Greyhaven's Water Gates

The drains of the Greyhaven Basin were older than the Compact, and Nera Pell had been inside them once, at nineteen, on a dare.

She remembered them as the sea wall came up out of the dark: tall arched tunnels that stank of the town's leavings, built to last. Now she meant to go back in with a maul.

"There," said Hugh Stannard softly, at her shoulder. "The third arch. The one with the iron in it."

He was a cooper from the upper town, soft-spoken, with a cooper's adze in his belt, and he had run the resistance in Greyhaven since the town capitulated in October. On the table in Brightwater's cabin he had drawn them the Basin with a stub of charcoal and a steady hand.

Nera could see the arch now, a darker shape in the dark wall, with the low tide sucking and slapping at its mouth.

It was a little before three in the morning on the sixth, and Greyhaven lay under Shelter's dark. The engine was anchored three miles west of the harbor mouth in the outflow of the Grey, and Nera could see the great cluster of its lights over her right shoulder, low on the black sea. The gatehouses lay less than four miles from it. They were inside the dark and inside the reach of its fitting, and any dead thing in this water would be awake.

The sea wall ran south from the chain house in a long, low curve of dressed stone, with the sea on its west face and the Basin behind it, where six thousand people slept below the level of the tide. Two squat gatehouses stood on the wall above the two sluice gates, fifty yards apart. At low water the Basin emptied through them. At high water the gates shut and held the sea out.

In four days, at the top of the spring, Vaust meant to open them.

"Ready, Mistress Pell?" said Amos Yelland from the oars. He was a freckled Darn shipwright who had worked beside her on the Kestrel's new mainmast. Owen Tasker beside him was an older joiner with two fingers missing. A second boat followed with Stannard's brother and four more.

And in the stern sheets beside Nera sat Annet Sorn, with a long canvas bundle across her knees.

"Ready," Nera said.

The arch swallowed them. The open hiss of the sea gave way to a hollow, dripping echo, and the smell came down on them, thick and warm. Amos and Owen shipped their oars and pushed the lugger along with their hands against the walls. Nera opened her lantern's shutter a crack. A thin yellow beam went ahead of them over black water, wet green stone, and a curved roof crusted with salt.

The tunnel ran east under the sea wall, straight as a ropewalk, with the Basin's water running out past them knee-deep.

"How far?" said Owen.

"Two hundred yards to the outfall pool," Sorn said. "Then the gate race. Then the gate." Her voice was dry and precise, and it carried no farther than the boat. She had not smiled once in the fortnight Nera had known her. "Keep the light low. They don't need it to see you, but the living ones do."

"There are men down here too?" Owen asked.

"Two," Sorn said, "on the gate stair, last week."

They came out of the tunnel into a wider place. Nera's beam swung up and found a vaulted chamber, round, with a pool of black water in its floor and the tunnel mouth they had come by on the west side. Across the pool, on the east side, a second arch opened into the gate race, and the water came roaring out of it into the pool and swirled and ran away under them. A stone ledge went round the pool's edge. Iron rungs climbed the wall to a trapdoor in the vault.

Something was standing on the ledge.

Nera brought the light round onto it. It was a man, or had been. He wore a gateman's leather jerkin, and he was barefoot, and the water ran off him onto the stone. His face was the color of tallow. He stood with his arms at his sides and his head turned toward the light, and as the beam touched him, he began to walk.

"Drowned," Amos said. "Look out, there's more."

Five of them came out from the shadows round the ledge and down into the pool, wading toward the boat with the water to their thighs, without hurry and without sound.

"These aren't mine," Sorn said sharply, before anyone could ask. "Understand that. The fitting in the race doesn't hold them. Shelter does, from four miles out. They'll keep moving after we break the race fittings. Break them yourselves."

"Mauls," Nera said. "Legs first. Amos, Owen, with me. The rest keep the boat off the ledge."

She went over the side into the pool.

The cold hit her to the waist, and the current pulled at her legs on the slick stone. She set her feet wide. The first of the drowned came at her out of the dark, a big man with a sodden beard, reaching. She swung the maul low and flat at his knee. The shock went up her arms to her shoulders. The knee gave with a crack that echoed round the vault, and the man went down sideways into the black water and came up again, still reaching for her, and could not stand.

She hit him again, at the base of the skull. He stopped.

Behind her Amos was shouting. She turned. Two of them had Owen Tasker by the coat and were dragging him backward toward the tunnel mouth, toward the deep water where the current ran. Owen was hammering at one with his joiner's mallet, and it made no difference.

"Owen! Down! Go down!"

He threw himself down into the water. The drowned man holding him bent with him, and Nera came through the pool in three plunging strides and swept that one's legs from under it with the maul. Amos got the other from behind with a timber dog, an iron hook on a handle, and dragged it off its feet. Owen came up coughing, and Nera hauled him upright by the collar.

"Damn them," Owen gasped. "They're cold as the sea."

Nera turned with the maul up. The last two were coming along the ledge at the boat. The Darn men in the boat had boathooks out and were shoving them off. One of the dead caught a boathook and pulled, and a young shipwright named Robin Lowry went over the side with a yell.

Nera reached him first. She caught his belt as he went under, and heaved him up against the boat's side, and someone inside grabbed his arms. The drowned man that had pulled him in came for her with its white hands out. She hit it in the chest with the maul head, which did nothing, and in the knee, which did. Amos broke its neck.

The fifth stood on the ledge without moving. It was a woman. She wore a Basin housewife's apron, and she stood with her hands folded in front of her as if waiting for a cart. Her eyes were open.

"Leave her," Sorn said quietly, from the boat. "She's not been told to do anything."

"I'm not leaving her at our backs," Nera said.

"Then be quick," Sorn said.

Nera did it as cleanly as she could, and kept her eyes off the woman's face.

The gate race was a stone channel twelve feet wide and as long as a ship. The Basin's water came down it fast and loud under a low vault. At its far end she could see the gate: two great leaves of oak and iron, eight feet high, standing open against the race walls to let the Basin drain.

And on the gate, on both leaves, the ward plates.

They were bronze, each the size of a door panel, bolted to the oak, cut with lines that made Nera's eyes slide off when she tried to follow them. In the dark of the race they gave out a pale glow, like moonlight on frost, and the water running past them shone with it.

"By the Deep," said Amos, very low.

"Don't look at the plates," Sorn said. "Look at the floor. The fitting is in the race bed, ten yards short of the gate. Mid-channel. You'll see the cage."

They waded up the race with the current pushing against their thighs. Nera held the lantern. Ten yards short of the gate, the beam found it. A squat iron cage the size of a bread oven was bolted into the race bed, with the water foaming round it. Inside the cage, in the rush of the stream, sat a knot of black stone and dark metal the size of Nera's two fists.

"It's working," Sorn said. She stood in the race with the water piling up against her legs and looked down at the thing in the cage with an expression Nera had not seen on her before. "Feel it. Put your hand in the water downstream of it."

Nera did. The water was cold, as she expected. But below the fitting it was colder. A thread of cold ran out of the cage down the middle of the race, colder than the sea, and it set her teeth aching.

"That is a door," Sorn said. "A small one. It needs no engine near it, only the stream. When Crown opens these gates at the top of the spring, every soul down there who drowns within a mile of this cage gets up afterward." She stopped. "It doesn't need Shelter. It just sits here and waits."

"Then let's get it out of the stream," Nera said.

Sorn unrolled her bundle. Inside were iron tongs as long as a boathook, with jaws of bronze cut in the plates' pattern reversed. She had forged them at Darn and cut the counter-wards herself.

"Break the cage," she said.

Nera set her feet in the race. She had brought the big maul, the fourteen-pound one from the Darn slip, and she swung it up over her shoulder and brought it down on the cage's top bar. The iron rang like a bell under the vault, and the blow jarred her to the heels. The bar bent. She hit it again, and it cracked across. A third blow, at the bolt, sheared the bolt head off, and the top of the cage lifted on its hinge.

"Out of the way."

Sorn put the tongs in. The bronze jaws closed round the fitting. Nera heard her breath go in sharp through her teeth, but she held on. She leaned back on the tongs, and the fitting came up out of its seat in the cage with a sucking sound, and the thread of cold in the water stopped.

"On the sill," Sorn said. "Quickly. Before it finds anything."

The gate sill was a broad bar of granite across the race bed at the gate's foot, standing a foot clear of the stream. Sorn laid the fitting on it, holding it down with the tongs. Nera brought the maul down on it with all the weight of her shoulders.

It broke. No flash came, and no sound except the blow itself and a dull crack. The black stone split into three pieces, and the warded metal inside it bent and tore. A breath of cold came off it, like the air from an ice house when the door is opened, and went past them, and was gone.

Nera went on hitting until there was nothing on the sill but gravel and twisted wire, and Sorn put a hand on her wrist.

"It's done," Sorn said. "That's one."

The second gate race was fifty yards along, reached by a cross-tunnel too low for anything but crawling. They crawled it with the water to their chins and the lanterns held up over their heads. Halfway through, Robin Lowry, in front, stopped dead and whispered that something had touched his foot.

"Keep going," Nera said behind him. "Keep going, Robin. It's weed."

Another of the dead was lying on the bottom of the cross-tunnel, and when Owen came past, it took him by the ankle. Owen kicked and swore. Amos reached back and dragged him free, and they came out into the second race in a scrambling tangle with the thing coming after them on its elbows. Nera broke its neck with the maul at the tunnel mouth.

The second race was like the first. The same open gate glowed with its plates, and the same iron cage foamed in the stream. But two living men were in this one.

They were on the gate stair, a narrow flight that climbed the race wall beside the gate to a trapdoor in the vault, the way up into the gatehouse. One sat on the top step with a lantern. The other stood below him with a crossbow. They wore Pale Fleet blue-gray, and they had heard the fighting in the cross-tunnel, and the crossbow was pointed at the tunnel mouth.

The bolt hit Amos Yelland in the shoulder and knocked him back into the water.

Nera went up the race at a floundering run while the crossbowman cranked at his windlass. She was halfway to him when he got it spanned, and she threw the maul. It was too heavy to throw well, and it hit him in the legs rather than the head, but it hit him. He fell down the stair into the race, and the bolt went off into the vault and rang off the stone.

The man on the top step had a sword out. He came down the stair at her. She had no maul now. She pulled the adze from her belt, the short-handled shipwright's adze she had carried at Darn since she was seventeen, and met him at the foot of the stair with the water round her knees.

He cut at her head, and she got the adze up and took the blade on its haft, and the steel bit into the ash a finger deep. She twisted, and the sword stuck. They wrestled for it on the stair. He was smaller than she was. She shoved him back against the wall and drove her elbow and the adze's poll into his face. He sat down hard on the steps and stayed there with his hands over his face.

The crossbowman was trying to get up out of the race. Owen sat on him.

"Amos," Nera said, breathing hard. "Where's Amos?"

"Here." He was sitting in the stream with the bolt through the meat of his shoulder and his face gray in the lantern light. "Here, Mistress. It's not so bad. Don't make me pull it out."

"Nobody's pulling it out," Nera said. "Robin, hold him up. Sorn?"

Sorn was already in the race with her tongs, standing over the cage.

The second fitting broke as the first had, on the sill, with the same cold breath. Nera did it with the maul she had thrown, which Owen had fished out of the race for her, and this time she stopped at three blows. She had no breath to spare.

"That's both," she said. "North race and south."

"Yes," Sorn said. "The girl said one in each race, and she was right." She looked up the gate stair at the door in the vault. "The controls are up there. And the work crews."

Above them, faintly, through stone, Nera heard shouting, and a deep thudding, and a bell ringing somewhere. Stannard's people had reached the landward door. It was a quarter to four.

"Up," she said.

The gate stair came up through a trapdoor into the windlass room of the south gatehouse, a long, low stone room. Two enormous wooden windlasses stood in it, one for each leaf of the gate, with their chains running down through slots in the floor. The room smelled of tallow and men who had not washed in weeks.

Twenty men were chained along its east wall.

They were Greyhaven gatemen and Basin laborers, with a long chain running through their ankle cuffs to a ring in the wall. Now they were all awake and sitting up on their straw. They stared as Nera came out of the trapdoor soaked to the neck, with a maul in her hand and an adze in her belt.

At the far end of the room, by the landward door, three Pale Fleet soldiers and a heavy man in an overseer's coat were holding the door against whatever was hammering on it from outside. The overseer turned and saw Nera.

"Overseer," said one of the chained men, quite loudly. "Look behind you."

The overseer came down the room at her with a short sword in his hand and his face set. He was big, as big as she was, and he knew how to use the sword. Nera had the maul in both hands. She swung it as he came, a flat sideways blow at his body, and he stepped back out of its way and came in again behind it before she could recover. The sword point came at her ribs. She threw herself sideways against a windlass, and the blade went past her and scored along the oak.

Then a chained man swung his chain.

He had stood up and gathered the slack of it in both hands, and as the overseer went by him, he swung the whole length of it round at the overseer's legs. It wrapped the overseer's knees. He went down on his face on the stone. Three more of the chained men were on him before he could rise. One took the sword out of his hand and threw it across the floor to Nera.

"Elias Brewer," the man with the chain said to her, panting. He was old, with a white stubble and a gateman's broad shoulders. "Sluice-master of this gate, twenty-two years. Who are you?"

"Nera Pell. From Darn. Where are the keys?"

"His belt," Brewer said.

The landward door burst in. Stannard came through it with a dozen men behind him, swinging his cooper's adze. The three soldiers at the door threw down their swords at once, and knelt, and put their hands on their heads. Stannard looked round the room, at the chained men, and at Nera dripping on the stone with a borrowed sword and a maul.

"The fittings?" he said.

"Two broken," Nera said. "North race and south. That's all of them."

"Then we've done it," Stannard said.

"Not yet," said Sorn, coming up through the trapdoor behind Nera with her tongs over her shoulder. "The plates are still on the gates. Crown can break the locks with the plates alone, if she gets within three miles at high water. The fittings were for afterward. The plates are what open the doors. Get these men's chains off. Then give me every bar and every cold chisel in this gatehouse."

They found the keys on the overseer's belt. Elias Brewer's men came out of their chains. Some of them were laughing, and one sat down against the wall with his face in his hands and stayed there. Brewer went straight to the windlasses and laid his hands on them, one after the other.

"The gates," Nera said to him. "When does the Basin flood?"

"The tide's turning," Brewer said. "It's an hour past low water. Spring tides coming, highest of the year on the tenth. They'd have done it then." He looked round at her. "The gates are open now to let the Basin drain. I'll shut them on the flood, and they'll stay shut. Nobody's opening these gates while I'm alive. Not with plates and not with anything."

Nera climbed the inner stair to the gatehouse roof. Sorn came after her.

From the roof she could see along the sea wall in both directions. To the north, lights were moving on the north gatehouse, where Stannard's brother had gone in, and somebody was cheering. To the east, below the wall, lay the Basin: a great dark hollow of roofs and lanes and gardens, lamplit here and there, lower than the sea at her back. People were coming out into the lanes with lamps.

And to the north, two miles off, the harbor was burning. Fires stood along the long wharf, where Marr's boats had gone in at half past three, and the clatter of crossbows came faint across the water. Out beyond the harbor mouth two Pale Fleet escorts were coming in from the west, with boats towing astern of them full of marines for the landing places. As Nera watched, Brightwater's lights came out from under the mole to meet them, and the clatter grew louder, and the leading escort sheered off.

"She can't land them on a wharf your commander holds," Sorn said. "Not in the dark, under crossbows."

"Then where does she land them?" Nera asked.

Sorn looked down at the sea face of the wall below them, where a stone stair climbed from the water to the gatehouse's seaward door. She did not say anything.

The second escort had turned too. Her lights went south along the sands, away from the harbor, and her boats went with her, and they were coming toward the wall.

Brewer was at the windlasses when she came down. He had his hands on the big one and his ear bent to it, as if it had something to tell him.

"Two boats of marines," Nera said. "Coming for the gates. How long before you can shut them?"

"The Basin's still running out. Shut them now and they'd hang open on the stream, and we'd never get the pins in." He looked at the slot in the floor where the chain went down. "The flood's making. Give me half an hour and the sea will be level with the race, and I can walk them shut by hand. Give me less and I can't."

"You'll have less," Nera said.

"Then I'll shut them with less," Brewer said.

Nera looked round the room: Stannard's townsmen with their adzes, the soldiers' swords, the crossbow from the race, Brewer's gatemen rubbing their ankles. The chain that had held them lay in a heap by the ring, thirty feet of it.

"That chain," she said. "Cut it into lengths. A fathom each, to every man without a maul." She gave the overseer's sword to Stannard. "Hugh, the landward door is yours, in case they come round by the Basin side. Sorn, the roof, with the crossbow and anyone who can shoot. The rest with me, on the sea stair."

"And the windlass, Mistress?" said Brewer.

"Yours," Nera said. "You and whoever you choose. Nobody else touches it."

She had wanted it herself. Her hands had wanted it. She looked at the old man's face, and at his hands on the bar, and left it where it was.

"It's your gate," she said.

"It is," said Brewer.

The sea stair came up the west face of the wall in one flight, four feet wide and forty steps, from a landing at the water to the gatehouse's seaward door. Nera stood in the door with the maul. Owen was beside her with a length of chain, and Robin Lowry behind with another, and the Darn men and the gatemen filled the passage at her back. Below, the flood was making over the landing, black and quiet, and the lamps of two big launches were coming in across it.

They grounded at the stair's foot. Marines came out of them onto the landing, twenty to a boat, with shields and short swords and a lantern on a pole, and an officer's voice sent them up the stair at a run.

Sorn's crossbow went off over Nera's head, and a man on the stair fell back into the two behind him. Then they were at the door.

The first came up with his shield over his head. Nera swung the maul down onto the shield, two-handed, and the shield split, and the man went down across the step. The next came over him. Owen swung his chain in a long flat arc that took the man's legs from under him, and he fell sideways off the stair into the water. A sword came through the doorway at Nera's belly. She turned it with the maul's haft and Robin Lowry hit the swordsman in the face with the end of his chain.

They came on. The stair was too narrow for more than two at a time, and the door was narrower. For a while that was the fight: two marines in the doorway with their shields up, pushing, and Nera and Owen hitting whatever showed over the shields. Her arms had been tired in the race. She swung the maul anyway, and it kept landing.

A fire pot came up the stair and burst against the door frame. Burning oil ran down the oak and across the sill, and the heat came into Nera's face. The marines came in behind the fire. One got through the door past Owen with his shield up, and his sword opened Owen's arm from elbow to wrist, and Owen went down. Nera hit the man in the back of the neck with the maul, and he dropped on top of Owen and lay there.

"Get him back!" she said. "Robin! Drag him back!"

Behind her, in the windlass room, iron was ringing. Crossbow bolts were coming in through the slots in the seaward wall, and the gatemen on the windlass bars were working with their heads down. She heard Brewer's voice over all of it, hoarse and steady.

"Level! She's level, lads. Walk her. Walk her round."

The great windlass began to turn. Nera felt it through the stone under her boots, a slow heavy shudder, and heard the chain go grinding down through the slot in the floor. Below the wall, under her feet, in the race, the south leaf of the gate was swinging on the flood, with the ward plates on it, out from the race wall and across the stream.

A gateman on the bar cried out and fell. Another stepped into his place without a word and took the bar.

"Walk her!" Brewer said. "Don't stop for him. Walk her!"

The marines heard the chain too. Their officer was shouting on the stair, and the men in the doorway came on harder, and Nera gave a step back into the passage with the fire burning on the sill between them. Two Darn men came up beside her with their mauls. A shield-edge took her across the forehead, and the lamps swam.

Then the stone shook. A deep double thud came up through the wall from the race below, the sound of two oak leaves eight feet high meeting in the middle of a stream and the stream stopping against them.

"Shut!" Brewer roared. "She's shut! Pins! Get the pins in!"

Iron went into iron below the floor. Hammers rang on it. On the stair the officer's voice changed. Nera could not make out the words, but the marines in the doorway stopped pushing. They backed down the stair with their shields up, step by step, dragging their hurt with them, and Sorn's crossbow followed them down. At the landing they fell into their boats. The launches shoved off into the dark, pulling hard for the escort's lights, and a bolt from the roof went into the water beside the second one.

Nera stood in the door with the fire dying on the sill and blood running out of her hair into one eye.

"Owen?"

"Alive." Robin Lowry had the joiner's arm bound in his own shirt. "He says it was his bad hand anyway."

"It was," said Owen from the floor. "Two fingers short already. Won't miss the rest."

In the windlass room, Brewer stood with both hands on the chained bar and his head down, breathing. Two of his gatemen lay on the straw where the bolts had come through the slots. One was sitting up. The other was not going to.

"Twenty-two years," Brewer said. He lifted his head and looked at Nera. "I told you. Not with plates, and not with anything."

On the chain-house roof, two miles north, somebody ran up three lanterns in a vertical line. Sorn called it down the stair. The wharves held.

At half past five, Shelter's lights began to move.

Nera saw it from the roof, sitting on the parapet in her wet clothes beside Amos Yelland, who had refused to be carried down without her. Small lights spread out ahead of the big cluster, west of it, in a fan. Then the cluster itself began to slide across the dark, away from the harbor, out across the Reach Water.

"They're towing her off," she said. "Sorn. They're towing her off."

"They've no landing places. No supply, and no way to take the garrison off if the town rises." Sorn stood up. "If your commander's boats get in among the towboats, Shelter's a hulk on a lee shore in that outflow. They're getting her out while they can. And Vaust will want her west anyway. He'll need every field he has at the strait."

The field went with the engine. Greyhaven would see no sky until Shelter was five miles from the harbor, and at two knots under tow that was an hour. Nera sat and watched the lights crawl, and wished them faster, and it was no use.

A little after half past six the sky over the upper town turned gray, and the ridge came out against it with the Admiralty House on its crest. The gray came down over the harbor and across the Basin to the sea wall. Nera looked down at her own hands, wet and black with race-silt, and saw them in daylight. At twenty to seven the sun came up over the ridge, red and low, and laid a long bar of light across the Basin roofs.

Somebody told her afterward that the last of the dead in the outfall pool had fallen over at about the time the sky turned gray.

Provost Ellan Hume was taken at nine o'clock that morning in the Admiralty House, at his breakfast. He gave Stannard's people no trouble, and asked only that his clerks be treated decently. Marr had him locked in the chain-house guardroom.

The garrison gave itself up in the course of the morning, company by company, as the daylight found them.

By noon, the people of the Basin were on the sea wall.

They came up the inner stairs from every lane, tanners and washerwomen and old men with crowbars, and Sorn walked among them with her tongs on her shoulder and told them which bolts held the ward plates, and what would happen if they touched the cut lines bare-handed.

The first plate came off the south gate at one o'clock, and six men threw it off the sea wall into the mud with a cheer that carried to the north gatehouse.

That afternoon Brewer's men chained the windlasses and set a watch of Basin men on every gatehouse, with orders to let nobody in who had not come up from the Basin itself.

Marr came along the sea wall at three, with Dunning and a girl in a lighterman's smock beside her. Her face was black with smoke, and both her palms were bound in linen.

"Mistress Pell," she said.

"Commander," Nera said. "Your hands?"

"Southwick," Marr said, and left it there. She looked down at the gate leaves, at the bare bronze-stained oak where the plates had been. "Two fittings?"

"Two," said Nera. "Broken on the sill. Both races are clean."

"Thank you," Marr said. "And here?"

"One of Brewer's gatemen, on the windlass bar," Nera said, "and Owen Tasker's arm. They came for the gates with two boats of marines and didn't get them."

Marr looked at the cut on Nera's forehead and did not ask about it. She turned to the girl. "Peg. Tanner Lane is that way. Go and find your mother."

The girl went down the inner stair at a run, and along the lane below, shouting a name. A door opened halfway down, and a woman came out in her apron. Nera turned away before she saw any more.

"How many did you lose?" she said.

"Nine," Marr said. "Six of the Southwick boatmen and three of Stannard's people, at the long wharf. Fulmar has a dozen hurt, and Brightwater lost her jib-boom." She was looking out to the west. "It was worth it. I hate that it was."

Out on the sea, twenty miles off now, Shelter's field stood up from the water like a tower of dark, sliding slowly west toward the Bar.

That evening, after sunset, Nera went out to the end of the mole.

The stars were out over Greyhaven. The town behind her was full of lamps and noise and singing, and somebody on the long wharf was playing a fiddle so badly that she knew it had to be Dunning.

To the west there were no stars at all.

The dark stood on the sea out there and cut off the sky. Low down in it, far away, she could see Shelter's lights creeping west across the Reach, toward the Kittle, where at tomorrow's high water they would warp it through to join the others.

Sorn and Marr came out along the mole to stand beside her.

"He has lost Greyhaven," Marr said. "He has lost his gates. If he waits for the December springs, the whole coast will be armed against him, and he knows it. He has to make the transit now, on the tenth, while he still has seven engines and we have nothing but boats." She looked at Nera. "Where are the ward-breakers?"

"At Darn, with Ebb," Nera said. "Sorn etched the last of them before we sailed."

"Then go and get them," Marr said. "Holm Sound, by the evening of the eighth. Every boat in this harbor that can swim is coming with us."

Nera looked out at the small lights crawling west in the dark. Beyond them, at Orra, under the dark, the Kestrel was waiting, and Rusk and Orris and Isobel and Joss, and Marietta Voss in her tower.

"I'll be there," she said.