The Salt-Stitch

Brineharrow kept its breath low and wet most days, as if the city itself were a sleeping thing that refused sudden movement. Liora Hark worked with her hands in a square of light that came through a crooked window in the upper room of a house that leaned like an old apology. Her fingers moved as if they remembered a language of knots and small miracles; steel felt, beeswax, a thinned scrap of skin where a name had been cut and softened. The smell of brine and boiled leather hung in the rafters, threaded with the faint sweetness of herbs steeped for coughs. Her bench was cluttered with things: a jar of salt, a spool of silver wire, scraps of names wrapped in oilcloth, a tin of needles whose points had been coaxed to remember their aim.

Finn slept on a pallet near the low stove, a child who coughed in rounds and then smiled as if the cough had never been. Liora watched him sleep more often than she admitted, listening to the tiny irregularities in his breathing as if they were notes she could tune. He had a laugh like a bright pebble, sharp and quick, and when he bolted upright in the dark hours, he would ask for small marvels—an extra soup crust, a mended shawl, a story in which the moon had a softer voice.

Outside, the Tidework merchants called in clipped voices, hawking sea-roots and salted fish. The Spire of Echoes threw back sounds like people flinging pebbles; the Registry's bells counted small forfeits and bigger sorrows. Liora knew how the city measured itself: by names given, by names kept, by names owed. People wagered words here. They pawned their histories and paid for tomorrow with syllables. She would stitch one of those syllables closed for a family whose memory had frayed, smoothing the ragged edge so the world could accept them again. It was delicate work. She used substances that tasted of brine and iron; she hummed old lullabies as she pressed the scrap of name into place and sewed with the smallest stitch, and sometimes, when a name fit right, the house took a breath lighter as if relieved.

A sound came from the stair—a pair of dull, careful thumps. Liora wrapped her thumb around the thimble, listening. Outside the thin glass, a gull circled in circles like a careless coin. Finn coughed once, soft and startled. The city kept its bargains in odd ways; it would demand payment in coin or in silence, in sweat or in sharp absenting. Liora had learned the rules the hard way, which was how she learned to keep her fingers warm and her mind colder. She set the needle down and leaned forward to tuck the scrap of cloth into a small wooden box. 'Tell me a thing so I can breathe after,' Finn whispered, and the whisper was an offering. She told him a small tale about a merchant who traded a sorrow for a small golden stone. He swallowed the tale, eyes bright, and for a moment the cough did not remind her he was fragile. But the bells in the Registry had a new tone lately—thinner, urgent—and that was a sound she could not stitch away with lullabies.