Liora Heartwhisper crouched at the edge of the rotted dock and watched a plank drop into the black water without a splash. The water swallowed it. She had come back to Riverrot alone this time, after her sister stood up at the council table last week and called the project a waste of coin and lives. Her sister had meant it as a kindness, a public shove to make people listen to the opposition. It worked. Liora still came back. Across the channel stood the three buildings she had chosen months ago, their floors solid under her boots when she first tested them, their walls dry. She wanted a place there where forbidden lovers could meet without being hunted. She had been one of those lovers. She knew what a locked door was worth. The problem was simple and ugly. She could not reach the buildings. The docks dropped anyone who stepped past the third post, and the water ate wood the way rot ate fruit. She had brought rope, planks, and a bucket of pitch, and none of it would matter if she went under. She sat back on her heels and pulled a folded cloth from her coat. Inside lay a white rose her grandmother had pressed into her palm the night she left home. The petals had not browned. They had not curled. Her grandmother had said the bloom would know its own people, and that anyone who carried it across foul water would cross dry. Liora had treated the gift as comfort, not a tool. Now she had nothing else. She set the rose on the last sound plank and waited. A frog climbed out of the reeds and onto the wood beside it. The frog had eyes like cut garnet and skin the color of a bruise healing. It looked at her and spoke. It said the rose was a token, one bloom, one passage, and asked who she meant to carry across first. Liora said herself. The frog hopped onto her shoulder. The black water under the dock thickened, then stilled, then held a pale skin across its surface from her boots to the far stair. She stepped out. The skin took her weight. She walked the length of the channel and set her hand on the door of the middle building. Behind her the water loosened again and ate the plank where the rose had rested. The rose was gone. The frog was not. It sat on her shoulder and told her she could give safe crossing to others now, but only by her own word, and only one at a time, and the wrong name would cost her the next bloom she did not yet have.