Silver Tide: Book One of The Unsworn Tide

Healthy citizens scarcely notice their tide-share. One year’s wages, paid in advance. Give Vey a little of your heart, and Vey will hold back the sea. ––Recruiting notice, Office of Tides

I’m underneath the floodgate when the city comes to collect a woman’s heart.

Not mine. Mine they would want for a different reason, if they knew what my hands can do. My mother taught me to hide it. Then she went down under this wall and never came back up, and I have kept her secret for twelve years.

I hear them before I see them. Six pairs of boots on the inspection bridge, then the hollow knock of a registrar’s staff. Sand sifts between the planks and settles in my hair. Above me, someone gives a small, nervous cough.

“Hold that lamp steady,” I tell Tavi.

“They’re bringing someone to the gate.”

“People often come to gates.”

“With a registrar?”

My spanner stops mid-turn.

Shit.

Through the bars of the maintenance cage, Vey’s harbor looks like hammered lead. It’s an hour before high water, and every fishing boat with a sensible captain is making for the outer moorings. Anything with a working brain is moving away from this stretch of wall.

I shove the spanner through my belt and climb toward it.

At the top, wind plasters my damp shirt to my spine. A carriage waits beside the gatehouse. Two guards stand at its door. Two more flank a broad-shouldered woman in a blue wool dress, red-brown hair coming loose from its cap, and there’s flour in the creases of her hands.

I know those hands. Nessa Pell is thirty-five, kneads sixty loaves before sunrise, and never remembers to wash under her wedding ring.

“What is this?”

The registrar’s gaze skims all five feet and a bit of me: the wet shirt, the grease, the twist of wire holding up my hair. He dismisses the lot. “A civic matter.”

“This is a floodgate. Every matter here is civic.”

Nessa looks at me then. Her face is gray, but I’d know that expression anywhere: sharp annoyance at an inconvenience she has no time to indulge.

“I told them your name,” she says. “Twice.”

“And I informed Mistress Pell,” the registrar says, “that an engineering opinion does not supersede a registered oath.”

He’s young for his office, with a beard carefully shaped to compensate. He isn’t the one I should be worried about.

That would be the man standing behind him.

Tall and spare, in a plain black coat. No sword, no badge of rank. Black hair with a streak of pure white at one temple, though he can’t be thirty. A face like the head on a coin, all straight lines, and a mouth that looks as if it gave up smiling for a wager and means to win. If I had passed him in the bread market, I would have looked twice, and been annoyed with myself for the rest of the day.

Then I see the silver clasp at his throat, an open eye enclosed by a ring. And on his right hand, a band of dull silver with no stone in it.

An oath examiner.

Of all the men in Vey to look twice at.

Examiners are the reason nobody in Vey breaks a promise twice. That ring can make any oath in the city bite down on the person who swore it. They are also who the Crown sends for people like me. I’ve never met one outside a courtroom, and I have put twelve years of effort into keeping it that way.

He isn’t looking at Nessa. He’s studying my gate. His gaze tracks the new bolts along the inspection plate, one by one, the way I’d check them myself, and stops at the spanner in my belt.

Then it lifts to my face. His eyes are the gray of the harbor at his back, and they rest on me a beat too long, as if he’s checking me against a description. I can guess how it would read. Small. Dark hair, dark eyes. Twenty-three years old. A solder scar like a comma under the left eye, and hands that have been burned before.

“You removed the housing.” It’s the voice of a man who has never had to repeat himself.

“It was leaking.”

“Was the oath channel exposed?”

“Not yet.”

Something shifts in his face. Relief, maybe.

It makes me dislike him immediately.

The registrar unrolls a paper. “Nessa Pell. In exchange for the remission of a household debt, you undertook seven years of tidal service. On the twenty-first day of Harvest, your bond failed to deliver its tide-share. Three streets were flooded. The estimated loss stands at…”

“She was in bed with a fever.” I don’t let him reach the number.

“Illness is provided for in the contract.”

“Then the contract is wrong.”

“The contract was witnessed.”

Of course it was. Everything in Vey is witnessed, stamped, and filed, right up until it kills you.

I look at Nessa’s wrist.

Most people who sell tidal service wear their copper bond openly. A year’s wages in advance can buy a roof, settle an illness, put a child into an apprenticeship. In return, the city takes a small share of your heart’s strength at every tide, and that strength holds the gates against the sea. Healthy people scarcely notice.

That’s what the recruiting notices say, anyway. Nobody on King Street wears copper. Up the hill, they pay their tide-share in coin.

Nessa’s bond has sunk into her skin.

“How long?” I ask her.

“Since Tuesday.”

“You should have come to me.”

“For what? So you could pay my debt as well as repair my oven?”

The rebuke lands because I would have offered. I have money for neither. I’ve mended that oven for nothing since the winter Joss died, and Nessa has never once asked me why I can’t seem to stop.

The registrar clears his throat. “Recovery must proceed before the tide.”

He lifts a slender silver instrument from his case. Two tines, like a tuning fork. The Office calls it a recovery instrument. On the quay, we call it a heartpick, and I know exactly what it does. I watched one used after a dock fire, on an exhausted bondsman who couldn’t give his share.

He lived for another eleven minutes.

Not her.

I step between the heartpick and Nessa.

“You can’t make a weak heart stronger by emptying it.”

“Mistress Venn.” The examiner says my name quietly, and somehow that’s worse than a shout. “Move away from the plate.”

I glance down.

Beneath my boots, the bridge’s iron floor has begun to vibrate.

It should be still. Water drives the great gate toward the city, but the oath mechanism holds it against the tide without so much as a shiver. Nine years I’ve worked this gate, five of them alone, and I’ve kept it that way. Now a sound rises from inside the housing, low and uneven.

Knocking.

I’ve heard the wall make that sound once before. I was eleven. The sea came through the foundations at night, and it didn’t roar the way the stories say. It knocked, patiently, like something that knew it would be let in. My mother went down into the dark with eight other women, and the knocking stopped. Vey calls them the Nine.

Nessa folds at the knees.

I catch her beneath the arms. She’s heavier than she looks, solid from years of lifting dough, but she hangs against me without any resistance at all. Her mouth opens.

No air goes in.