When a wall decides to become a door, the difference is speed. The third breaker came with the confidence of a fact. Arin stood in its way with the confidence of a belief.
He was faster than I'd admitted. Heat rucked the fog back; the boat's wet skin hissed. Men shrank from the sudden absence of air. Arin didn't aim to destroy—he aimed to deny. Deny momentum, deny sight, deny the boat the dignity of being a boat.
It wasn't enough.
"Left!" I called, and the word didn't mean direction; it meant trust the space I'm making. I snapped a curve into the shallows: water stiffened, then, beyond it, turned to silk. The prow hit the hard, slewed, and slid along the soft like a knife through fat that didn't care about wounds. The boat turned, not by will but by physics wearing my hands.
Arin understood in a heartbeat. He stepped into the pivot and shoved heat where the boat now had to be, not where it was trying to pretend it would stay. Wood sighed, then groaned, then decided it had learned enough about being a single piece. Men tumbled; one reached for Arin with that blind courage panic hires.
Arin didn't burn him. He broke the man's balance the way wind breaks a flame—by taking away the room for fire to remember itself. The raider hit water and learned humility. For a second, I liked Arin for how precisely he refused to be cruel.
"Push them back!" someone yelled from the wharf. Good advice when you have more men and fewer surprises. We had the opposite.
Vara's voice cut across the noise. "Anchor!"
Two iron kisses dropped into the shallows from the nearest boats. Rope spat out behind them. Men hauled. The line we'd rigged went taut; the wharf complained in old wood. She meant to tear our teeth out by pulling until the town bled. Effective. Ugly.
"Cut!" I shouted to the foreman, and his knife was already in his hand because he had been born understanding the cost of cleverness that outlives its own conditions. The rope went slack; the wharf sighed in relief. Vara's boats rocked, briefly confused. She did not swear. She simply raised her arm again, and the oars stroked as one, dragging her formation into a new shape: crescent, to cup the wharf and feed men into the gap until we drowned under arithmetic.
Arin looked at me. I shook my head. "No heroics," I said. "We're not winning. We're buying."
"Buying what?"
"Time," I said. "For the town to learn fear in the right direction."
He grimaced. "You talk like you don't bleed."
"I bleed expensively," I said.
We moved. I stiffened a strip of water, then relaxed it as Arin crossed, shaping stepping stones out of seconds. He used them without thinking, which is the only honest use of another man's plan.
"Ren!" A boy's voice—gull-nest hair from the market—waved a knife too big for his arm. "What do I do?"
"Live," I said. "Behind walls. Now."
He ran, knife up, which would cut nothing but his own certainty later. Good. Certainties need trimming.
Vara's lead boat drifted close enough that I could see her eyes clearly: not cruel. Not hesitant. Not anything that could be bribed by story. She saw a machine that had taught itself to move water. I saw a mind that had taught itself to move men. We recognized the other's profession and despised the competition.
"Last offer," she called. "Barrels now, boys later. Keep your old men if you must."
Arin's jaw set. "Never."
Vara's eyes slid to him. The faintest nod. Respect offered to an opponent who preferred dignity to survival.
I cut the water between us with a thin pressure wave that slapped her boat like a warning. "He didn't ask for your mercy," I said.
"And you didn't ask for my patience," she replied evenly. "Yet you've had both."
The bell spoke again—closer? No. The sound had learned us; it was reflecting off fog and wood and fear. I swallowed the urge to correct the world's acoustics. Not now.
"Back two lengths," I told Arin.
"We give ground?"
"We trade it for position," I said. "Everything is trade."
He moved with me, heat pulsing only when a blade or body asked impolitely for a consequence. We reached the sea-stairs. I tasted iron in the air; not blood—rust, as if the town had been thinking about bleeding too long and begun to practice.
"Ren," Arin said quietly, eyes on Vara, "if we push now—"
"We lose later," I said.
He shook his head. "Sometimes later isn't promised."
"Then we make it," I said.
He almost smiled. Then he took three quick steps down the stairs and planted himself in the shallows like a word that refused to be edited. "This is over," he told Vara.
She didn't answer him. She looked at me.
"Count," she said.
I did.
And my numbers said storm.
The fog behind her boats bulged, then tore—not with wind, but with presence. More hulls. Heavier oars. Vara had not come to negotiate. She had come to teach.
"Back!" I shouted.
Arin didn't move.
The first of the new boats hit the shallows with the confidence of a lesson about to be written on someone else's skin.