Retreat is a sentence. You can say it cleanly, or you can eat the words and choke. I took two steps up the sea-stairs and shaped water into a half-ring between Arin and the oncoming hull, dense enough to bruise momentum. Arin used the moment to shift left, but not far. Pride likes to occupy the center of things.
"Move," I said, low.
"If I move, they go through," he said, lower.
"They go through anyway," I said. "Just slower if you live."
"Useful," he conceded, and slid one stride, which is the same as a paragraph when the text is moving fast.
Vara's formation adjusted like a thought correcting itself mid-sentence. Anchors kissed sand. Ropes arced. Men leaped in a rhythm I'll admit was beautiful if your ethics allow you to find craft lovely even when it steals children.
I changed tactics. Water doesn't love to be a wall; it loves to be a rumor. I fed it lies: eddies where none should be, firmness where feet expected give, slick where weight wanted grip. Men stumbled in choreography I counted by the fall.
Arin gave them reasons to reconsider standing up. Not cruelty—efficiency. He aimed heat at joints, at breath, at the narrow wedge of space between certainty and panic. One raider tried to cut his face; Arin let the blade choose a path past him and never be welcome again. The man fell into water that had decided it was a mirror and did not accept bodies.
"Left flank!" the foreman yelled from the wharf. "They're climbing!"
Of course they were. Plans are ladders; someone's always already on the next rung. I flicked the lantern keeper a code—one long, one short—and he swung shutters. From the roofline, three boys I'd bribed with the story of not dying tipped baskets: sand cascaded onto slick boards. Raiding feet misread friction. The wharf spat men back into shallows like a habit it had missed.
Vara's gaze never left me. "Not a soldier," she murmured, almost to herself. "A book with teeth."
"Books burn," I said. "But they scream first."
She laughed, once. "Then let's see what you write when the page is wet."
She gestured. Her rear boats began to turn their oars in long, slow pulls that didn't aim at us at all. They aimed at the harbor mouth. At the current. At the shape of the bay itself. She meant to redirect the water's own convenience, to make our shallow protections into sluices that would feed her men into the town's lower lanes with a speed no feet had earned.
I admired the idea even as I hated it. The best opponents offer you a mirror you didn't ask to see.
"Counter?" Arin asked.
"Let her have her river," I said, and pulled breath down to my stomach until the world hushed. "Then teach it a bend."
I pushed—not forward, not up, but sideways, a thin pressure along the channel's inner wall. Water obeyed, not because I commanded but because I offered an easier story to believe. The current buckled, then curved, then licked back toward the reef with a hiss that might have been spite. Three raiders who'd been planning to run up our lanes found themselves running back to their boats instead, and boats don't accept apologies from men who arrive at the wrong angle.
Arin barked a laugh. "You make the sea lie."
"It prefers fiction," I said.
We might have held the edge there—on the lip of losing but not falling—if not for the bell.
Saint-Hollow spoke again, not ahead this time, not to sea, but from our right—bounced off rock and timber into a voice the town heard as behind you. People panicked. Doors slammed. A child screamed and did not stop. The orderly fear I'd been selling turned back into chaos, and chaos buys anything.
"Go!" Arin shouted toward the lanes. "Keep them away from the houses!"
He moved to angle himself between the widest alley and Vara's nearest boat. That put him beyond the curve of my control field; I would have to step down into the mess to keep him within the map I knew.
I hate moving into maps I haven't finished.
I went anyway.
Water thickened around my calves in greeting. I told it I was late and that we'd be rude together. It forgave me because that's what systems do for those who nurture them often.
A raider loomed, able shoulders and the smile of a man who thought he was solving a problem by reducing it to bone. He swung. I didn't block. I offered him a step that wasn't there. His weight chose imagination. It landed badly.
Arin's heat rolled across my skin like the first day of a fever. He struck, withdrew, struck, each motion as small as he could make it and still change the world. It cost him. Sweat cut lines through the fog on his face.
"We can't sustain this," I said.
"We don't," he panted. "They do. We just… write the last sentence."
"Poetic," I said. "Unreliable."
Vara lifted her arm again. Something in the fog shifted—mass, intent. A shape long and low slid into the new curve of current I'd made and used it like a road I'd paved for someone else. On its prow: a figure cloaked, heavy, holding a pole like a spear that had learned to aim itself.
"Who is that?" Arin asked.
"An accountant," I said, because only accountants arrive exactly when the ledger needs them. "Ours or hers, we'll see."
The pole dipped. The water between us dimpled as if a thumb had pressed it from above.
I felt the pattern change.
"Down!" I shouted—
—and the world jerked sideways as if the bay had coughed.