The Wrack Keeper's Apprentice

What the Tide Brought In

By the time the storm lost interest, Halda Mercer had swallowed enough bay water to season a stew.

The tide rolled her into the shallows with no more ceremony than it would have given a broken crate. She came in on her side, one arm through the strap of her bag, boots dragging through pebbles and black weed while cold rain worried at the back of her neck. For a while there had been only dark water, the slap of it, and the stubborn thought that she had paid for passage to Penwick Shoal and therefore ought to arrive somewhere that had heard of Penwick Shoal.

Her knee struck sand. The bay gave her a final shove and retreated. Halda pushed herself upright, spat salt, and decided she would be angry later if she had the energy for it.

The beach curved around her in a long grey crescent, half-hidden under torn streamers of wrack. Driftwood lay tangled with brown rope, broken shell, a child's red button, and enough sea grass to make a poor roof for someone desperate. Beyond the shore rose a line of houses tucked above the tidemark, their windows shuttered against the storm.

Light burned along the boardwalk.

Halda blinked brine from her lashes and looked again. Lanterns hung from posts all along the raised planks, each one cupped in glass, each flame steady despite the storm's lingering breath. They ran the length of the village, a patient line of gold above the grey water, lit for any fool who had lost a boat, a road, or the argument with the sea.

"That's excessive," she told the nearest piece of driftwood. It had survived its own journey and offered no opinion.

Her bag was still attached by the grace of a buckle she had not trusted when she bought it. She dragged it across the wet sand and checked the fastening with numb fingers: shirt, spare trousers, knife, tin cup, needle case wrapped in oilcloth, a heel of bread that was now more bay than bread. The coin packet remained where it belonged. Practical miracles, then. The tide had left her poor, soaked, and alive.

A bell rang once from somewhere above the shore. Not a warning bell. Too small for that, and too tired. More of a question. Halda stood, swayed, and steadied herself with one hand on the bag strap. Her left boot made a wet noise. The right made a worse one.

The first steps off the beach took her through a band of wrack so thick it clung to her ankles. It smelled of kelp, old wood, fish scales, and something sweet underneath, like apples gone soft in a barrel. Bits of the tide's leavings nudged against her boots: glass worn smooth, a comb with three teeth missing, a wooden spoon darkened by salt.

Above the wrack-line, a narrow path climbed to the boardwalk. The planks stood high on braced posts, though the bay had climbed after them in places, and someone had nailed strips of shell-white wood along the safer edge to mark where the footing held. Even in the rain, the boardwalk smelled faintly of tar, lantern oil, wet rope, and bread.

Bread meant civilization. Possibly even credit.

The first person she met was old enough to have stopped pretending weather was personal. He came out from under an awning with a lantern hook in one hand and a folded cloth in the other, took in Halda's dripping coat, the weed on her shoulder, and the bag clutched against her hip.

"Morning tide brought you, then," he said.

"Not by invitation."

He nodded as if that answered the important question. "Can you stand without falling?"

"So far I’ve made a good show of it."

"Good enough." He passed her the cloth. "Dry your face. Hask's got porridge on if the roof stayed on."

Halda looked at the cloth before taking it. Clean, patched, warmer than it should have been after being held in an old man's fist. "You do this often?"

"Dry faces?"

"Collect strangers."

"We don't collect them. Tide brings them." He pointed down the boardwalk with the hook. "Hask's Table is under the blue awning. Eat first. Questions after, if you've got breath left for answers."

There it was: the gap where suspicion ought to have gone. Every port had its order: name, origin, work history, debts, who would speak for you. The old man only adjusted the lantern nearest him.

"You don't want to know where I came from?"

"Not before porridge." He tucked the spare cloths under his arm and moved to the next lantern. "Mind the fourth plank past the fishmonger. It argues."

Halda obeyed the warning because arguing with planks was a luxury for people in dry socks. The boardwalk carried her through the waking village, past shuttered windows, dripping nets, and doorways where people had left boots upside down to drain. A woman sweeping water from her threshold saw the weed in Halda's hair and pointed silently toward the blue awning.

Hask's Table turned out not to be a table, or not only one. It was an open-sided shelter near the harbor edge where long boards had been set on trestles, their surfaces scarred by knives, cups, and weather....