Page 19 of Add To Hoard

I have been threatened by men who were angry, men who were drunk, men who thought cruelty was a form of communication. I have never been threatened by something that was simply informing me of a capability: accurate, impersonal, delivered without malice because malice would imply I was worth the investment of feeling something.

He looks back at me.

My heart is loud and inconvenient behind my ribs and I am not going to let it show because the moment I let it show this conversation is over and so is everything that depends on it.

“You could?” I say. My voice comes out even. I am quietly grateful for this. “You probably should, from where you’re standing. But you haven’t.” I let that sit for exactly a beat. “You came back down here instead.”

Something shifts behind his eyes. I don’t know what it is and I am not going to speculate about it while I am trying to negotiate my continued survival, but I note it.

“So,” I continue, before he can reassemble whatever I have just displaced, “May Lord.”

He blinks. It is the first time I have seen him blink and it is because of the name, which tells me the name was the right call.

“Here is my counter.” I turn slightly and gesture toward the northern rock formation. “That overhang is going to come down in the next serious storm. It’ll take your mooring rock with it, which means anything you want to land on this beach afterward will have nothing to tie off to. The crack in the base has been running for — judging by the moss, at least two seasons. Nobody has touched it.” I turn back. “There’s a freshwater seep at the north end of the formation. The basin it collects in is silted up to half capacity. If it blocks entirely you lose the only clean water source on this side of the island. I found both of those in a morning.”

I watch him. He is listening. He does not want to be listening, I can see that, but he is.

“I work,” I say. “That is the thing I do. I gut fish and I haul cargo and I fix what needs fixing and stopping only when the job is done, and I am very good at seeing what needs doing because I have spent my entire life in places where nobody else was going to notice. You have an island that has been managed but not maintained, and I have a reason to be useful that does not involve stealing from you or mapping your coastline for anyone else or any of the other things you’re currently deciding I might do.” I cross my arms. “Let me work. Give me a fair exchange when the work is done. One jewel. I don’t need to know which, I don’t need it to be significant by your accounting, I just need it to be enough. I leave. I don’t come back. I don’t tell anyone what’s here, because nobody would believe me anyway and I’d be dead of old age before anyone could get a fleet organised to do anything about it.”

I stop. I have said the thing. It is in the air between us now and I cannot take it back and I am not going to fill the silence with anything else because I have made my case and adding to it now would be weakness, not argument.

Maelor looks at me for a long time.

The island breathes around us. The tide works at the hull of the ‘Tenacious’. A bird I have no name for calls once from somewhere in the canopy above the treeline and does not call again.

“Three days,” he says finally. The words come out against better judgment, which I suspect they are. “You have three days to demonstrate that the arrangement is viable. If I am not satisfied —”

“You’ll put me on the boat and forget me before morning?” I say. “Yes. I heard you the first time.”

Those eyes do something that is almost, in the most technical sense of the word, almost, a different expression than any he has worn so far. I cannot name it. I decide naming it is not my most urgent priority.

“Three days,” I agree.

He turns and walks back around the northern rock formation without another word. His footsteps fade into the treeline, and then I turn to look at the overhang and the cracked basalt and the mooring lines and the brig and the freshwater seep at the end of the beach, and I start making a list.

I have always been good at lists.

10

MAELOR

The barrier survey records go back two hundred and forty years and they make for poor reading.

Not because the data is incomplete — Ysara has pulled everything, organized it by approach corridor and season and degradation category, cross-referenced against weather events and the known history of the concealment magic’s maintenance cycles. The records are thorough. That is precisely the problem. Thorough records of gradual decline are considerably worse than incomplete ones, because incomplete records leave room for optimism and these do not.

I sit at the war room table with the survey logs spread before me and work through them the way I work through everything that I do not want to be true — methodically, without looking away, because looking away has never once made a thing less real and I stopped attempting it sometime in the fourth century.

The degradation is real. It is slow — decades between measurable shifts in the northern barrier corridor, a century of incremental weakening along the outer fog boundary, but it is consistent and it is directional and extrapolated forward it produces a timeline I do not want to put a number to. Drazik is not wrong about the fact of it. He is wrong about what it means and who should address it, but the fact itself is documented in two hundred and forty years of survey records and I have been the one signing off on those records and I have been looking at the individual data points and not the pattern.

I have been managing. Not maintaining.

The phrase arrives in Nerina Ashvale’s voice, which it has no business doing, and I set down the record I am holding and look at the ceiling for a moment the way I have not looked at a ceiling since I was young enough to find the gesture useful.

She had said it about the overhang. About the silted basin. About the specific, observable neglect of a cove that has been inside my territory for six centuries and that I have not personally visited in forty years. She had said it in the tone of someone identifying a problem that has a solution, not delivering a verdict, and it had landed in me with the quiet accuracy of a thing that has been true for years and simply needed someone to say it aloud.

I pull the survey log for the western approach corridor and read it properly for the first time.

The name surfaces two hours later, the way names surface when you have spent a long time not thinking about them, not called, not chosen, simply present, the way a deep current is present beneath water that looks still from above.