Chapter 3: Lyseni Grain Ships on the Horizon

The ships appeared at first light on a Tuesday, which Aldric knew because Pia had begun keeping a calendar.

She had constructed it from salvaged wood and a piece of charcoal, tacking it to the post nearest the distribution table, and she updated it each morning with the same unornamented precision she brought to everything else. He had not asked her to do this. He had not known he needed it until the morning he looked up from the water ledger and realized he could not have told anyone what month it was, let alone what day, and something about that ignorance had felt like a symptom of something worse than exhaustion. Now he knew it was Tuesday. He was not certain this helped.

The lookout — a former dockworker's apprentice named Saren who had appointed himself to this function without being asked and whom Aldric had quietly confirmed in the role because replacement would have required inventing a process for replacing him — came down from the collapsed remnant of what had been the harbor master's watch post and crossed the mud flats to the distribution table at something between a walk and a run. The distinction mattered. Men who ran brought news that required immediate response. Men who walked had decided, on their own authority, that response could wait. Saren was doing neither, which meant he had news that he himself could not classify.