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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Bone Compass
The morning the compass woke, the salt wind carried the taste of brass. I knew the feel of that wind; it had scoured my skin since I was small enough to fit under my father’s workbench, but I had never known it to taste like metal—like coin, like hinge, like the inside of the old man’s palm when he pressed luck into my fist and went after a legend.
The bone compass lay on the table, a disc of pale vertebrae inlaid with a ring of copper. Its needle had gone dead when he did—at least that’s how we told it in the dockside prayer booths of Barren Quay. Now, as dawn lifted, the copper ring warmed until the oil in its etched letters glistened like fresh tears. The needle shuddered and swung toward the interior, toward the inland glare we called the Mirrorwind.
Pella Karr stood in the doorway, hair in a scarf, dust on her boots. “If you’re looking that hard at a trinket, you’re about to leave,” she said. “And I haven’t yet invested in a misplaced rescue.”
“It’s not a rescue.” I kept my voice flat. The needle steadied. Something in my sternum steadied with it. “It’s a beacon.”
Pella stepped in, lantern at her hip, her grin pulled tight like a lanyard. “I heard plenty of dockside stories about the First Beacon when I was a runner. The kind that sell you a map and leave you short a tongue.” She studied the compass. “It hurts to look.”
“It’s pointing where he went,” I said. “It didn’t do that for five years. Not until today.”
Pella hummed her disapproval. “Then we go today. Before too many mouths taste that wind.”
