We fell together, not into water but into a new set of rules. The pole had not struck us. It had struck the story we were telling the sea, and the sea had amended it without apology.
Pain made a point. I rolled, came up on a knee, took stock. Arin was on his feet already, breathing like someone teaching his lungs to obey again. The cloaked figure on the prow stood perfectly still, pole raised, reading the currents as if they were lines in a familiar book.
"Counter-seal," I muttered, tasting old theories in a new mouth. "Not written. Felt."
Arin didn't look. "Say what matters."
"They brought someone who can unwrite bends."
"Then we break the pen," he said.
He charged. Not recklessly—directly. He drove heat low, not at the figure, but at the boat's skin where wood turns to will. It worked; even good wood remembers it used to be trees and misses the ground. The hull shivered.
The pole dipped again. My water answered someone else before remembering me. I snapped my palm flat, retuned tension, and lied faster: this way, not that; this truth, not that one.
For a moment our influences braided—theirs angular, mine curved. The pole lifted, reconsidered, pressed again. We fought a duel that would look like nothing to anyone who did not speak the language of pressure.
"Ren!" Arin's voice was tight. Men pressed the alley mouth now, iron and breath and hunger. He could hold them or die buying me time to explain the bay to itself. He chose holding, because that is who he had decided to be.
"Three breaths," I said.
"You can have two."
Fair.
I pulled silence into my chest until my heartbeat felt like a clock in another room. Then I reached not for water, but for the hum the bell had left in everything. Sound had become a lattice in the fog, an invisible scaffolding that men and boats were leaning against without noticing. I nudged one joint. The note in the air darkened, barely. The cloaked figure's pole paused.
Again. I pressed another joint. The hum lifted, almost shy.
The pole swung to compensate. Good. Compensation is predictable.
"Now," I said.
Arin stepped into the space the pole had created by trying not to leave a space, and jammed heat under the boat's lip. It leaped, awkward, and its prow kissed the false firmness I'd hidden there. The cloaked figure stumbled, a human moment pried out of a perfect posture.
In that blink, I cut—a thin slice through the water's skin that made it forget to hold the boat kindly. The hull slumped into rudeness. Oars clattered. Men cursed.
Arin was laughter and effort. He shoved, withdrew, shoved again, tiniest motions, smallest costs. If I'd had time to be pleased, I might have been.
Vara's gaze flicked between us—the boy who refused to move and the boy who moved water. For the first time, something close to interest sharpened into respect.
"Name," she called to Arin.
"Arin," he snapped, not taking his eyes off the men in front of him.
"Keep it," she said. Then, to me: "And yours?"
"Ren," I said.
"Keep that as well," she replied. "It will look good on a list."
"What list?" Arin asked.
"The ones I don't finish," she said, and raised her arm for a new pattern.
The pole-man adjusted, this time slower. He had learned I could touch the lattice the bell had left. Learning costs speed.
"Ren," Arin said between teeth, "how many more of these do we endure?"
"As many as it takes for their fear to remember arithmetic," I said, and signaled the foreman to pull the last trick I had bought with the price of future apologies.
From beneath the wharf, six clay jars surfaced on lines, their mouths sealed with wax and stubbornness. Inside each: trapped air, trapped dry tinder, trapped a kind of promise. The foreman yanked a cord; wax surrendered. Oil kissed water, then kissed flame from a lantern the boys had sheltered in a clay throat.
Light bloomed in rings—soft, dangerous, not to kill but to claim space. Fire on water is a sermon everyone hears.
Vara lifted a hand to shade her eyes, not from brightness but from the truth in it: we were willing to bruise the harbor to save the town.
"Enough," she said to her men. No anger. No surrender. A decision measured against tomorrow.
Anchors rose. Oars leaned back. Boats edged away, not losing so much as leaving, which is the future's word for retreat.
The pole-man held my gaze for a heartbeat. I inclined my head, because we had spoken in a language not many people admit exists. He did not return the courtesy. That, too, was information.
Arin sagged against the sea-stairs, breath sawing. I steadied him without letting him think I was, which is sometimes kindness and sometimes strategy; here, both.
"We won," he said.
"We didn't lose," I corrected.
He grimaced, but the eyes were laughing under it. "You and your words."
"They're cheaper than blood," I said.
From the fog, Saint-Hollow spoke one last time, and the note sounded almost like a chuckle.
The town began to cheer in those ragged spurts relief invents. Doors opened. The gull-nest boy shouted my name and then Arin's and then, wisely, the foreman's.
Vara's boats slid back toward the reef like thoughts to be had later.
Arin tipped his head at me. "You'll sleep?"
"No," I said. "I'll listen."
"To what?"
"To fear finding equilibrium," I said. "It's a precise moment. You can miss it if you blink."
He shook his head and pushed off the rail. "You're impossible."
"Useful," I said again.
He was still laughing when he disappeared up the lane.
I stood with the foreman and watched the oil-rings gutter out, one by one, as the tide's patience drowned them.
Tomorrow, Vara would return with a new arithmetic.
So would I.