Alexis Glaciermage's Arc

Chapter 7 of 13

Dawn came clean. Alexis went aloft, checked every seam, and signed off on the rigging. They made port by dusk, holds full, contract in hand. But before the gangplank dropped, a dockhand jogged up the pier with a folded note for the captain. Word was moving fast along the waterfront: the drydock at Crescent Harbor sat on something older than the pilings, and the port authority had been turning ships away for reasons no clerk would write down. Alexis watched the captain read it twice. Then he looked up at her, and she knew the night's win had already started to curdle. Alexis flew the length of the harbor before the captain could ask. She passed the squat booth where the harbor master leaned out his window, waving certain ships toward open water. A line of steel posts strung with rope marked the lane he kept closed. Past the posts, low tide had pulled back from the drydock's far wall. Wedged in the mud beneath the pilings sat a chest bound in old timber, blue scales carved across its lid, half-swallowed by silt. Something older than the port, and someone had been sitting on it. She landed beside Rikki and told him plainly. The chest. The closed lane. The harbor master picking who saw it and who didn't. Rosa was already at the captain's elbow with the contract in her hand. Alexis spoke before Rikki asked. "They'll turn us away next. Our name is on that flag the Corsair flies, and the booth knows it." Rikki folded the note. "Then we use the contract tonight. Before the harbor master writes us into the wrong column." They moved the ship into the drydock at full dark, papers signed, fee paid, before any clerk could quietly lose the file. The contract held. But as the blocks settled under the hull, Alexis looked back at the rope line and saw the harbor master watching her from his booth, a list in his hand. The repair was theirs. The harbor's quiet war was not finished with her ship.