The Tide-Spindle

You wake to the salt memory of the sea before your eyes open. The window above your bed is a smudge of gray-blue light; gulls argue about breakfast and a tide-clock in the lane below coughs its low, wooden note like an old throat clearing. You press your toes into the cold floorboards and count the gears by feel—one tiny clamp, a brass tooth, a split pin—before you even sit up. That counting is habit. Counting keeps things from slithering away.

Your name is Saffron Nettle, though everyone in Brinehaven shortens it to Saffy when they shake your hand without meaning to be kind. Your hair tangles like seaweed and your hands smell of oil and lemon rind. You are ten years old, and you know how to coax a broken tide-clock back into song. You know which spring will forgive a snapped tooth, which pin needs just a whisper of resin. You know, because you learned at the knee of someone whose hands were all small and patient and slow.

The workshop where you sleep squeezes between a fishmonger and a sailmaker: a narrow, leaning building with a roof like a crooked tooth. The front window is a collage of clock faces and tide-lenses. When you push the small door, a bell—made from a tin cup—tinkles and a puff of warm, oily air smells of metal and boiled tea. The bench you sleep under is the same bench you apprenticed at. Tools hang in neat rows like teeth. A half-finished tide-clock sits under a cloth: carved cedar, a face painted with tiny waves, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. You have been carrying that dust on your knees for three weeks.

Perched on the shelf is Pip, your heron-shaped clockwork. Pip's brass feathers are scuffed; one eye is a watch-glass that catches the light and turns it into a bright coin. When you touch his back he blinks with a faint whirr and a single gear clicks. Pip is clever enough to worry at strings and small locks and patient enough to listen to sea-songs. He is also the only creature who will hear the little rhythms you whisper when you are learning something new.

Outside, the tide-clocks sing in their slow, interlocking chiming. They keep the town's stories. At high tide their voices thread into a thicker, quieter sound that people call the memory-tide. You learned that name from your grandmother, Earna Nettle, who hums old boat-songs into the rising light. She says the memory-tide remembers things people forget on purpose and by accident, and keeps them somewhere deep and safe. You do not know exactly where, only that the tide lulls your fear like a hand. Today, the tide sings one of its low, ordinary songs. You tighten your fingers around the patch of wood you were shaping and listen.