7. Rafe
RAFE
Rafe was on his knees in the hold with a headlamp and a pry tool at half past seven in the morning, running his fingers along the split partition where the hull had separated from the floor mount, and he did not like what he found.
The crack ran eight inches further than what the initial walk-through had caught.
He pressed the wood, felt the give in it, and sat back on his heels.
"How bad?" Dex's voice came from the top of the hold ladder.
"Come down here."
Dex descended with his headlamp already on, crouched beside him, and looked. "That's going to need a full plank replacement, not a patch."
"I know."
"Rowan said—"
"Rowan looked at it in the dark and in the rain." Rafe stood and moved forward to check the secondary frame brace. "I'm not blaming him. But I'm not trusting an estimate made in those conditions on a repair that determines whether this hold is watertight for the next six months."
Dex pulled at the damaged wood, testing the way Rafe had. "You want to pull Rowan off it entirely?"
"No." He crouched again at the forward end of the partition.
"He knows this dock, he knows the materials suppliers, and he's the only person in this town who's worked the timbers on a vessel this size.
I need him." He said it the way he said anything he found inconvenient.
Flatly, without drama. "I just need to be here when the decisions get made. "
Dex pressed his mouth together forcing himself to not say his opinion.
"Say it," Rafe said.
"You delegated three contracts and a full crew rotation to me for the Caldermere run last season without a second glance."
"The Caldermere run was straightforward."
"And this isn't, so you'd rather do everything yourself."
"I'd rather know everything is done correctly."
"That's the same thing."
Rafe looked at him. Dex looked back with the untroubled expression. They had been having this argument for seven years and Dex had made peace with never winning it.
"Get Pell to start pulling the damaged cargo inventory," Rafe said. "Everything that got wet goes on a separate list. I want to know what's salvageable before I contact the Vanewright account."
"And the forge appointment?"
"This afternoon, if the smith can take me." He climbed the hold ladder. The morning air hit him after the damp below, cool and resinous, pine from the tree line and river mud from the bank. "You talked to anyone in town about the him?"
"A bit." Dex followed him up, squinting into the light. "Bear shifter named Silas, been here awhile. Runs the forge on the square's north end. Word is he's steady, good work, fair on price." He paused. "Also married to a fire witch who had some trouble with her magic when she first came to town."
Rafe narrowed his eyes.
"I'm just noting it," Dex said. "Given the general theme."
Rafe walked to the bow to assess the rail in daylight.
It was worse in the morning light too, the iron bracket beneath it having torqued when the wood bent, which meant Silas would need to recast it rather than reshape it.
He put his hand on the rail, felt the instability in it, and made a note in the small book he kept in his jacket pocket.
Rowan arrived at the dock at eight with two men and a materials list. He was already in work clothes, tool belt on, moving with the no-nonsense efficiency of someone who had built half the structures in this town with his own hands.
He looked at the bow rail the same way Rafe had, pressed it in the same place, and his jaw did the same thing.
"The bracket's going to need Silas," he said.
"Already on my list."
"I can take you over this afternoon if you want an introduction. He doesn't love cold appointments."
"I'll manage."
Rowan gave him one look and then moved on, which Rafe appreciated. He handed the materials list over and Rafe read it carefully, twice, before handing it back with two additions and one substitution circled. Rowan looked at the substitution and nodded without comment.
They worked through the morning in that way, Rowan's crew doing the labor and Rafe doing the oversight, and when the two overlapped, which they did, regularly, because Rafe could not watch someone else handle his rigging mount without eventually taking the line himself, Rowan adjusted without making a thing of it.
By midday, the port side hull caulking was done and curing, the rigging mount was braced for the replacement hardware that would arrive tomorrow, and Orick had produced a cargo damage inventory that Rafe read standing on the dock with a cup of black coffee going cold in his other hand.
"The Vanewright order," he said.
"Totalled," Orick confirmed. He was a big man, half-orc on one side, with a steady temperament that Rafe valued. "The secondary crates took in water when the hold partition split. Anything wrapped in the lower tier is gone."
"The Mercantile dry goods?"
"Three crates destroyed, two damaged but possibly salvageable if they're dried immediately. Rufus Tansley came down this morning, actually. He said he'd have Edgar go through them this afternoon."
"Edgar's the one who—"
"The more open one, yes. Rufus just looked at the crates, made a sound I couldn't interpret, and left."
Rafe set the coffee down on a dock post. He'd deal with the Vanewright account by letter this afternoon.
A partial refund, a renegotiated delivery timeline, an offer on the next run.
It was going to cost him and he knew exactly how much.
Putting the number in his head and working out its implications was the kind of problem that kept his wolf from doing other things with its attention.
That evening though, as the light in the sky was fastly fading, a storm outage hit at half past six.
It wasn't one of hers. He knew that the moment it started.
This was an ordinary pressure front coming down from the north ridge, the kind that rolled through late-spring valleys, and when the power went out in the three buildings visible from the dock it went out clean, no precursor lightning, no lake disturbance.
He stood at the dock's edge for a moment anyway, instinctively tracking the weather, and felt nothing unusual in it.
Dex appeared at his shoulder. "Silver Fang's already got candles going. Orick and Pell went up twenty minutes ago."
"I have the Vanewright letter to finish."
"The letter will still be wrong tomorrow if you write it tonight."
Rafe raised his eyebrow at him.
"I'm saying," Dex said carefully, "that sometimes a man needs a drink before he writes a difficult letter."
Rafe let out a gruff ‘humph’ to show his argument before letting Dex lead the way.
Half the town appeared to have had the same thought about the outage, the bar doing solid business by candlelight, voices filling the low-ceilinged room in overlapping layers.
The Silver Fang has the kind of warmth that lived in the wood and the stone with the smell of old ale and good fire.
Someone had a fiddle going in the back corner.
Rafe noted the exits, the layout, the faces he recognized from the dock and the square, and found a table against the far wall that had a clear view of the room and the door.
Orick had commandeered a spot at the bar and was deep in conversation with a man who looked like he worked with stone. Pell was at a table with two locals and had already made himself comfortable enough to be laughing.
The woman behind the bar was not what Rafe had expected, though in retrospect he should have.
Short, sharp-featured, with a black bob and the kind of expression that assessed everyone who came through the door.
She set two drinks in front of waiting customers without looking at them, said something to the man beside her that made him put his cup down slowly, and then her eyes moved to Rafe's table.
He got up and went to the bar. Easier than watching her decide whether to come to him.
"Lupeus," she said. "Maeve Cross. I run this place." She didn't offer her hand but she didn't need to. Her posture said everything about who was in charge of this room. "Heard you came in rough."
"Storm damage. I'm told it's been a recurring theme."
"On and off." She poured without asking and slid it across. "Your crew behave themselves?"
"Always."
"Good." She looked him over with the flat efficiency of someone deciding where he stood.
Rafe ordered the stew, because it was what everyone else was having and because he hadn't eaten since noon. Maeve moved back down the bar and Rafe took his drink and leaned against the counter to watch the room.
The man beside him had been there when Rafe arrived and showed no signs of leaving.
Tall, broad, golden-haired, with amber eyes and the particular ease of a man who was precisely where he wanted to be.
He was watching Maeve with patient, proprietary attention, and when she came back down the bar and said something sharp to him that Rafe didn't catch, he smiled at her like she'd paid him a compliment.
"Dante," the man said, without looking at Rafe. Still watching Maeve. "You're the river captain."
"Rafe Lupeus."
"She told me about your ship." He finally glanced over, amber eyes direct, unhurried. "You'll be in good hands with Rowan and Silas. They know what they're doing."
"So I've gathered."
Maeve came back, set a bowl down in front of Rafe that smelled like it had been on the fire for hours, and gave Dante a look.
Rafe took his bowl and went back to his table.
He was almost done with his stew when Dex sank in next to him bringing him another drink.
"The fae woman's been here a year," Dex said, sliding into the seat next to Rafe. "Storm fae, which everybody knows, nobody's pretending otherwise. Town apparently had some negotiation about it when she first arrived. Elder Varric—he's bedridden now but he weighed in, and Emmett sat with it."
Dex hadn’t been looking for info on the fae, but he had a fox shifter's gift for walking into rooms and becoming part of the furniture inside ten minutes, and the couple at the table beside him had been talking about the lake weather.
He kept his voice below the fiddle. "They let her stay.
Conditions were informal. She keeps herself at the edges, she practices control, she doesn't make promises about the weather because promises about the weather from a stormcaller aren't worth the breath they're said on. "
"What happened when she first arrived?"
"The word 'precautions' came up a few times." He took a drink. "Nobody's using the word problem. They use 'situation.'"
"She's not a problem to them?"
"Not yet. Not currently." Dex set down his cup. "She's made herself useful. Buys local, doesn't cause trouble, keeps her head down. People like her in the way people like someone who's trying hard and hasn't hurt them lately." He paused. "Which is a fragile kind of liking and everybody knows it."
"Who else knows the history."
"Twyla Honeytree. She knows everything. The harbourmaster has the file the Council would have put together when Isla applied to stay. Rowan, probably, given how carefully he manages his words around the subject." He glanced sideways. "Why."
"Because someone was on the river road last night after dark," Rafe said. "Moving carefully. Stopped near the dock turn."
The fiddle in the back corner had picked up tempo and someone had joined it with a drum. The noise level had risen enough to give them cover.
"Could be anything," Dex said.
"It could be."
"But you don't think so."
Rafe turned his cup in his hands. He thought about the river road, the darkness on it, the quality of the quiet.
He was about to say something else when the man three seats down the bar raised his voice enough to carry, talking to the man beside him about upriver movement.
Normal dock talk, the kind that ran through any waterfront establishment in any town, trade logistics and route conditions and who'd come through recently.
"—second captain asking after the Ashvane by name. One of the traders on the north channel mentioned it. Name of Sloane."
Rafe went still.
The man kept talking, not about Rafe, not addressing him at all, just two locals comparing information the way people did over drinks. The name had dropped into the conversation and kept moving past it like it weighed nothing.
Dex had heard it too.
Rafe picked up his drink and finished it. Set the cup down. The warmth of the room pressed in on all sides, fiddle and candlelight and the smell of the stew going cold in front of him, and his wolf had moved from its usual settled watchfulness into something sharper.
Malrick Sloane.
Not asking after him because he was concerned.
Not asking after him because they were colleagues.
Malrick didn't ask after people out of courtesy.
He asked after them because he was mapping something.
Because he'd already decided on an outcome and was running the numbers on how to get there.
And there were eight days still left on the repair estimate.
He flagged Maeve down for a another drink.
She poured it without comment, but she was watching him with those sharp, cataloguing eyes, and he had the distinct impression she knew exactly which part of the conversation he'd been listening to.