Dawn found them already within sight of Dock City's bones. The Salt-Road pinched into the Throat here, a pale ribbon sliding toward cranes, posts, and a veil that looked tugged thin by masts and ambition. The air had the tang of old storms and brine—as if the sea were practicing its lines before the city woke.
Amon walked ahead with the Whisper Compass in his palm—two needles, two minds. The long one held steady; the short one trembled like a nervous bird. He let the tremor lead. "Real power resists being found," he'd said, and the nearer they drew, the truer it felt.
Bolt fell in beside Eryn, chewing something that crunched like rock sugar and probably wasn't. "Rule for last miles: if it looks friendly and moves, don't step on it; if it looks unfriendly and doesn't move, also don't step on it."
"Noted," Eryn said. Tidewire sat warm and certain at his wrist, the silk-steel line coiled neat, the stormglass head feathered with ripples—as if wind had been trapped inside it. Vaelor's scroll rode under his cloak, the queen's seal catching light when it dared.
They crossed the last mile-markers. The ground chimed underfoot where heat had fused sand into sheets of stormglass. A caravan rolled past toward Keystra—three wagons, eight camels, one rider who lifted two fingers without blinking much. "Dock City swells," the rider said, voice dry as old rope. "New ships. New flags." His eyes flicked to Eryn's wrist. "Careful with that. Tidewire kicks until it likes you."
The road should have been clean this close to the works. It wasn't. A gutted sand-sledge lay half-buried in a drift, runners splintered, cargo tarp slashed. No blood. No bodies. The wind had already meddled with the tracks.
Amon crouched. Bolt circled, solemn for once. Eryn listened.
Beneath the wind: a hush-hush, like a whisper under glass. He touched the sledge's flank.
The world blinked. Light bent. Ink rose like breath through paper—two half-circles around a slit, a coin split down the middle.
"Veil-scorch," Amon said, not letting his skin meet the wood. The mark faded. Bolt grimaced.
"The Split Coin," he said. "Twin Corsairs. Dock City trouble that learned to walk on land. They do their oaths in halves—both speak or nothing binds. Cute, if you're a romantic. Less cute if you're the one they're binding."
Amon's mouth thinned. "We keep moving. Eyes wider. Ears wider still."
Eryn worked Tidewire loose and practiced as they walked—the line sang, the glass kissed air and snapped back, a living tug in his wrist that felt like throwing a net at low tide. Bolt watched, a quiet approval he didn't dress as a joke. Amon watched the horizon like it might decide to be honest.
⸻
They reached the Wayhouse of Three Stones by late morning—a low clay building huddled around a well, its sign a painted triangle with a dot in each corner. The keeper was an old woman with silver veils layered like the rings of a tree. She had the practical intelligence of someone who could price a lie by its weight.
"Water's dear," she said, "bedroll space dearer, and you're in luck—I don't sell luck." She studied the queen's writ when Amon showed it, pressed her thumb to the seal, and grunted, all without changing expression. "Food's hot, questions are cooler. If you want colder than that, I don't stock it."
They ate on a bench under an awning, bowls of spiced grain and dried figs and a stew that tasted like it had met a goat once and thought better of it. Voices rose and fell around them—traders, riders, a pair of riverhands with skin twice-browned from the glitter canal.
Bolt drifted, as Bolt did, and came back with the precise amount of news he should not have been able to buy with the few coins Amon had let him take.
"Brannoc's in Dock City," he said low. "Arrived days ago." He saw Eryn's jaw stiffen and added, before the boy could ask, "He's flying half-flag with the twins. Means allied. Means he doesn't mind his name on the same line as theirs, which means the coin's good."
Eryn set his bowl down very carefully. "Why would he be there?"
"For the same reason anyone is anywhere," Bolt said. "Because there's something to take. Or someone."
The keeper dropped a clay cup on their table without being asked. "For whoever has to swallow the worst news," she said. Then, to Eryn in a voice that didn't carry: "You from the western shallows?"
Eryn blinked. "Once."
"Thought so. The way you flinch when the door opens." She tapped the rim of the cup. "Drink. The road to Dock City grows loud when trouble's ahead. Best to make your decisions before you can't hear yourself think."
After she left, Amon leaned on his forearms. "We stick to the plan. We deliver the queen's seal and Vaelor's scroll. We get to the locks under Dock City and we fix what we were sent to fix." He looked at Eryn. "If Brannoc crosses us on the way, we handle it. But we don't detour into revenge. We don't have the sand for that."
Eryn stared at the cup until his reflection steadied. "I'm not detouring," he said. His voice surprised him with how even it was. "If the road goes by him, I'll walk it with my eyes open."
Bolt nodded, approval quiet. "That's the worst kind of brave and the best kind of smart."
⸻
They camped just outside the wayhouse beneath a piece of sky that looked less like a dome and more like a promise. The air cooled until their breath ghosted, the sand gave back the day's heat by degrees, and the desert sang its small, private songs: insect ticks, far-off lizard claws, the wind lifting and laying itself down again.
Amon took first watch. Bolt's snores were a parable about optimism. Eryn lay awake, the Tidewire's line coiled under his palm, feeling the world huff and settle.
When sleep came, it came hard. When the dream came, it was not a dream.
He stood at the edge of a black-water harbor walled by ships—hulls shouldering each other like elbows in a crowd. The air smelled of pitch and salt and money. Above him, the Dock City veil hung in tatters, torn by mastheads and ambition.
A coin spun in front of him, its halves refusing to meet. A voice he didn't know laughed, and the laugh had two beats to it, like two dancers stepping into the same space.
Then a different voice—low, wrong, familiar—spoke behind him: "Tidewire boy. Your village learned how to burn. Did you?"
Eryn turned and saw nothing but the wash of lanternlight on black water, and his own face reflected back from it like an accusation.
He woke with his hand tight around the glass spearhead. The line whispered against his palm. The pendant burned against his chest. The eastern horizon was the color of a blade.
Amon was already awake, watching the road. "Up," he said. "We make the locks by midmorning if the Salt-Road wants to be kind."
"Since when does it want that?" Bolt muttered, rolling to his feet.
"Since we ask nicely," Amon said. He didn't smile, but the corner of his mouth remembered how.
⸻
By late morning, the ground changed beneath their feet. The Salt-Road sloped into a basin where the desert had once tried to be a lake and almost succeeded. The flats ahead were glazed smooth, a mirror drowned in dust. At the basin's far lip, lines cut the horizon: posts and cranes and the crooked silhouettes of waterworks.
"The outer locks," Bolt said. "Menders call it the Throat. Dock City drinks from here when the sea pretends to be generous."
"Or when the veil lets it," Amon said. He opened his hand. The Whisper Compass trembled like it was glad to be near a heartbeat again. Both needles leaned east. "Good. For once we're wanted."
They weren't the only ones. Wagons queued along the road. Riverhands worked wind-vanes until their forearms roped. A party of veiled envoys argued with a keeper over the price of water measured not in barrels but in time.
As they moved into the crush, Eryn saw a thing that made the hair along his arms stand. Someone had hung a charm from one of the lock posts—a split coin bound back together with red thread. At a glance it could have been a blessing for prosperity. At a second glance it wasn't.
He nudged Amon. Amon saw, and his face closed like a fist.
"Eyes wide," he said. "Hands wider."
"Rule," Bolt said softly. "If you can't tell if it's a welcome, assume it's an invitation. And don't R.S.V.P."
They reached the keeper's platform. Amon set the queen's writ down without flourish, the seal facing forward. The keeper—a man with salt scorched into the lines of his hands—studied it longer than Eryn liked and then lifted his gaze to Eryn like the boy was the part of the document that most interested him.
"Your name," the keeper said.
"Eryn," Eryn said carefully.
The keeper's eyes flicked, just once, to the Tidewire on Eryn's wrist. "Brannoc asked for a boy with a line like that to be pointed out," he said in the tone of someone mentioning weather. "Days ago."
Silence has a weight. Eryn felt it settle.
"And did you?" Amon asked, courteous as a blade sheathed by choice.
The keeper's mouth thinned. "I sell water," he said. "I am not in the business of selling people." He slid the writ back. "The Throat opens for you. Do what you came to do. And watch the water for reflections that aren't yours."
Amon inclined his head. "We will."
They stepped onto the lockway. The air tasted like old storms. Beneath the grating, water moved with a mind. The city beyond rose in tiers of cranes and masts and rooflines, all of it held together by trade and rumor and a veil that didn't know how to be polite.
Eryn touched the scroll at his side. The wax seal was warm under the sun. He felt the Tidewire's pulse in his wrist, the pendant's in his throat, his own under both. For a second all three beats found the same rhythm.
"Dock City," Bolt said, sighing like a man greeting a complicated friend. "Please don't kill us before we spend money."
Amon didn't look back. "No promises."
They walked into the noise.
⸻
Far out on the outermost pier, on a ship with her name filed off and her lines too clean not to be new, a woman with a coin on a string around her throat watched the lockway through a glass. Her sister stood beside her, twinning her posture so neatly that sailors who didn't know them learned to spot the difference only by the way one's laugh came half a second after the other's.
"That's them," the sister said. "The runner. The smiler. The boy with the line."
"And the boy with the village," the woman said. She flipped the coin. Caught it. "Days ago, Brannoc said. Not months."
She smiled without showing teeth. "Let's not be late."