Versetide

Chapter 1

The ink was alive again.

It slithered along the feather-cracked quill, thick and clotted like a scab not yet ready to fall off, and clung to the parchment with a stubbornness Rin could feel in her molars. She dabbed the pen's point against the blotting cloth once, twice, thrice, but it still bled wide and angry when it met the next line in the ledger. The symbol, a triple-crossed tidehook, spread like rot through the paper's fibers.

Callun would notice. Callun always noticed.

She pressed her thumb against the edge of the parchment, smearing the left margin to hide the blotch. Her thumbprint left a crescent-shaped black smudge. When she lifted her hand, a faint red glimmer peeked through the ink. She'd split a cuticle again.

Behind her, the room groaned, wood swelling and contracting with the damp, and somewhere beyond the window, the salt-wind howled through Drownpost's skeletal wharves.

The counting house was a long, low room fashioned from warped shipwreck timber, bolted together and repainted so many times the walls resembled bruised barnacles. It had once been a holdfast for plague vessels, you could still see the rusted quarantine latches embedded in the floorboards, painted over but not forgotten.

Twelve desks crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, all stacked high with parchment, sea-charts, knot-coded manifests, and the ever-dripping gutterlanterns used to sear Crown marks into the vellum.

Only three of the desks were occupied.

One was Rin's. The second belonged to a boy with glassy eyes and a wrist tattoo of Crown tides. He copied quickly, soullessly, and reported anything you whispered to the overseers for a dry biscuit. She didn't know his name. He didn't offer it.

The third desk, nearest the broken window, belonged to Sarrha, a Varnari girl no older than sixteen, whip-thin, high-cheeked, with eel-black eyes and a missing left hand. She worked faster with one hand than most did with two, looping her brush-script in elegant lashes despite the constant reek of mildew and rainwater.

Varnari were reefkin, shell-born, humanoid but ocean-touched, with coral-glint veins and skin in tones of worn stone or sunless pearl. Sarrha's scales peeked faintly at her throat when she was frustrated. Varnari indentures were common in places like Drownpost; they weren't considered citizens under Crown law, temporary assets until they broke or drowned.

Sarrha never spoke unless spoken to. She also never looked down while writing, only ahead, like she was chasing something just beyond the ledger's edge.

Rin respected that.

Her own desk slouched in the back left corner, beneath a dripping slate beam that warbled with each breath of sea wind. Her stool was uneven, one leg propped by a folded page of an outdated salt-tax census. It was always slightly tilted, like the world was trying to slide her off it.

Beneath the lip of her desk, worn down over years of stolen moments, was a symbol Rin had carved with a paper-knife tip in her first month here: a swirling sail glyph. She'd seen it once on a dockhand's shoulder, an outlaw brand known as "storm-seeker." Supposed to mean those who chased freedom, not safety.

Her thumb found it now, tracing the spiral without looking.

One breath. Two. She let the pressure steady her pulse.

"Six crates of riverglass, marked under fictive trade," she muttered aloud, copying from a water-wrinkled slip of parchment onto the main ledger. "Origin falsified to Sallahar. Recipient: Venn Drygoods. Approval mark..."

She squinted at the Crown glyph shaped like a backwards fishhook. "Sigil of... 'Importation Deceitfully Rendered'?"

"'Routinely Redirected,'" said a voice like wet driftwood from the next desk over.