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Chapter 1
Smoke-Salted Coins
The tide clock on the harbor wall had teeth like a beggar’s grin and a smear of gull droppings for a smile. Bryn Ordar checked it with half an eye and the way a man with too many scars learns to read the weather. Low tide had turned; he had a handful of hours before Blackwater Gate filled its lungs again.
He thought of leaving. Then a woman slid onto the bench across from him and put down a purse that clinked like a promise.
“You wouldn’t come if I told you what waits in the gate,” she said. Her hair was a black river braided with finer, stranger threads—salt-white cords that caught the light when she moved. She wore no jewelry. Her eyes were the color of old anchors.
“I’m a man of poor decisions,” Bryn said. “Tell me anyway.”
“The drowned knights of Holgarin are chained to their posts. They remember nothing but their names and the weight of their oaths. They will try to remember you with a hook.”
Bryn looked at his cup. The ale wore a skin of scum like a pond. He pushed it away and rubbed at the white seam across his palm. “And what is it you want from their tomb?”
She tapped the purse once. “They call it an ember. Not a coal, not a jewel. A thing that burns where promises are made in blood. It can unmake the worst bindings. Governor’s brands. Salt-oaths. Names older than the river. I have words that need burning.”
He could hear the water in his memory, colder than a river had any right to be. He could hear Ivar screaming in a burning hall, smoke turned to rope around his throat, and Bryn’s own feet skidding on ash as he fled because he was not strong enough, not fast enough, not enough.
He touched the rag bundle in his coat pocket. A doll with button eyes stared back at him from between frayed cloth ears. “And if a man had a binding to burn?”
Her eyebrows lifted a breath. “It will take your flesh where it frees another. That is the law of old fire.”
“My flesh for hers,” Bryn said. “Where and when.”
She nodded once, and only then told him her name. “Neris.”
He counted the coins with his thumb on the table, each a ring of weight. Smoke and salt and old iron rolled in from the docks and settled on him like a cloak.
“Blackwater will have its way if we tarry,” Neris said, and rose. “Bring what blade you trust. Bring salt. Bring a memory you can afford to lose.”
