The first boat ghosted out of the fog the way guilt enters a room that hoped to stay honest. Low, wide, oar-tight. Then the second, knifing the same groove. Dark heads, dark cloth, and that particular posture of men who expected to be obeyed.
Arin exhaled once, and the air warmed around us. Not chakra leakage—will. "We stop them here," he said.
"We stop them cheaply," I said.
I signaled the lantern keeper: one long swing, two short. Under the wharf a coil of tarred rope—pre-laid by the foreman while the council argued about whether courage could be affordably rented—tensed. On my cue, two men hauled, and the line drew taut across the shallows like a smile with too many teeth.
The first boat hit it at speed. Momentum argued. The rope won the grammar lesson. Wood bit water wrong and shuddered sideways. Oars tangled. Men swore in the low, angry way of professionals having a bad day.
"Now," Arin hissed.
He flew down the sea-stairs, not so much running as deciding where his feet had already been. I moved slower, choosing lines and windows. The second boat had learned from the first; it leaned, then tried to leap the rope. I snapped a finger; water under its bow stiffened into something less generous. The prow slapped down hard. A man toppled, then found himself ankle-deep in a force that felt like mud and wasn't.
They saw me then: a narrow boy with a shuttered lantern, one hand out, calm as a ledger. It's useful to look like a clerk when someone expects a soldier.
"Back!" Arin shouted. "You don't belong here."
A figure at the second boat's stern stood. She had the kind of stillness good captains learn and bad kings think is theirs by birth. Vara, then. No crown. Just certainty.
"Everything belongs to hunger," she said. Her voice traveled like a thrown hook—honest about its purpose.
"Then teach it manners," Arin snapped, and his hands bloomed heat.
He didn't throw fire; he simply made the air move with the violence of heat leaving it. The nearest raider staggered, blinded by steam and rage. Arin moved again, a red line drawing itself through gray.
I kept the water from choosing sides without me. Currents prefer chaos if you let them. I stiffened a band of shallows into false sand and let it trip the third boat, then softened a patch under the rope so it sank just enough to tempt a fourth to try—only to find the second line we'd laid kissing its keel.
"Lift!" I called, and the foreman's men heaved. The rope surfaced like a grin.
Vara didn't swear. She watched. When she spoke, her men below her shut up mid-breath to hear. "Who taught you to count?" she asked, voice carrying.
"The same ocean that taught you to spend," I said.
A smile, small and bright and gone. "Then you know no one leaves a debt half-paid."
She gestured. Two shapes peeled from the fog farther out—longer boats, heavier men. Not raiders. Breakers. The kind used to smash wharves so tribute would prefer the open beach next time.
Arin saw them when I did. "I'll take the left," he said, and was already moving.
"Not alone," I replied, but he was already heat and movement.
I stepped to the lip of the sea-stairs and let my breath fall into the bowl of my chest until the world slowed to the length of a thought. The breaker on the right rolled, trusting mass and momentum. I touched the water and asked it to remember a sandbar that didn't exist until now.
It did.
The boat's belly kissed that memory hard. Wood complained. Men cursed. Vara's head snapped toward me, calculation stacking behind her eyes like crates pre-labeled for later.
The left breaker kept coming, arrogant in symmetry. Arin met it in a sheet of steam and light. He didn't bind water; he insulted it with heat. The boat hit the rope a breath later, staggered, then coughed men into the shallows.
For a heartbeat, victory pretended to arrive early.
Then Saint-Hollow's bell spoke again—closer now, as if the rock itself had decided to walk.
"Down!" I shouted, too late. The world turned; a third breaker—invisible until the fog chose to remember it—shouldered past the end of the wharf and aimed to split wood, men, and our plan into instructive pieces.
Arin pivoted toward it, palms bright, teeth set.
I drew breath to reshape the channel—
—and Vara finally moved.
She lifted her arm, and every oar in the water obeyed her like a roomful of kneeling sentences.
The breaker didn't slow.