The road narrowed until it became a suggestion—a pale ribbon swallowed by marsh and fog. Salt clung to my tongue, to my clothes, to the slow breath I kept measured beneath the weight of a pack that carried little and promised less. The sea was near. I could hear it breathing through the rushes: a long inhale over shallow sandbars, a tired exhale through teeth of rock.
I paused where driftwood made a crooked gate over the path. Beyond it sprawled a town that looked as though the tide had forgotten to take it away: stilted huts with bowed knees, nets like torn lungs drying on gray racks, roofs patched with whatever the wind had spared. And people—thin, alert, moving with that particular economy I knew well. Hunger refines movement better than training.
I adjusted the plain linen band around my wrist—my chosen mark of trade here—and stepped into the streets. Scholar-healer. That was the role I had cut from simple cloth: someone curious enough to ask questions and useful enough to be tolerated. I had herbs in my pack, a mortar scarred by use, and a memory full of symptoms that could be soothed with nothing more than instructions and belief. Perception shapes truth more strongly than fact. It would do.
Eyes followed me without following me. A boy stopped chasing his hoop. Two women tightening a rope glanced once, then again, then decided I was not immediately valuable. A fisherman counted nets and miscounted on purpose when he noticed me, because strangers made people aware of what they had to lose. I stored the details.
Near the waterline, a scaffolded jetty creaked under its own history. Waves slid beneath it, indifferent. I knelt on the planks and touched the surface. Cold bit my fingertips. Beneath the chill, the sea carried threads of movement that were not wind-driven: crosscurrents pulled by the shape of the bay, old scars cut by storms, and—fainter still—the discipline of oars working in formation, repeated often enough to leave a rhythm in the water like memory. Tribute lanes, perhaps. The Drowned ran their collections on schedules a tide could keep.
"Not safe to lean so far, stranger," a voice said behind me. "Water steals what watches it."
I looked up. An old man with rope-scored hands and a jaw like a cracked knot stood at the edge of the jetty. He had the posture of someone who had tried to leave and come back when the world was the same elsewhere.
"I've found," I said, "that water only steals what thinks it can't be stolen."
He studied me, then snorted. "Scholar talk. You look young for knowing things that don't help." He jerked his chin toward the town. "If you're selling cures, sell cheap. People pay in thanks and regrets here, and neither keeps you fed."
"I accept information," I said.
"Information?" His mouth twisted. "Then you'll starve."
I watched the next set of waves fold and break, counting their intervals. "When do they come?"
He didn't ask who. In some places, a word is dangerous; in others, it's redundant.
"Fog-thick nights," he said. "When the bell on Saint-Hollow rock speaks. Every dozen days, give or take. They take more. We give less. The arithmetic is wrong."
"Where is Saint-Hollow rock?"
He pointed through the haze. There was nothing to see but gray. People point at what they need to believe is there.
"Thank you," I said.
He hesitated. "If you're staying, keep your hands clean. The Drowned like to make examples with clean hands."
"I don't plan to be touched."
I left the jetty as the bell in the town's small shrine muttered the hour. If one listened without wanting to be comforted, even the bell sounded tired. I rented a corner of a loft above a cooper's shed for coin I could afford to lose and a promise to help with fevers. The room was a triangle of shadow and splinters. It had a window that did not close and a view of the marsh, where reeds bowed to the wind. Good. Observation requires an exit.
By late afternoon, I had walked the town's perimeter twice, counted four watching posts that watched nothing, and three escape routes that would choke on panic if used. I mapped the lanes and recorded the habits that repeated with the stubbornness of hunger: when children were called in, when boats came home, when women moved water in buckets with the rhythm of the tide, because you move as the world moves, or you get ground down. Patterns are merciful; they tell you what will happen even when no one wants it to.
At dusk, when smoke turned the fog into dirty glass, I set a small bowl on the floor and filled it from a cistern at the back. The water was flat, heavy with iron and silt. I sat cross-legged and quieted my breath until the room forgot I was there. Then I let a single thread of energy touch the surface.
At first, only recognition: the water admitted my presence. Then a response, subtle as a change of mind—pressure shifting, tension easing along the rim. The bowl became a map. Outside, waves leaned and returned; the harbor mouth tugged as if something large had passed often enough to teach it how to yearn. Oars, yes. And discipline. The sea remembers chains differently than it remembers storms.
Noise below; a quarrel punctuated by laughter that wasn't laughter. I held the thread steady. Fear spreads faster than truth. It was here already, in the way doors closed without slamming and lanterns were trimmed early.
When the bowl stilled, I withdrew and opened the window. Night pressed its ear to the town. Far off, something rang once—a metal throat in the fog, dull and patient. Not the shrine bell. A buoy, perhaps. Or Saint-Hollow rock deciding to speak.
A shadow moved along the lane. Not wind. Step-weight, too balanced for a drunk, too sure for a stranger. I watched without turning my head. He stopped under the eaves across from mine and leaned against the wall as if he owned it. Young. Broad-shouldered. A hint at the way his breath steamed that said his chakra burned rather than flowed. He lifted his gaze, and for a heartbeat, we were two points on a line drawn taut by inevitability.
He grinned without seeing me and pushed off the wall, heading toward the shore with a pace that chose now over later on principle alone.
Interesting.
I closed the window. The fog thickened until it felt like a weight placed carefully on the town to keep it from floating away. Tomorrow, I would walk the strand at low tide and mark the channel's teeth. I would ask the cooper's wife about Saint-Hollow rock and pretend I believed in saints. I would buy a broken compass because people trust those who share their broken tools.
And when the bell spoke again, I would be listening—not for sound, but for the arithmetic hidden in it.
Some lessons can be written on paper. Others are written in the patterns of water and the footprints it remembers.