Morning unstitched the fog thread by thread, enough to show the town's seams without making them proud of it. Nets sagged between poles like tired thoughts. The cooper's yard coughed woodsmoke and sap. Someone boiled fish broth heavy with pepper to convince hunger it had chosen to be satisfied.
I walked without purpose on purpose. People trust a stranger who is clearly going somewhere less than one who is clearly going nowhere.
The market—three stalls and an argument—sat on packed sand where the tide sometimes forgot to retreat. A woman sold banded shells as charms against drowning, which meant drowning happened often enough to need inventory. An old man sharpened knives that had been sharpened past their shapes. A boy with hair like a gull's nest tried to barter a broken compass for a story.
"What kind?" I asked.
"The kind where we win," he said.
"Those are expensive."
He considered. "Then a short one."
I turned the compass in my hand. The needle quivered, then chose east because east was the least wrong. "Here is a short one," I said. "Every tide returns. Not because it wants to, but because the world leaves it no other option. If you learn what the world leaves you, you can pretend to want it first."
He made the face of someone deciding whether a truth was a trick. "Is that… good?"
"It's useful." I gave him a coin anyway. He ran off to spend it badly, which would teach him to count.
Information prefers patterns. I followed the smell of fish and brine to the wharf where men mended nets and eyes. A foreman with a beard salted from the inside out watched his crew with the calm of someone who had outlived all the panics the sea could invent.
"Scholar," he said, as if naming a species. "You're here to measure things that don't change."
"Only to see how they pretend," I said. "What's your tribute?"
His jaw moved once, considering whether to spit truth or tradition. "Barrels of salt and dried fish. Cloth if we have it. Boys if we don't." He did not look at me when he said the last part.
"How often?"
"When Saint-Hollow speaks." He tipped his chin toward the open water where the mist had drawn a curtain and then convinced itself it was a wall. "Sometimes eleven days, sometimes thirteen. Vara keeps fishermen's time. She reads hunger faster than bells."
Vara. The name moved through the air like a knife carried under a cloak—felt before seen. "What does she read in you?"
"That we'll endure what we hate long enough to call it normal," he said simply. Then, after a breath: "You ask like a man who means to change arithmetic. We have buried better."
"I'm not a better," I said. "Just a curiosity that keeps notes."
He grunted—the sound a boat makes when it realizes it is smaller than the wave it chose. "Notes don't stop blades."
"No," I said. "But they tell you where the blade will be."
I left him and walked the strand at low tide, where the beach kept its accounts in ribs of shell and drift. Channels carved by old storms pointed like bones toward a narrow gap in the reef. If you were ferrying plunder and men who had to move quickly in fog, you would choose the gap with the least apology. I crouched and dropped pebbles at intervals along the waterline, then watched which disappeared first under the incoming fringe. Current favored the left-hand slit. The sea likes habit, too.
By midday the cooper's wife had learned that I could grind willow bark and speak gently to children burning with fevers. She fetched me to a cottage where a girl coughed every third breath. I measured her pulse with two fingers and watched the way her mother watched me. People do not want doctors; they want witnesses who refuse to panic.
"Brew this with patience," I told the mother, handing her a twist of bark. "The patience is the medicine. The bark is to give the patience something to hold."
She blinked. "And the price?"
"Tell me what you hear at night."
"Sometimes the fog sings. Sometimes it counts," she said, without surprise that this was the cost. "And once, a boy with fire in his hands stood on the sea-stairs and shouted at it to stop. It didn't, but for a moment it listened."
Fire in his hands. A shape leaned against last night's wall in memory: broad-shouldered, breath steaming hard. "Does the boy have a name?"
"Arin," she said, soft enough to be a prayer or a complaint. "He fights like a storm. He breaks like one, too."
The afternoon pressed the town flat with heat that didn't belong to the coast. Men salted fish with the mechanical grace of defeat. I returned to the loft. On the way, I passed a shrine to a saint who had once promised the sea a vow it could not collect. The saint had eroded into suggestion. Even stone learns when to forget.
In the room I set the bowl again and fed it a ribbon of energy. The surface shivered, relearning me. Arcs of pressure drew a faint map—here, the harbor mouth; there, the reef's teeth; farther out, a basin where water circled as if rehearsing. And beyond that, a pulse like a slow bell: metal on rock, dull and patient. Saint-Hollow's throat clearing. If the Drowned aligned with that note, their oars would climb a rhythm that ferried them past the reefs without apology.
A shadow crossed the window. I did not look up.
"You're the one with too many questions," a voice said from the hall.
I opened the door enough to show politeness and reluctance in equal measure. He stood there—the heat-breathed boy—closer now, which made him seem younger and more certain. The grin he wore had been practiced to meet blessings and trouble with the same teeth.
"You're the one with answers you don't trust," I said.
"Arin," he offered, like a hand he wasn't sure I'd take. "You watch the water as if it owes you money."
"It pays in advance to those who count."
He leaned against the jamb without asking. "Counting won't stop Vara."
"No," I said. "But it will tell her where to bleed if she insists."
He laughed, and it was almost kind. "You talk like a book that forgot it was paper."
"Books burn. Salt doesn't," I said. "Tell me about the gap in the reef."
His eyes flicked, just once, to the left-hand slit I had already marked in mind. He caught himself, then shrugged. "You already know."
"I prefer confirmation to faith."
"Faith is what keeps this town here," he said, one palm briefly touching the wall as if feeling its heart. "What keeps you?"
"Arithmetic," I said. "And curiosity."
We stood in a silence that did not belong to enemies. Outside, the fog thinned like a promise preparing to fail. Somewhere beyond it, a bell thought about speaking.
"When it does," Arin said, straightening, "I'll be on the sea-stairs."
"I'll be where I can hear the numbers," I said.
He nodded once and left without looking back. I closed the door, cooled the bowl with breath, and let the surface go still.
Some towns ask for saviors. This one asked for witnesses and counters. That could be arranged. The world would force its options upon us soon enough. Better to choose first, and pretend it was will.