Tamsin dropped the replacement mast through the infirmary window three hours and thirty-two minutes before departure.
It struck the corridor wall, removed a strip of plaster, and stopped with its heel across Garran’s blanket.
“Spruce,” she said from outside. “Twenty-one feet, six inches. Straight within half a finger unless your standards have become expensive.”
Garran pushed himself upright. The room leaned left, corrected, then leaned again. “Where did you get it?”
“The east signal tower wasn’t using all four legs.”
“That tower belongs to the Hall.”
“Then your master contributed.”
Master Vetch appeared behind her in the window, ceremonial robes tucked into tar-black boots. “The honored institutions of Tideglass Hall stand ready to sacrifice every superfluous timber in this hour of maritime necessity.”
“You sold her the leg,” Garran said.
“For a future consideration of modest dimensions.”
“How modest?”
Vetch looked toward the ruined harbor. “The dimensions remain under negotiation.”
Lark came through the door carrying Garran’s boots and a coil of half-inch line. She had washed the mud from her face. A bruise darkened one temple, and her left sleeve had been cut away below the shoulder so the bandage beneath would lie flat.
“You have three hours and twenty-six minutes,” she said.
Garran put on his boots. “The mast step split.”
“Tamsin Reed has made a collar from the infirmary bed frame.”
“It was the correct thickness,” Tamsin said.
Garran looked at the iron footboard. Half of it remained attached to his bed.
Lark handed him the line. She had cut away the frayed strands, tapered the ends, and laid a short splice so neat that the rope would pass through a block without catching. Garran ran his thumb over it once.
“Who taught you?” he asked.
“My mother repaired net cranes.”
The splice had six full tucks, each pulled to equal strain. Most people stopped at four and trusted paint to hide the laziness.
He stood, taking the wall for the first two steps. “That’ll hold eight hundredweight.”
“Nine, if dry.”
He looked at her.
“Nine,” she repeated.
He carried the splice with him.
The inner harbor had become a yard full of stranded boats. Mud shone between them, scored by the sixty-four thin channels running under keels, through fallen stone, and toward the open sea. Hall disciples worked at the blocked gate with pry bars. Each time they shifted a slab, water lapped into the cut beneath it and went the wrong way, climbing against the harbor’s slope before draining into one of the channels.
No one stepped across those cuts now.
Vale Keelworks’ courier boat lay canted on her port bilge beside the collapsed west stair. Her name, Practical Mercy, had lost the M and most of the y. The engine housing stood open. Tamsin had arranged its removed parts on a sailcloth in order of failure, which meant the arrangement covered most of the foredeck.
Garran climbed aboard and put one hand on the engine casing.
“Don’t comfort it,” Tamsin said. “It knows what you did.”
“I was fifty yards away.”
“You’ve used that defense before.”
The mast step had not merely split. It had opened along the grain and driven two bronze bolts through the cabin sole. Garran crouched, measured the break with his fingers, and asked for the narrow chisel.
Tamsin slapped it into his palm handle-first. “We need to discuss my share.”
The chisel stopped above the damaged wood.
Around them, disciples dragged stone. Vetch shouted blessings at a capstan until the chain slipped, after which his vocabulary improved.
Garran set the chisel to the grain. “We need to leave.”
“That’s a direction, not an answer.”
“I told you we’d write it.”
“You told me twice. Once after the Bell Shoal run and once when I rebuilt the condenser from three pumps and a soup kettle.”
“The soup kettle still leaks.”
“It leaks soup. It holds pressure.”
He cut out the crushed fibers. Each tap of the mallet traveled through his wrist and found places in his bones that had no business hurting. Behind his breastbone, the sixty-four marks lay quiet but not asleep. He had the sense of doors with people waiting on the other side.
Lark stepped over the rail. She carried a ledger under one arm and a parcel of oat bread under the other. She put the bread beside Tamsin without interrupting.
Tamsin tore off a piece on the next breath.
Garran watched Lark check the deck planks before placing her weight. She found the soft one without being warned. She also found the loose hinge on the tool chest, took a screwdriver from her coat, and tightened it while reading the engine parts spread at her feet.
He had known officers who could inspect a ship for an hour and see only polish. Lark had been aboard less than a minute and had already stopped the chest lid from taking off someone’s thumb.
He looked back to the mast step.
“I prepared a provisional ownership instrument,” she said.
Tamsin stopped chewing.
“No,” Garran said.
Lark opened the ledger. “You have not read it.”
“Keelworks is under suspended liquidation. A share would make her liable for its debt.”
“It would make her a secured labor creditor with occupancy rights senior to Tideglass Hall’s commercial claim.”
Tamsin swallowed. “Say that in shipyard.”
“They cannot sell your room before paying you.”
“Better.”
Garran drove the chisel too deep. The blade bit sound wood.
Lark crouched across from him. “You promised her a permanent share.”
“I promised to discuss one.”
Tamsin pointed bread at him. “False. Also cowardly.”
“I was going to protect it from the debt first.”
“When?” Lark asked.
The question had no room in it. No accusation either. That made it worse.
Garran fitted the iron collar around the step. Tamsin had drilled the bolt holes precisely. She always did. Even furious, she deburred her work.
“When the winter accounts settled,” he said.
“Which winter?”
He tightened the first bolt.
Lark set the ledger on the deck. “The instrument grants Tamsin Reed one eighth ownership, earned through recorded labor, with no responsibility for liabilities incurred before today. Sale requires unanimous consent while any employee residence is attached to the property.”
“You wrote that in three hours?” Garran asked.
“Two. The harbor damage schedule took one.”
Tamsin reached for the ledger. Garran put his hand over it.
Her face closed at once. Not anger. Inventory. He knew the look: doors, distances, fuel, what could be carried in one trip.
He removed his hand.
“Read every line,” he said.
“I can read.”
“I know.”
“Then stop saying things that mean something else.”
She sat against the engine housing with the ledger on her knees. Lark gave her a pencil. Sharpened, Garran noticed. Both ends.
He finished bolting the collar, stepped the mast with a tackle from the quay, and rigged the forestay while Tamsin read. The harbor gate opened by another foot. Seawater pressed through, thin and bright, filling the nearest channels before it touched the ordinary low places.
When the mast stood, Practical Mercy looked less wrecked from a distance. Up close, she had a borrowed spar, a cracked rail, three colors of patching compound, and an engine whose governor Tamsin had labeled MALICIOUS with chalk.
Acceptable for service.
Tamsin turned the last page. “One eighth is insulting.”
Garran leaned on the shroud to test the mast. “You’re seventeen.”
“The condenser was fourteen.”
“Years?” Lark asked.
“Components.”
“What share do you consider accurate?”
Tamsin looked at Garran. “One fifth.”
“Done,” he said.
Her mouth stayed open for half a second. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You were meant to argue.”
“I’m busy.”
Lark amended the figure in three places and drew a clean line through the old fraction. “Initial each alteration.”
Tamsin did. Lark signed as examiner and witness, then turned the ledger toward Garran.
The pencil felt too light in his hand.
He had signed enlistments, casualty returns, restitution orders, foreclosure notices. His name had fit beneath all of them with room left for a seal. This line was shorter. Tamsin Reed, one fifth proprietor of Vale Keelworks, effective upon execution.
He signed Garran Vale.
Pain drove the pencil through the paper.
The mark inside his right forefinger opened like heated wire. Garran caught the ledger before it fell, but his hand no longer belonged entirely to him. Lines of pale green light traveled from the bone into the pencil, across his signature, and through the amended fraction.
Tamsin scrambled backward. Lark seized Garran’s wrist with both hands and forced it flat against the deck.
“Do not pull against it,” she said.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“You are bending the plank.”
He looked down. His fingers had sunk into the old cedar by half an inch.
Outside the boat, one of the sixty-four channels changed course.
Mud folded inward along its edges. The narrow cut turned beneath Practical Mercy, climbed the harbor stones, and ran toward the hill. Toward the road descending to Vale Keelworks.
Every other channel still pointed out to sea.
Letters rose on the ledger page beneath Garran’s hand. They were not written in ink. They stood in the fibers as if the paper had grown around them years ago.
WORK PROMISED IS HARBOR OWED.
No one spoke.
Tamsin came forward first. She crouched beside the words, grease on her cheek and bread still clenched in one fist.
“Is that part of the contract?” she asked.
“No,” Lark said.
The examiner’s grip remained locked around Garran’s wrist. Her pulse beat against the heel of his hand, quick but even. With her free hand, she pulled the pencil from between his fingers before the light could reach it again.
Master Vetch climbed aboard, took in the glowing page, and lowered himself onto a coil of rope.
“Ah,” he said.
Garran disliked that sound from craftsmen, physicians, and masters.
Lark read the sentence twice. “The seal did not answer the Hall. It did not answer the rootstone. It answered performance of a private obligation.”
“The share?” Tamsin asked.
“The promise.”
Garran’s finger throbbed in time with the green letters. “Can it be removed?”
“From the paper?”
“From me.”
Lark released his wrist and closed the ledger. Green light showed around the page edges.
“No,” she said. “And our first destination has changed.”
“We haven’t got a destination.”
“We do now.” She looked uphill, where the turned channel cut straight through Tideglass mud toward his shop. “Before any island can claim this seal, it appears your own harbor has filed first.”