The lantern light at the stern of the Mare's Folly guttered, coughed, and died. Then the second lantern followed, its flame swallowed by a gust rolling off the water, thick with brine and the sour vegetable rot of squid ink. The wharves of Saltmarrow materialized out of the dark like a row of rotten teeth.
Argo Steel braced one hand against the gunwale and watched the approaching dock with the careful attention of a man who had not slept in thirty-six hours. Behind him, the FolIy's hull ticked and settled, timbers cooling after a three-day run through the Shimmering Reach. The deck beneath his boots still smelled of warm pitch. Below, in the cramped cabin, he could hear Sera Blacktide snapping orders to the deckhands who had been foolish enough to sign on for a treasure hunt no insurance clerk would touch.
A coil of wet rope arced over the rail and caught the nearest piling with a sound like a wet slap. The Mare's Folly groaned against the fender logs. Somewhere forward, a gull screamed, the sound unnaturally sharp in the stillness, and a dog answered it from the wharf with a low, broken howl that raised the small hairs at the back of Argo's neck.
He did not believe in omens. His father had, and his father's father before that, smelter-men all of them, and every one of them had died with their boots on in a forge that had not turned profit in twelve years. The forge sat cold now, the bellows rotted, the anvil green with rust. What Argo believed in was work, and maps drawn in honest ink on honest vellum, and the stubborn, aching conviction that somewhere in the Shimmering Reach a hull of beaten gold still drifted with the currents, waiting.
"Bring her in clean, boys," he called over his shoulder, his voice roughened by salt and three days of silence. "I want her tied before the tide turns."
"Aye, Argo." Sera's voice reached him from the bow, brisk as a slap, bright as a struck bell. "Tide's already turning. You planning to argue with it, or shall I save us the trouble?"
He smiled despite himself. Sera Blacktide had been hired on at Brinehollow a fortnight ago, after the previous navigator had stepped off the dock in a huff over pay. She was young, sharp-jawed, with a mouth that never stopped moving and hands that could read a wave the way a smelter's apprentice read the color of hot iron. Her accent was pure Salt-Dock, vowels flat as a hammered blade, consonants bitten off short. She had already talked Argo out of one grounding near the Mussel Skerries and into a bargain with a customs officer that had cost him two months of profit and most of his dignity. He was not certain he liked her. He was certain he could not do without her.
The Mare's Folly shuddered, found her berth, and went still. Argo exhaled a long breath that tasted of copper and old sweat, and reached for the mooring line.
Saltmarrow was not a town so much as an accumulation of habit. The wharves leaned at angles that would have made a shipwright weep. The warehouses stacked along the waterfront listed toward the water as though listening to some long complaint. Every surface bore the pale, indelible stain of squid ink, a creeping bluish-black that no amount of scrubbing would ever lift. The locals called it the Reach's autograph, and they wore it the way other towns wore a coat of arms. The smell of it was everywhere, underneath the fish and the woodsmoke and the human stink of three hundred souls who had no reason to bathe more than once a week.
Argo stepped off the gangplank and onto a piling cap that gave beneath his boot. He caught himself, swore under his breath, and found a more solid board. Behind him, Sera was already bargaining with a dock boy over the price of a lantern refill. The boy was losing. The boy did not yet know it, but he was losing.
"Argo." Sera fell into step beside him, her sea-bag slung over one shoulder, a coil of fresh line over the other. "I asked the harbormaster. There's a man here. Old Brennan, they call him. Crab-fisher. Lives out past the last coal-she'd, in a hut built on a wreck."
"Crab-fisher." Argo turned the word over. "I'm not here for crabs."
"No." Sera's eyes were bright in the lantern light, the color of river-polished slate. "You're here because the man in Brinehollow told you Old Brennan drew the map you're carrying. Or the one your map was copied from. The harbormaster says the old man has lived on the Reach's shores for fifty years. Half of that time, he pulled crabs. The other half, he says, he drew maps."
"Drew maps of what?"
"Of places the Reach doesn't show to common sailors." Sera's mouth twitched. "He's also blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and reputedly owes money to every chandler between here and the Shatterstone. The harbormaster called him a cantankerous old bastard. The harbormaster then said it three more times, in case I had missed it."
Argo considered this. He thought of the map folded in the oilskin pouch against his chest, the map that had cost him his father's forge and the last of his inheritance and a sum he preferred not to name. The map that promised the Solbright , the legendary golden galleon that had vanished into the Shimmering Reach eighty years ago with the treasure of the Drowned King still lashed to her decks. The map that was, upon close inspection, only half a map. The southern quadrant of the Shimmering Reach was drawn in clean, confident lines, the work of a practiced hand. The northern quadrant, the quadrant that mattered, the quadrant where the Solbright was reputed to have been last seen, was empty. A blank space, framed by a single line of faded script: Ask the old man what the Reach keeps.
He had been carrying the question for two months. The question had grown no lighter.
"Show me the way," he said.
Sera led him off the wharf and into the warren of Saltmarrow's lower town, where the alleyways were narrow and dark and the air tasted of old fish. Their boots found the worn cobbles, the boards, the patches of muddy sand where the tide came in. Twice they passed under strings of dried squid hung out to cure, the white flesh leathery, the ink sacs burst and trailing pale blue. The smell was enough to make a man's eyes water. Argo kept his mouth shut and breathed through his nose, which was not an improvement.
The coal-she'd squatted at the edge of the wharves like a brooding toad, its roof caved, its walls stained with soot and salt. Beyond it, a path of broken shells led out onto a low spit of land that ended in a hut built on the upturned ribs of a wrecked schooner. Lantern light flickered behind a square of oiled canvas that served as a window. From within, Argo could hear a low, tuneless humming, broken by an occasional mutter.
Sera stopped at the door. "Want me to come in with you?"
"No." Argo checked the strap of his sea-bag, straightened the collar of his salt-stained coat. "Stay close. If you hear me shout, don't come in. Go get the constable."
"There's no constable in Saltmarrow."
"Then go get anyone with a club and a grudge."
He knocked.
The humming stopped. A long silence followed, broken only by the soft lap of water against the wreck-ribs beneath the hut. Then a voice, slow and drawling, with the broad coastal slur of a man who had spent his life shouting over weather, came through the canvas.
"Whatever you're selling, I don't want it. Whatever you're buying, I already have. Move along."
Argo cleared his throat. "My name is Argo Steel. I'm a treasure hunter out of Ashfall. I've come about a map."
Another silence. He could hear the old man moving inside, the creak of a stool, the clink of a bottle set down too hard. Then the canvas flap twitched aside, and a single pale eye regarded him from a face that looked as though it had been carved from the same salt-stained wood as the hut.
"Argo Steel," the old man repeated. The name came out flattened, chewed over, tasted. "Ashfall. The smelter town."
"Former smelter town." Argo met the eye. The other socket was closed, a puckered knot of old scar tissue that disappeared into a fringe of white beard. "My father was Korrick Coalvein."
The name landed. The old man's mouth worked beneath the beard, working some private calculation. Then the eye blinked, slow as a barnacle opening at the tide, and the door creaked wider.
"Get in, then," Old Brennan said. "Before the wind changes and my mood with it."
The inside of the hut was smaller than it looked from outside, and warmer. A small iron stove squatted in one corner, its chimney pipe crooked, its fire banked to a sullen orange. A table of salt-warped planks held a clutter of charts, compasses, inkpots, a half-eaten plate of pickled fish, and a bottle of something amber and viscous that smelled, faintly, of anise. Old Brennan lowered himself onto a three-legged stool and gestured at a second stool with a hand that was large, gnarled, and still bore the salt-corroded scars of fifty years of hauling crab pots.
"Sit," he said. "You can leave the door open. The draft is good for what ails you."
Argo sat. He took the oilskin pouch from inside his coat and laid it on the table between them, careful not to disturb the clutter. He did not open it. Not yet.
"Two months ago," he said, "a man named Master Torvald sold me a map in Ashfall. He said it was drawn by a man who had sailed the Shimmering Reach when he was young and had charted the waters that no sailing master will commit to a proper chart. He said the map would lead me to the Solbright ."
Old Brennan did not move. The single eye regarded the pouch the way a gull regards a smaller gull that has found something interesting on the tide.
"Master Torvald," the old man said, and the name came out the way a man spits out a fishbone. "Aye. I know Torvald. I know of Torvald. I know the kind of map Torvald sells. I know the kind of man who buys them, too. Treasure hunters. Grave-robbers. The kind of fool who looks at the Reach and sees only what's on top of it."
"And what do you see, when you look at the Reach?"
Old Brennan was quiet for a long moment. The stove ticked. Outside, the tide muttered against the wreck-ribs, and Sera's shadow shifted in the doorway.
"I see what's underneath," the old man said at last. "I see what the Reach keeps, and I see what the Reach takes, and I see that the second list is longer than the first." He reached for the bottle, poured a measure into a cup that had once been a tin can, and pushed it across the table toward Argo. "Drink. You look like you need it."
Argo drank. The liquid was harsh and sweet and burned a line of fire down into his chest. He set the cup down and opened the pouch.
The map unfolded across the table in soft, ink-dark vellum. The southern quadrant of the Shimmering Reach lay exposed, the coastline drawn in fine, confident lines, the soundings marked in careful numerals, the hazards annotated in a small, precise hand. The northern quadrant was the blank he remembered, the empty space, the framed question. He laid the map flat and tapped the empty quadrant with one finger.
"Master Torvald told me the man who drew this map drew only half of it on purpose. He said the other half had to be asked for. He said to ask the old man what the Reach keeps." Argo looked up. "I'm asking."
Old Brennan did not answer. The single eye moved over the map, tracing the lines of the southern quadrant with a slow, practiced attention, the way a man reads a letter from someone he has not heard from in a long time. The gnarled hand reached out, hovered above the blank of the northern quadrant, and did not touch.
"Where did Torvald get this?" the old man asked.
"He didn't say. He said a man in a black coat had sold it to him, ten years ago, in a port I never heard of. He said the man told him the map was drawn by a crab-fisher who had gone mad on the Reach, and that the second half was the price of the fisher's silence."
"A man in a black coat." Old Brennan's mouth tightened beneath the beard. "Aye. There's a man in a black coat. Lysander Vane, they call him, though I doubt the name is one his mother gave him. He buys things. Maps, mostly. And the men who draw them, when the price is right."
Argo felt a coldness settle at the base of his spine that had nothing to do with the draft from the open door. "Has he bought you?"
The old man's laugh was a short, ugly sound, like a gull choking on a fish. "He's tried. Every five years, like the tide. Comes to Saltmarrow in some sleek black bark with sails that look like they've never seen a storm, offers me coin, offers me favors, offers me threats he thinks I don't notice. The last time he sent something after me that was less a man than a thing. Pale as salt-bleached bone. Quiet as a held breath." The single eye found Argo's and held it. "I am not a young man, Argo Steel, but I am not yet so old that I have stopped being afraid of the dark. I have drawn my half of the map. I have kept it close. And I have been waiting for someone to come asking the right question."
He reached beneath the table, into a shelf Argo had not seen, and brought out a long, narrow tube of oiled leather. He unstopped it, shook out a single sheet of vellum, and laid it on the table beside the first map. The two pieces met along a curving seam, ink to ink, line to line, and the Shimmering Reach lay whole before them for the first time in Argo's life.
The northern quadrant was not blank. It was covered in a fine, dense tracery of lines that did not look like any coastline Argo had ever seen. There were no soundings. There were no hazard marks. There were only the lines, and a single, large symbol drawn in red ink at the center of the quadrant: a galleon, sails furled, hull bright as a struck coin, and beneath it, in the same small, precise hand, a single line of script.
The Reach keeps what it loves, and drowns what it cannot keep.
Argo stared at the map until the lines blurred. Somewhere far off, across the dark water of the Reach, a horn sounded, low and long, the note of a vessel moving under sail in a direction no chart in Argo's possession would have recommended. The old man heard it too. The single eye did not move from the map.
"That," Old Brennan said quietly, "would be the black bark. I have been expecting it for a week." He looked up at Argo, and for the first time the cantankerous mask slipped, and what lay beneath it was a kind of tired, unsurprised grief. "You had better drink the rest of that bottle, son. You are about to have company, and I do not think she will knock."
The bottle was on the table, three fingers of dark spirit left in the bottom, and Old Brennan lifted it with the slow deliberation of a man who had long ago learned that last measures were for thinking on, not for drinking. He drank, watching the door. The spirit went down hot and clean and did nothing at all for the cold that had taken root somewhere behind his sternum in the year his boy had not come back from the northern grounds.
The horn sounded again. Closer.
Argo was on his feet. The young man moved the way young men do when the world suddenly narrows to a doorway, with too much energy and not enough idea where to put it. His hand went to the knife at his belt, and Old Brennan saw him check the edge with his thumb, and saw him decide the edge was not enough, and saw him set his jaw anyway because the boy had been born stubborn and would die the same way.
"Sit down," Old Brennan said.
"Mr. Brennan, that's a vessel coming in to the dock. I can hear the oars."
"I said sit down. You will not outrun her on the dock, and you will not outsail her on the water, and you will not outfight her in a closed room, because the only way to fight her is to not be in the room." He set the bottle down with a soft click of glass on wood. "Now. Help me roll this map."
They rolled the joined vellum together, the leather tube and the old chart inside it, and Old Brennan slid the bundle into a hollowed shelf behind a false back he had cut forty years ago for exactly this sort of trouble. The shelf closed with a click. By the time the knock came, three measured raps on the door, the cabin looked like nothing but a fisherman's den, and the only light in the room was the single whale-oil lamp guttering in its glass.
Argo had not sat down. He had done the next best thing, which was to stand in the corner with his shoulders against the wall and his hand on his knife, in a position where the door would have to open past him to get at Brennan. Old Brennan noted this, and was irritated by it, and was something else besides irritated that he did not intend to look at directly.
"Open it," he said. "Slow. Hands where she can see them."
The door swung inward on its salt-swollen hinges, and the night came in with it, salt air and the smell of weed and the low, constant complaint of the Reach, and behind the night came a woman.
She was not tall. She was not broad. She was dressed in black, in cloth so fine it had no weight, and her face was the color of new milk and just about as warm. Her hair was drawn back from her temples in a way that made the shape of her skull too clear, too perfect, as if the bones underneath had been set by a hand that did not entirely approve of the original. Her eyes were the pale, water-clear grey of a sky before a killing frost, and they moved across the room in a single unhurried sweep that took in every corner, every shadow, every face, and came to rest on the place where the map was not.
"Mr. Brennan," she said. Her voice was the temperature of the lamp glass. "I have been hoping for some time that we would have occasion to speak. I am told you are a man who keeps oddments, and that you know the names of things that have been lost."
Old Brennan kept his one eye on her face. "I am a fisherman, miss. I keep nets. I keep bait. I keep a poor opinion of anyone who comes to my door after dark without sending word ahead."
"Nevertheless." She stepped inside without waiting to be asked, and the cabin, which had held Argo and the old man and the lamp and the whole of Old Brennan's small life comfortably enough, became suddenly crowded. She did not move like a person. She moved like a thought passing through the mind of a very tired man. "I am given to understand that you possess, or have at one time possessed, or know the location of, a chart of a certain portion of the northern Reach. A chart of unusual age. I am prepared to offer a considerable sum for the loan of such a document, and a more considerable sum still for the location of the vessel it is believed to describe."
Argo, in his corner, had gone very still. Old Brennan did not look at him.
"Ma'am," Old Brennan said, and let the word stretch out the way he had learned to stretch it in fifty years of speaking to people who came to his door with proposals, "I have been a fisherman on this Reach since before your mother was a thought in her grandmother's mind. In that time I have been offered, by one party and another, a great many considerable sums. I have found, almost without exception, that the sums are offered by people who are not in the business of paying considerable sums, and that the thing they are buying is not in the end mine to sell."
She inclined her head. The motion was correct, and smooth, and utterly without meaning. "You are a careful man."
"I am an old man, miss. The two things are not the same, but they do tend to arrive together."
"And yet," she said, and her gaze slid, with the unhurried precision of a blade being drawn, across the cabin, across the shelves, across the walls, "I am told that the chart exists, and that it has been seen in this room within the last quarter-hour. I am told this by a person who does not, as a rule, deceive me." The pale eyes came back to his. "Will you look me in the face, Mr. Brennan, and tell me that you have no such document in your keeping?"
The lamp guttered. Somewhere outside, the black bark shifted at her moorings with a long, low complaint of timber against the pilings, the sound of a ship settling in for a wait. Old Brennan looked the woman in the face. He had been a boy on the boats when his father had first pointed out, on a foggy morning, the pale shape that had stood on the far rocks and watched them haul their catch. He had been a young man the first time he had been spoken to by one of them, in a voice like a stone being dropped into a deep well. He had been a man grown the first time he had understood what the things were, and what they were for, and what they took from the people they spoke to. He had outlived a wife and a son and a half-century of weather, and he was not afraid of this one. He was, however, careful of her.
"I have no such document," he said.
The silence that followed was the kind of silence that has a shape. It sat in the room like a third person. The woman's face did not change. It had not changed since she had come in. Old Brennan suspected it had not changed since the morning she had been made.
"I see," she said, at length. "Then I have taken up enough of your evening, Mr. Brennan. I will trouble you no further on the matter of charts. There is, however, a second small service I had hoped to ask of you."
She turned her head, and for the first time looked directly at Argo. The young man did not flinch. Old Brennan was glad of that, and sorry of it, in the same breath.
"You are Argo Steel," she said. It was not a question. "Son of Harold Steel, formerly of the Three-Coin Forge in the lower town. Apprenticed to your father in the smelting trade, and at his death, inheritor of a forge that has not turned a profit in three years. You are here, I am told, in pursuit of a vessel of considerable value, and you have been at some pains to assemble a crew and a means to put to sea."
Argo's hand had gone white on the hilt of his knife. "Who told you that?"
"I am told many things, Mr. Steel. It is one of the conditions of my employment." She looked back at Brennan, and for a moment the mask of courtesy thinned, and something older and colder looked out through the pale eyes. "I am here, in plain words, to remove Mr. Steel from the board. The employer I represent has taken an interest in the same vessel, and is not inclined to share. I am instructed to do this with as little disturbance to the neighborhood as possible, and I am instructed further that Mr. Steel, having had the misfortune to see the first half of the map, is to be induced to surrender the location of the second half, and thereafter to be persuaded to take no further interest in the matter. The means of persuasion are at my discretion."
Old Brennan's hand, under the table, had found the old fish-gutting knife he kept in the rail. It was not a fighting weapon. It had a six-inch blade and a horn handle worn smooth as bone. It was, however, in his hand, and his hand was not shaking.
"You will do no persuading in this house, miss."
"Mr. Brennan." The voice was patient. "I have no wish to disorder your house. I have no wish to disorder anything. I am, by nature, a creature of order. If I were to take Mr. Steel from this room by the door, he would walk out under his own power, and he would walk back in again under my instruction, and the location of the second half of the map would be given to me, and the matter would be concluded. I have done this before. It is not, I assure you, an unpleasant procedure. I am told that the subject retains no clear memory of the interval, and suffers no lasting ill effect beyond a certain tendency toward headaches in cold weather."
Argo had gone the color of old tallow. "Brennan," he said, low, "what is she?"
"She is a porcelain lady, son." Old Brennan did not take his eye off the figure in black. "They are made for the rich, in the old way, and bound to a master. They are not unkind, by their nature. They are not anything, by their nature. You will treat her with the respect you would treat a loaded crossbow, which is to say, a great deal of respect, and a great deal of caution, and not a step closer than you have to."
The Porcelain Assassin inclined her head, a fraction. "You are kind to describe me so accurately, Mr. Brennan. Most men require a demonstration."
"I have had the demonstration, miss. I was a boy. I have not forgotten." He lifted the bottle, considered the finger of spirit left in it, and drank it down. The glass went back to the table. "You have said your piece. Now I will say mine. The young man is under my roof. He will leave under his own power, and not before morning. If you want him, you will wait until he is on the dock, and you will take him there, and you will not set foot in this house again. That is the arrangement."
The woman was silent for a long moment. The lamp, which had been sinking, found a last tongue of flame and steadied on it. In the new light the lines of her face were very sharp, and very still, and the eyes watched him with the unblinking attention of something that did not need to blink.
"You presume upon an old acquaintance, Mr. Brennan. I am not sure that the acquaintance will bear the weight you are putting on it."
"It will have to, miss. I am all I have."
Another silence. The black bark creaked at the dock. Argo, in his corner, had begun to breathe again, though he was doing it through his teeth.
"Very well," the Porcelain Assassin said at last, and the words fell into the room like coins into a closed hand. "I will wait until morning. I will wait on the dock. I will not set foot in this house again. I will ask you, however, to consider, in the night that is coming, whether the price of the young man's comfort is worth the second half of a map that is not his, and was not meant for him, and will, in the end, be taken from him one way or another. Good evening, Mr. Brennan. Mr. Steel."
She turned and went out through the door, and the door swung shut behind her, and the night came in for a moment and then did not, and the lamp steadied, and the cabin was a cabin again, and the two men were alone in it with the remains of the bottle and the smell of salt and the small, cold knowledge of what was waiting for them on the dock at first light.
Argo let out a breath that shook on the way out. "Brennan. What in the hells was that."
"That," Old Brennan said, "is a problem. Sit down. I will tell you about her while we have the dark."
Brennan poured the last of the bottle into two small glasses. The liquor caught the lamplight and looked like weak tea, which was about what it was. He set one before Argo and kept the other, and did not drink.
"She is called the Porcelain Mask," he said, and his voice had gone flat and slow, the way it did when he was telling something he had told himself he would not tell. "Some say the name is just a name. Some say there is more than one. I have seen this one three times in my life. The first time I was a boy. The second time I was a man. The third time was just now, and I had hoped it would be the last."
"Who sent her?" Argo asked. His hand was still trembling. He wrapped it around the glass to hide it.
"The man who owns the other half of the map I gave you. Lysander Vane." Brennan tasted the word like something sour. "He has been buying up the old routes for thirty years. Any captain who gets close to something he wants, any fisherman who remembers too much, any old fool who kept the wrong scraps in a box. They have a way of disappearing, or worse."
Argo's mouth went dry. "And you kept your half anyway."
"I am an old fool, as I said. And I am not the only one who kept what I kept. There are others. There is a whole shelf of us, on this coast, in the villages, in the old families. We have been waiting for someone to come looking. We hoped no one ever would."
"Why Vane? Why a map?"
Brennan looked into his glass. "Because the Singing Shoals are not just a place, lad. They are a door. And what is behind the door is worth more than any of us can imagine. Vane has been trying to open it for a long time. He has tried with ships. He has tried with men. He has tried with money. The shoals do not answer to any of those things. But a map made by the sea-folk, in the old way, with the old songs, that is a key. And he needs the other half of the key."
The lamp guttered. Somewhere outside, a night-bird called, three notes, falling.
"The sea-folk," Argo said slowly. "You mean the ones in the stories. The ones who sing the ships in."
"I mean the ones your captain's great-grandfather cheated, yes. The ones who made the bargain and then watched it broken. They have not forgotten, lad. They are still out there, in the water, in the fog. They remember the shape of the hull and the color of the sail and the sound of the laugh. And they will have their due, one day. Vane wants to get to the shoals first. He wants to take what is there and use it. He does not care about the debt. He does not care about the singing. He only cares about the power."
"And the woman in the mask?"
"She is what he sends when he is done asking. She is not a woman, lad, whatever she looks like. She is a thing he made, a long time ago, out of something that was not human and is not human now. She does not tire. She does not sleep. She does not forget a face once she has seen it. And she does not leave until the work is done."
Brennan drank, finally, a long pull that emptied the glass and set it down hard on the table.
"I am sorry," he said. "I should not have given you the map. I should have let it rot."
Argo looked at the old man, at the lamp, at the small dark cabin, and felt the weight of the night settle on him like a hand.
"You did not have to," he said. "I am glad you did."
Brennan grunted. "You may not be, come morning. She will be on the dock. She will wait, because she said she would. And when the light comes, she will come in, and she will ask again, and if the answer is still no, then I will not see the sun go down again. That is the way of it."
"Then we leave before the light comes."
"With what? A cart and a mule? She will find us on the road before the first bird sings. She always finds them."
"Then we take a boat."
Brennan shook his head. "The only boat I have is the crab-skiff, and it would not make the harbor mouth in this wind, let alone the Reach. And Sera's cutter is at Salt-Dock, and that is a full night's walk, and the road is watched."
They sat with that for a while. The lamp burned. The shadows moved. Argo's mind turned the problem over and over, the way he had turned over hot ingots in his father's forge, looking for the flaw, looking for the place where the metal would give.
"The cart," he said at last. "The cart and the mule. But not on the road."
"Where, then?"
"Into the water. The cart has a bed, and the bed is sound. We take it down to the north beach, where the slope is gentle. We lash a spar across the front, and a blanket for a sail, and we run before the wind, along the coast, under the cliffs, where the road cannot see us. We make for the Widow's Step, the headland south of Salt-Dock. From there it is a short walk over the downs to the harbor, and the cutter, and the open water. By the time she finds the cabin empty, we will be three miles out."
Brennan looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, a short, rough sound, like a seal barking.
"You are either a fool or a genius, lad. I have not decided which. But I will take the fool's chance over the certain end."
They worked quickly after that, in the dark, without lamps that would show at the windows. Brennan moved with a sureness that surprised Argo, reaching for things in the black, knowing where each nail and each cleat was by feel. He pulled a sea-chest from under his bunk, and from it he took a bundle of oilskin and a small leather purse, and from the purse a folded paper, which he tucked into the breast of his coat.
"The other half," he said, when Argo looked. "I have carried it for forty years. It does not leave me now."
They led the mule down the path, the cart behind, the wheels greased with tallow so they would not squeak. The wind had picked up. It came off the water in long, cold gusts that smelled of weed and deep water. Argo could hear the surf on the north beach, a low, steady rush, like breath.
They reached the shingle. The slope was gentle, as he had hoped. The mule balked at the first step into the water, and Brennan spoke to it in a low, steady voice, and after a moment it went forward, and the cart followed, the wheels sinking into the soft sand beneath the waterline. Argo took the traces. The water was shockingly cold. It came over his boots and into them, and the chill ran up his legs and settled in his chest.
They pushed on. The spar was lashed, the blanket hoisted, a pale square against the dark. The wind took it, and the strange craft began to move, slow and heavy, out along the coast. The cliffs rose black on their left. The sea was a blacker black to their right. Above them, the stars came and went in the racing scud.
They went on for an hour, maybe more. Argo lost track. His arms ached. The water was at his thighs. Brennan sat in the cart, wrapped in a blanket, holding the chest against him, and did not speak. The mule stood with its head low, resigned.
The Widow's Step appeared as a deeper blackness against the sky, a blunt prow of land jutting out into the sea. Argo steered for the shingle beach on its lee side, and the cart grounded with a crunch, and the mule stopped, and they were still.
From the downs above, the path to Salt-Dock was a pale line in the dark. They left the cart, and the mule, and the spar, and climbed. The wind was colder up here, and stronger. It pressed against them as they walked, as if it were trying to push them back.
Sera was at the harbor. She came out of the dark as they came down the last slope, a lantern in her hand, her coat pulled tight around her.
"I saw the cart on the beach," she said. "I thought you were both drowned. What in the name of the Reach are you doing?"
"Running," Brennan said. "And we need to sail. Now. Tonight. Before the light."
She looked at him, and at Argo, and at the sky, and she did not ask for an explanation. She had been a tide-runner too long for that. She turned and walked back down the dock, and they followed, and the cutter's lines were cast off in a minute, and the sail went up, and they slipped out of the harbor on the last of the ebb.
The wind was fair. The cutter leaned and ran, and the wake behind them was a pale line in the black water, and the coast fell away, and the Widow's Step was a shape, and then a memory, and then gone.
They did not see the Porcelain Assassin that night. They did not see her at all, not on the dock, not on the road, not on the north beach. She had waited, as she said she would, until the light. She had come up the path at first grey, and found the cabin door open, and the lamp out, and the two men gone. She had stood for a long time on the threshold, quite still, the mask turned toward the empty room. Then she had turned, and walked down to the water, and stood there, and looked out at the Reach, and the dawn came up behind her, and the wind moved her coat, and she did not move at all.
Brennan slept in the bow of the cutter, curled on a coil of rope, the sea-chest under his head. Sera held the tiller, and Argo sat beside her, and the stars wheeled overhead, and the sound of the water against the hull was the only sound for a long time.
"We are going to the Singing Shoals," Sera said at last, her voice low. "I can feel it. That is where the wind is taking us."
"Yes," Argo said.
"Are you afraid?"
He thought about it. The wind. The cold. The mask. The old man's story. The map in his coat, the other half in the chest, the door at the end of the sea.
"Yes," he said. "But I would rather be afraid and moving than afraid and still."
She smiled, a small flash of white in the dark. "Good answer, smelter. Hold the sheet."