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In the salt-lashed city of Saltreach, cane-maker Yorren Vale breaks a forbidden stillness to hunt his missing sister’s voice beneath the cliffs. With a lighthouse keeper’s sea-fire lantern and a stormwood nail, he confronts a guildmaster who feeds storms with stolen voices—then remakes the city’s song.
The sea kept its claws in Saltreach. Every morning the tide combed the shingle and left long blue ribbons of kelp that smelled like iron and honey, and by evening the fog rolled in and braided itself around chimneys and gulls as if the city were a set of quiet bones. Yorren Vale planed a length of pearwood in his street-level workshop, shaving curls that fell like pale fish-scales onto the patchwork floor. His hands were not remarkable hands—nicks in the knuckles, salt ingrained in the nail-beds—but the canes and inlays they made drew captains with coin and widows with stubborn knees. He worked with the door ajar to watch the harbor and hear the muted steps of his neighbors.
Edda from the fish-stalls paused and leaned in, a basket on her hip. “You’ll ruin your stomach, working through supper.”
“I ate,” Yorren lied, brushing the paper-thin curls off his apron. The tide bells had started to speak to his bones again this season. He could pretend food mattered.
Edda gave him a wad of dried kelp wrapped in cloth. “Put this under your tongue when the wet air makes you cough. The fog is thick as milk. They’ll close the harbor gate early.”
He thanked her and watched her go, legs quick, shoulders squared against the chill. Up the slope, the bell-tower stood with its ribs of stone, a silhouette against the pale sky. It had a name no one said aloud after nightfall. Officially, there was to be no ringing until the spring storms; until then, the tower slept. He looked away, back to his wood. Steel rasped on wood; gulls rasped at each other. Someone shouted about a crate of lantern oil. A little wind threaded the doorway and caught on the brass pins lined in a tray—no, not brass, he corrected himself automatically, driftmetal hammered thin and burnished. His fingers made the correction and the planing went smooth again.
Lisse would have teased him for that lapse. She’d been the one who insisted words mattered. “If you call it brass, you’ll shape it like brass,” she used to say. “Let it be what it is.” She had vanished six months ago. Vanished the way the sea took things—without bruise or witness, leaving behind only her blue scarf and the dent her boots had made by the bench. Sometimes, walking past the bench, he still shifted his hip to avoid her knee, as if she sat there, plying twine and speaking the names of stars.