Swamp Butter watched the first boat of nobles glide up to her new dock and knew she had one hour before they walked back out. The lounge she had built on stilts above the black water was ready in every way a person could see. Cushions in silk. Cold wine in copper buckets. Gris, her green crocodile, chained loose beside the door for a thrill. What she did not have was a single sound to fill the room, and rich people who paid for a spectacle would not sit two hours in a quiet swamp listening to frogs. She had staked everything on this place. Without the golden egg her grandmother had hidden in the Sunken Palace, the marsh would be carved up and sold before the next dry season. The lounge was her long play: draw the nobles in, take their coin, learn their faces, and buy time to go after the egg herself. But a lounge with no music was a boat with no oars. She had two servers pouring drinks and a painted signpost at the landing promising a frolic she could not yet deliver. She walked fast down the plank path to the storage shed and dragged out the thing she had been saving for later. It was a weathered music box with a brass crank, cylinders spotted with rust, damp at the seams. She had bought it off a bargeman who swore it still played. She set it on a stool by the bar and turned the crank. Three notes rolled out, thin and tinny, then a wet click, then nothing. She cranked again. Nothing. "That won't hold them." Swamp Butter turned. A red-haired woman stood at the doorway with a snake curled along one arm. She had come in on the noble boat and Swamp Butter had marked her at once as not one of them. The woman stepped inside without asking. "Amkissra," she said. "I sing. I charm. The snake helps." She looked at the dead music box, then at the empty stage platform Swamp Butter had raised at the room's far end — pale stone tiers under a sweeping silk canopy, cypress logs holding it all above the tide. "Give me that stage tonight. Half the drink take. I stay as long as it pays." Swamp Butter heard the nobles' voices on the dock, already bored, already turning. She looked at Gris. Gris blinked. She looked back at Amkissra. "Half until the tide turns. Then we talk again." Amkissra was already walking to the stage, unwinding the snake. She climbed the steps, lifted her arms, and began to sing — low, clipped, strange — and the snake rose with her voice. The nobles came in from the dock one by one and sat down. Swamp Butter poured the first round herself. She had bought her hours. Now she had a partner in her house, and she did not yet know what that would cost.