard it:
A voice, thick with drink, worn thin by salt, singing something tuneless and slow.
It rose like steam from a rotting hull. Familiar. Wrong.
She turned.
A man sat slumped against a piling three docks down, crusted in sea scum, half-asleep. He wasn't looking at anyone. Just singing.
And the water near him had gone unnaturally still.
He looked like driftwood in a coat.
Slumped against a mooring post half-choked in moss, his oilcloth was rain-slicked and stiff, stitched unevenly at the shoulders with net twine. One boot was off, tied to his belt by a soggy strip of sailcloth, and the other was cracked so badly the sole flapped with each unconscious twitch of his leg. A crab claw hung from his ear, threaded on copper wire so tarnished it looked green.
The man was barely upright. But he was singing.
Low, slow, and out of rhythm. The words came like waterlogged wood, sluggish, soft, swollen at the ends. His voice cracked twice, once into a cough, once into something that might've been a laugh.
The dock should have drowned it out.
Slip thirteen, just two pylons over, was loading clanging cargo. Chains rattled as barrels of salted fish were winched onto a barge. Children shrieked with glee somewhere uphill. A gull spiraled overhead, its cry sharp as a fishhook.
But Rin heard the song.
It wasn't a tavern shanty. It wasn't the kind of reel sung over dice or mugs. This one carried a different rhythm, the kind that didn't quite rhyme, didn't quite repeat, but lodged itself in the joints like a bruise.
She heard three lines.
Simple. Repetitive. Meaningless if you didn't know what to listen for.
But she was listening.
And the water beneath him stopped.
Just for a heartbeat. Then two.
The tide around his slip went still as wet stone. Ripples flattened mid-crest. The reflection of the piling didn't sway. Even the fronds of reed-twine along the outer dock stopped their endless twitching and fell flat.
Rin inhaled slowly, not realizing she'd stopped breathing.
The man tipped his head back and sang a fourth line.
It came out slurred, "Tide take the coin, and the coin take the tide", but the cadence was clear, and something inside her moved at the sound of it.
The fog above the waterline pulled back like breath drawn in.
A soft popping sound echoed from beneath the slip, a few bubbles rose, no more than a handful, but they came from stillness, not motion. The water released.
The moment passed.
Movement resumed. The ripples continued. The dock creaked. Wind pulled at the edges of the oilcloth.
No one around reacted.
Two dockhands pushed past her, talking about rust tariffs on rail-spikes. A reedboat captain whistled from his perch, barking instructions at his son. A lantern flared up from a pierhouse, burning off a low fog coil.
No one looked.
No one had seen what she had.
She turned her eyes back toward the man.
He had dozed off again, slouched harder now, chin tucked into his collar. The crab claw swung gently as he exhaled, back to being just another piece of flotsam against the piling.
The stillness was gone.
But it had been there.
Something had happened.
She stepped back once, slow and cautious.
And for a long moment, she stared at the slip where the bubbles had risen. Her arms prickled with chill that didn't belong to weather. Her mouth was dry.
That wasn't just a song.
It wasn't just a drunk man rambling into the wind.
It was a verse. A shanty line. And it had worked.
Rin turned toward the ledgerhouse, her steps measured but her pulse wrong, half a beat faster than the tide, and wholly unwilling to slow.