The Charter of Gullhaven

Dawn unrolled over Gullhaven like a salted sheet, thin light sliding across a clutter of beached boats and rotting nets. Maia Alden stood barefoot on the planks of her father’s slipway, palms dark with pitch, and watched the harbor wake. The smell of hot tar and wet wood filled her nostrils; gulls argued in a language she had long since learned to ignore. Around her, men hauled planks and stanchions, calling names across the low roofs and crooked yards. She moved among them with the practised ease of thirty seasons’ work in a body that was not yet thirty years old: fingernails perpetually stained, hair pinned back with a scrap of rope, the muscles along her forearms mapping the long arcs of her labor.

Jory Alden, broad-shouldered and forever smelling of smoke and salt, bent over the keel of a half-built sloop. He glanced up when Maia set a steaming kettle on the stones. His face, creased by sun and the fine lines of laughter, softened. He looked more tired this year; there were shadows beneath his eyes that the dawn could not bleach away.

"You'll scald yourself if you set that there," he said, voice low as the sea in a trough.

She smiled without looking at him. "Not my first kettle, Father. Mary and I learned fire when the bell was but a whisper."

A child's voice joined them—Tomyl, the baker's boy, carries a bulging sack of flour and a dozen hard rolls. He paused at the slipway, watching the men with the solemn reverence of someone who had been taught to admire craft without yet joining it.

On the low green beyond the berths, a flag took the wind: the village's tethered standard, a small piece of linen stitched with a gull and a scallop shell. It was an emblem of late summers and of the charter that all the elders liked to speak of in winter. The charter was, in Maia's mind, part myth and part ledger: a heavy, cedar-bound thing kept beneath the floorboards of the meeting house—an old piece of parchment that said when and how the people of Gullhaven could take from the sea, which channels belonged to them, which tides they might use for salt and trade. When the charter was read every year, men and women would crowd the hall and clap their hands at the familiar words, as if language itself were a rope to bind them to the shore.

"Old Simon will be down with the register today," Jory said at last. His voice lowered as if speaking of a creature that might overhear them. "He'll want it set where the crowd can see."

Maia felt a small, steady flicker at the idea—a sense of something important and fragile being set out in the sun. She had never seen the charter except on festival days when an old hand would lift it and let the light run across its folds. Its ink smelled faintly of iron and cider. To her, the charter had always been more than paper: it held the right to lay a rope across the channel, to draw a seine where whales sometimes came close, to claim a slip at the quay. It kept people fed, and in a year fraught with poor weather, that was no small thing.

The shipwright paused in his work and turned to study the horizon, where a small smudge of sail slid toward the mouth of the bay. Another boat, then. The men stiffened in the chill like reeds answering the same wind.

"A strange sail for this hour," Brant said, stepping onto the wet stones. He shaded his eyes with a square of knuckled hand and frowned. "Not one of ours."

At the far quay a rider drew up: a thin lean figure in a grey coat, a pair of brass buttons catching the first gold. The rider's horse stamped and blew steam into the air. Maia's fingers tightened on the kettle handle, her mind with the wood and the smell of the meeting house, with the paper that laid claim to their lives. Whatever the visitor carried would matter, she felt it like an undertow that had not yet surfaced.