Dawn pulled itself over the harbor like a slow hand, and Sylvi moved through that light the way a ship moves through fog—deliberate, listening. The planks under her boots reported their own small histories: sand ground into the grain, the faint oil sheen where a keel had been slipped, a stubborn nail that never quite sank. She ran a palm along a rail and found a hairline seam she didn't like. It felt like a bruise on wood, an almost-silent complaint.
A vendor shouted five different names for his morning pastry—sea-kelp fritter, tide-bun, brined-sweet curl—none of which appealed to Sylvi, though the scent of frying dough threaded along the quay. A boy with a crate of smoked fish jingled a set of tide-tokens on his wrist; people in the harbor believed in small charms: a braided strip of sailcloth tied round the wrist for a steady hand, a thimble carved from driftwood for good luck when stitching. None of that comforted a plank that wanted to split.
She crouched, fingers in the cold grain, and probed the fracture. It ran in a thin, careless line where the lashed seam met an iron strap. Whoever had made the original join had left a point where stress would gather like rain on a porch. Sylvi listened with a craftsman's heart and the noise in her mind quieted; the world was mostly sensible when measured in joins, lashings, and the way wood yielded if you let it. She could feel the way the dock wanted to wiggle when a boat rolled; that wiggle was small now, but it found her worry and left it.
A shout broke the morning's smaller catalog of sounds. "Watch your step, shipwright! You and that plank are conspiring to drag me into the sea."
She looked up. Cassian was emerging from the narrow throat between a merchant's barge and the cobbled quay, his coat smelling faintly of seaweed and iron. He carried a pilot's satchel slung like a second heart and a grin that had a habit of uncurling her defense. He'd been a presence at the edge of her routines for moons—never intrusive, always in the right place to notice a tide before the rest of the harbor did. Their exchanges had the rough cadence of people who shared cemented trust without fuss: teasing, practical, precise. Today his grin was an unwelcome sun.