Mirella Voss reached the killing before the sun cleared the reeds. A frog-kin lay face down in the collapsed flood pool, blood threading the murky water between broken stones. Two crowds had already gathered on the banks. The frog-kin bared their teeth. The heron-folk gripped their fishing spears. Mirella waded in between them with both hands raised. She had spent three months talking these two clans down from war, and one body could undo all of it before noon. She knew what waited for her at home if she failed. A heron-folk boy named Bram Tallow slept in her loft, and the frog-kin elders had already threatened to drown him for the crime of loving her. Peace in the marsh was not politics to Mirella. It was the only door through which she and Bram could walk together in daylight. "Nobody touches the body until I look," she said. Her voice cracked on the last word. A frog-kin matron spat into the water. A heron captain lowered his spear a finger's width. It was enough. Mirella turned the corpse over in the shallows and searched the wound. The cut was wrong. Frog-kin fought with hooked bone. Heron-folk stabbed straight through with barbed iron. This wound was a long clean curve, sliced from shoulder to hip. She dug her fingers into the mud around the body and felt something hard. She lifted it out: a jagged shard of dark metal, streaked with color she had never seen in the marsh. It was not from any weapon either clan owned. She held the shard up so both banks could see. "Look at this. Neither of you made this cut. Someone wants you fighting." The frog-kin matron leaned forward. The heron captain squinted. A small pastel winglet darted down from the reeds and hovered by Mirella's shoulder, chirping at the metal. The creature had followed her since childhood and knew every forged thing in the marsh. It shook its head hard. Not marsh-work. Everyone saw. The crowds did not embrace. They did not lay down their weapons. But the matron lowered her hand, and the captain waved his people back three steps. "One day," the matron said. "You have one day to bring us the maker of that blade. After that we settle it our way." The captain nodded once and turned toward the tattered dock where his boat waited. Mirella tucked the shard into her belt and climbed out of the pool. She had bought a day, not peace. Somewhere in the marsh a third hand was cutting throats and counting on the clans to blame each other. She looked toward the sunken shrine ruin on the far bank, where old paths led down into chambers nobody had walked in years. That was where a stranger would hide. She started walking before the water finished dripping from her sleeves.

Mirella pushed into the reeds and made for the sunken shrine. The metal shard rode heavy at her belt. The pastel winglet flew ahead of her, low over the water, then swung back sharp and landed on her shoulder. It clicked its beak twice and pointed its head to the south bank. She stopped walking and listened. Boots in mud. More than one pair. A patrol was moving parallel to her, and moving faster. She crouched behind a stand of cattails and counted shapes through the stalks. Four frog-kin, armed, painted for a hunt. At the front walked a small captain with a red patch on his brow. She had met him once at a grain trade. Captain Marsh Coldbrook. He was young and angry and loyal to the murdered clansman's mother. If he reached the shrine first, he would gut whoever was inside before she could ask a single question. Her one witness would die with the answer in his mouth. Mirella could not outrun four frog-kin through their own marsh. She looked at the narrow reed path ahead. Rotten planks, tied with old rope, laid across the shallows. One crossing. If she cut it, the patrol had to wade a mile around. If she cut it wrong, she went into the water with it. She pulled the shard from her belt and used its curved edge as a knife. It sliced the wet rope like grass. She sawed through the first line, then the second, then dropped flat behind a mud hump as the frog-kin came into view on the far side. Captain Coldbrook raised his hand. His patrol halted at the crossing. He tested the first plank with his foot. The plank swung loose and slapped the water. He tested the next. It fell. He looked across the reeds and shouted, not at her, but at the marsh in general. "Voss. I can smell your winglet. Come out." She stood up slowly with both hands open. "The maker of the blade is at the shrine. If you kill him, your matron gets nothing. If I question him, she gets a name." Coldbrook stared at her a long moment. He looked at the broken crossing. He looked at the shard in her hand and at the winglet on her shoulder, which shook its head hard the way it had at the killing pool. His jaw worked. "You have until the sun touches the reeds," he said. "Then I come around, and I do not ask." He turned his patrol back the way they had come. Mirella waited until their splashes faded. Her hands were shaking. She had bought hours, not the day. And she had just used a stranger's blade to cut a frog-kin road, which meant when Coldbrook told that story, the shard in her belt would look less like evidence and more like a confession. She wiped it on her sleeve and started running toward the shrine.