The cove is a stone bowl half full of night.
Surf folds and unfolds on shingle. The cliffs lean close the way walls do when they're trying to keep a secret. I set two ring coins under my boots so the ground remembers we belong, and the warmth rises through my ankles like decent advice.
Kirella's right forearm is wrong. He breathes through his nose, jaw set. One—two—three—four.
"Strip," Lupa says, already tearing a sleeve from his cloak. She finds two straight pieces of driftwood, dead grey and honest.
"I'll set it," Kirella says.
"Of course you will," Lupa answers, and holds for him.
He grits once, then twice, then the bone meets the place it's been missing. The sound is a quiet click the surf pretends not to hear. I lay my palm along the splint and draw a thin seam of warmth through cloth and wood. It's not healing. It's comfort in the language of rope and pots.
"Thanks," he says, voice rough.
"Don't thank me yet," I answer. Dawn is a rumor on the back of my tongue. I can already feel the part of me that hates day practicing how to complain.
The wolves curl beside a boulder—a brindled shoulder over a limping paw; a dark head on paws that smell like marsh and patience. Lupa scratches a small ear and the world forgives itself a little.
"Move before first real light," she says.
"Shelter," I say.
We find it where storms hide their shame: a half-buried boathouse tilted into the cliff, doors jammed by sand and stubbornness. A rust latch winks like a tooth under old scum. Someone carved NO SKY above the beam with a knife that didn't love the work.
I try the latch. It doesn't enjoy me. Fine.
"Small," I warn myself, and coax a blood key into being—thin, trembling, no bigger than a hairpin. It costs more than it looks. The world tilts for a heartbeat. One—two—three—four, Kirella counts under his breath and the deck steadies inside my body. I turn the key in the rust and the latch remembers how to say yes.
Inside smells like tar, wet rope, old storms. In the half-dark, a cracked hull sleeps on its side—the bones good, the skin battered, the prow ring missing from the nose like a pulled tooth. Two oars. A jar of tar with a lid that will need persuasion. Rope fenders shrunk to stubborn donuts hang from nails. Ribs, ribs, ribs.
"This one will still listen," Lupa says, patting the keel the way some people pat dogs.
We stash the proof first. The voice bottle—glass humming faint and wrong—goes into a tar crate wedged between ribs. Kirella ties a three-visit release on the crate's rope handle, tidy and modest; a liar's hand will swear it never saw a knot. I chalk on the beam above: WE KEEP EACH OTHER →, arrow aimed at the least bad exit.
"Guard," Lupa tells the larger wolf, and it pads to the door; the smaller limps up the cliff tongue to watch the notch that shows a thin rectangle of sea.
We've barely pulled the hull into a patch of deeper dark when a new sound purls at the cove mouth: prism whirr soft as a fly that thinks it's important. A low skiff ghosts into view, nose cutting the black water, a bell on the mast that wants to be a priest when it grows up. The man aboard wears white that somehow refused the sea and prism gauntlets that drink even the moon's lies.
"Skiff," Lupa breathes.
"Close and quiet," Kirella says.
We leave the shed like three shadows that learned manners. The skiff noses toward the sand. The warden lifts one gauntlet and taps a stud; a tight pulse of light slaps the beach in a glowing circle and fades. He's looking for numbers to please a form.
He doesn't get a form. He gets us.
"Now," I say, and we move.
I snap a shade cloth open with the boat hook and pull it over his gauntlet line, dropping the prism's sight into a polite night. The warden jerks, wrong-footed but not stupid. The other hand rises for a second pulse.
I let the tırpan take one handspan of extension—no more—and hook the bell striker off its pin, dragging it into the little ring I've drawn under my feet. The striker sits in warmth and learns to mind. The bell pings once, embarrassed, then goes polite.
Palm sting climbs my arm. Kirella's count keeps it in its lane. One—two—three—four.
He hops to the skiff, plants WORD=WAIT on the mast cleat so the rig listens to reason, and drops a fast kept-loop on the net line. The net looks hungry and then remembers how to act in public.
The warden lunges anyway. Lupa meets him halfway, not with claws but with math: wrist to wrist, weight to triceps, knee to dock. She puts him on the planks in a way that lets him keep his dignity if he chooses to. "Breathe," she tells him. He was going to argue with the idea; then he obeys it.
"Mirror hygiene," I say.
I take the gauntlet in my hands the way you take a knife away from a kitchen accident—no blame, just competence. Moon balm smears across the facets; reflections muddle into honest dull. A brine dab in the wrist vent makes the gauntlet think about coughing. I draw a thin seam along the skiff's gunwale—audit quiet—so if someone later lies with this boat, the wood will blush.
A horn mutters outside the cove—far but working on close. Wolves' ears tilt. Lupa's eyes, silver at the edges, flick up the cliff and back.
"Search teams," she says. "Not here yet."
We pull the skiff noses-in so it looks like a bad idea that gave up. The warden glares at his own choices and at us and at the sea for being the sea.
"Don't make me dislike you," Lupa tells him, and the kindness in her voice is the point. He swallows and somewhere in him a math changes—this is not a fight, this is a lesson.
Footsteps scuff at the shed door. A hand we know raps a little rhythm that asks, You still alive?
"Reed," Kirella says, and Stone-Reed slips inside like a man arriving where the floor kept his seat warm.
He smells of salt and rope. He reads the hull the way some men read letters. "Ribs are true," he says. "Keel's honest. We're missing the mouth."
"Prow ring," I say.
He thumbs a shriveled rope fender on the wall and grins like a thief greeting luck. "We'll cut a ring from this. Tar will mind it if we teach it manners."
We work. It's the kind of work that keeps panic in the corner with a bowl of soup and a spoon.
Stone-Reed knots a fat ring out of the fender, splices the ends until the rope thinks it was born a circle. I heat the tar with a little lantern breath until it loosens its jaw. Kirella holds the ring to the prow nose; Lupa braces the hull with a shoulder like a promise.
"Lash," Reed says.
My fingers are steady until they aren't. The world puts a hand on the back of my head and pushes. I taste day as a thin idea at the edge of my teeth.
"Small," Kirella says without looking up.
"Small," I promise, and flick a drop-decoy of blood onto the first knot so it will hold while the tar cools. The cost bites quick and sharp. I sway; he finds my elbow without taking his other hand from the ring. One—two—three—four.
"Enough," Lupa says, soft but absolute. "No more blood. We need you awake."
"You like steering," I say, and it earns the ghost of a grin.
We trade out what blood would do for what rope can. The ring sits and learns to be a nose. Stone-Reed pegs a rib that was thinking about being a liar. Tar oozes in the joint and accepts our patience.
Outside, the horn sounds again—nearer, official, a voice that did paperwork before it went to sea. The skiff warden twists his wrist, testing a gauntlet that forgot how to be proud. He looks at us, then at the door where wolves breathe like sentence marks.
"Listen," Kirella tells him, gentle as rope. He tucks a three-visit release into the skiff's mast cleat—knot so simple a drunk could untie it after three honest tries, so stubborn a thief will swear the rope insulted his family. I scrape a faint ring seam under the tiller, a little shine only a kept eye would see. Stone-Reed chalks WE KEEP EACH OTHER → under the gunwale where it will surprise men who taste the wrong smell.
"We're letting you go," Lupa says to the warden. "Go home dry. Tell your foreman his lamps are rude."
He wants to spit something cutting. He chooses to live instead. Good choice. We push the skiff off; the release knot holds the story for three clean breaths, then loosens like a better idea. The skiff noses out, tagged in ways he won't respect until they matter.
We turn back to the hull.
The rope-ring prow is lashed and tarred, hums a small keep when I lay my palm against it. We seat two oars in locks that argue and then surrender. Stone-Reed pegs the last rib; I press my thumb to the peg head and whisper the two lines so the wood will remember them in a storm.
We won't pay.
We won't sell.
The wolves come in from their posts—one limping, proud of the idea of stubborn; one with sea on his whiskers. Lupa rubs both ears with a hand that knows who they are better than names could.
"First gray," Kirella says.
The cove mouth pales like breath on glass. Day is a rumor that thinks it's a law. My skin tightens; the coins under my boots glow as if someone turned their temperature up one notch. He sees my shoulders and shrugs his cloak higher, tucking my head into a shade shape the world will have to argue with.
"Keep me on four," I tell him, because the only bravery I have left is asking for exactly what I need.
"Always," he says, like a man repeating a recipe he respects.
We shoulder the hull to the lip where water makes up its mind. Tar tugs against shingle; rope bites friendly. Stone-Reed and Lupa lift together, the boat sighs down, and the ring in the prow hums yes.
Out past the cove, more lights bloom—one, three, five—skiffs making tidy rows where ocean should be rude. The warden we spared raises an arm, signals with a lamp he thought he owned.
"Circle tightens," Lupa says, watching the angles.
"We don't fit circles," I answer. "We fit kitchens."
Kirella laughs once—the breath kind—because even here, even now, I am exactly myself. He plants one boot in the boat, one on the sand, and offers his good hand. I take it. The lantern settles good-heavy between our palms, the way a pot does when everyone is going to eat.
"Push," Stone-Reed says.
We push. The boat slides. Water takes it, first grudging, then glad.
A voice rides the wind, amplified by mirror, official and incorrect. "By order," it begins.
The wolves' hackles lift as if listening to a song that forgot to be music.
We put our weight where it belongs: into the oars, into the rope, into the word we built and keep. The rope-ring prow quivers with keep and points at the seam of darker dark beyond the skiffs where a road no one sells waits for hands that mean it.
And the chapter ends there—with dawn thinning like bad tea, three patrol lights blooming wider at the cove mouth, our little hull tar-wet and willing, wolves bristled in the bow, Lupa set to pin not kill, Kirella's count steady at my pulse, and the sea opening one quiet door left of the loud ones, just big enough for a boat that remembers it is part kitchen and part promise.