9. Rafe
RAFE
Rafe had been too sharp with her. He knew it the moment he said it, that thing about unexpected company not determining control, and he'd watched it land exactly where he'd aimed it and felt no satisfaction from the hit.
That was the problem. He'd wanted her to bristle because a bristling woman was easier to leave alone than the one who'd stood in that meadow with her hands loose at her sides and hair whipping around her like her own personal storm.
He'd seen her perfect sky from the track before she heard him.
The cloud formation over the ridge was moving with intent, the air over the meadow sitting different from the air around it, and even from that distance the quality of it was unmistakable.
Controlled. Deliberate. Nothing like the storm that had put his ship into the dock.
His wolf had gone immediately, stupidly hopeful about the whole situation, and he'd told it to settle down and kept walking but the gate had given him away before he could do anything about it.
He crossed the river footbridge and came back onto the dock road, the Ashvane visible through the tree break, her bow rail still naked without the bracket.
He had an appointment at the forge in two hours.
He had a letter to the Vanewright account that still needed finishing and a name from the night before sitting at the back of his skull like a splinter he couldn't reach.
On top of all that, he had a mate he was not in a position to claim and a wolf that had not accepted this reasoning.
Rafe rolled his shoulders, attempting to let the unwanted thought slide off and kept walking.
The dockside tavern was nothing like the Silver Fang.
It sat at the water's edge on the eastern bank, low-built and practical, more working house than hospitality, with a dock of its own that took small river craft and a clientele that ran to traders, freight workers, and the kind of people who had business on the water and preferred to drink near it.
Rafe had stopped in twice on previous runs.
He knew the barman's name was Petch, that he kept a reliable tab and an unreliable memory for faces, and that the tables nearest the dock door were occupied by river traffic that changed over every few days.
He went in just before noon and ordered coffee before sitting at one of the tables.
The man two seats down was a freight runner Rafe recognized from the north channel. Broad, weathered, with the particular squint of someone who spent too much time looking at sunlit water. Rafe had traded dock space with him once, two seasons back, nothing significant. Enough to nod at.
He nodded. The man nodded back. Rafe drank his coffee.
"Rough coming in?" the man said, after a bit.
"Storm damage. Repairing now."
"Heard it was something unusual. Weather-wise."
"Unusual spring," Rafe said.
The man turned his cup. "Town's had more weather than usual the last few months."
"So I hear." Rafe kept his voice at the same register he used for negotiating freight rates, conversational, bored. "You been running this stretch long?"
"Five years."
"You know the river traffic pretty well then."
"Well enough."
"Anyone new come through lately? North channel, past the gorge?"
The man thought about it, not in the careful way of someone deciding whether to answer but in the genuine way of someone trying to remember. "Couple of vessels last week I didn't recognize. One heavy cargo, Ardenmere registry if I read it right. The other smaller, faster. Private charter maybe."
"Captain's name on the charter?"
"Didn't catch it." He drank. "Why, you expecting someone?"
"Trying to get ahead of a scheduling conflict," Rafe said. "Somebody was asking after my route through here and I want to know if they're planning to run the same timing."
"Competition?"
"Something like that."
The man shrugged and went back to his drink, which was the right outcome. Rafe finished his coffee, left a fair tip and walked back out into the noon light.
Malrick Sloane did not captain his own vessels anymore.
That was the first thing to understand about him.
He had three ships registered under two different names, ran three separate trade identities depending on which port he was working, and moved through the river networks with the kind of layered misdirection that took years and a particular kind of patience to build.
Rafe had known him for nine years. He'd trusted him for the first two.
They'd started on the same coast, running similar routes, young enough to think that goodwill between competitors was possible and stupid enough to say so out loud.
Malrick had been charming in the way of people who understood how to be useful to whoever they were talking to.
He'd also had a faster ship and a looser relationship with port registry requirements, which Rafe had overlooked until he couldn't.
The Kellert account. Six years ago now. Malrick had undercut him on a standing contract Rafe had held for four years, and the undercutting had been clean, technically legal, and built on information that Malrick should not have had access to.
Rafe's cargo schedule, his rate negotiations, the contents of a private bid.
None of it was information that moved through official channels.
He'd never proven where Malrick got it. He didn't need to.
He knew the shape of how Malrick moved, the way you knew a current by what it did to the surface, and what had happened to the Kellert account had Malrick's methodology all through it.
Patient, plausibly deniable, and personally satisfying to a man who kept score.
Coming to Hollow Oak to ask after the Ashvane by name was not a casual thing. It was not trade interest or route overlap or professional courtesy. It was Malrick determining that Rafe was stranded and calculating what that was worth. The question was what he'd decided it was worth, and to whom.
Rafe was at the forge by two, which gave him something productive to do with the rest of the afternoon.
Silas Greystone ran a tight operation, the space organized and hot.
He was enormous, 6'5" with arms that looked like they'd been built for the work rather than developed by it, rich brown hair and dark amber eyes that assessed the bracket Rafe handed him with the quiet thoroughness of someone who'd been doing this long enough to see the problem before it was explained.
"Torqued under load," Silas said. "The rail bent and the bracket tried to compensate. You can't reshape this, the metal's stressed through the base."
"Recast it?"
"Full recast. I'll need the rail measurements too, the wood's going to want a new fit when you put it back." He set the bracket on the bench. "Two days."
"I've got time." Rafe looked at the forge, the tools laid in order along the wall. "I was told you'd worked with unusual materials before. Properties that weren't strictly standard."
Silas looked at him sideways.
"I'm not asking about your business," Rafe said.
"I'm asking because I may need some advice on materials that interact with magical conductivity.
My hull took a static discharge in the storm.
I want to know if there's anything in the caulking or the iron fittings I should be concerned about long-term. "
Silas picked up the bracket again, turned it over. "You could talk to Freya at the apothecary. She'd know more about the residual effects than I would." A beat. "My wife would too, but she's not taking consultations at the moment."
"The fire witch," Rafe said.
"Word gets around, even to passerbys I see."
"My crew is thorough in looking into people helping with our boat."
Something that might have been the beginning of a dry smile moved across Silas's face and disappeared. "Tell Freya what kind of discharge it was. She'll know if it left anything in the wood worth worrying about."
"Appreciate it."
Rafe left the forge with two days to wait on the bracket and one more name added to his working list of people in this town who knew more than they said about the relationship between magic and the physical world.
He was building a picture of Hollow Oak the way he built a picture of any port he worked in, by accumulation and cross-reference, understanding who knew what and who talked to whom.
It was the same process he was using to build a picture of what Malrick was doing here, and the two pictures kept finding unexpected edges in common.
Dex was at the Ashvane when he got back, checking the cured caulking on the port side with a penknife, pressing the seam at intervals with focused care.
"North channel freight runner," Rafe said. "Goes by Hent, I think. Runs out of the Ardenmere basin. He saw a private charter last week he didn't recognize."
"I had a similar conversation this morning," Dex said, without particular emphasis, still pressing the seam. "Petch at the dock bar mentioned a small charter that didn't file a mooring record. Came in quiet, single night, gone by morning. That was four days ago."
"Before we arrived."
"By one day." Dex folded the knife and put it in his pocket. "Someone was here ahead of us."
"Someone who knew we were coming."
Dex's expression did not change but he'd gone still in the way of a fox that had just identified a smell it didn't like. "Malrick has contacts on the north channel. Always has. If he knew your route schedule—"
"He knew it," Rafe said. "The question is what he's planning to do with the week I'm giving him."
Dex looked at the water. The afternoon light was cutting low across the lake, turning the surface the color of old brass, and from here the western bank was a dark line of tree and shoreline with nothing visible of the cottage or the meadow behind it.
"I want you asking questions," Rafe said. "Quietly, the way you do. Dock workers, freight runners, anyone who moves through this river and might have noticed a charter or a face they didn't recognize. Don't push. Don't let it look like we're building a case."
"And if someone's already talking about us?"
"Find out who and what they're saying. But carefully." He grabbed the cargo manifest he'd left on the dock rail and went back to work. "Malrick is good at making the people he uses think they're doing him a favor."
"He's not the only one," Dex said, and went back to checking the seam.
Rafe didn't answer that. He stood at the dock rail with the manifest in his hand and looked at the lake and thought about the way his wolf had gone quiet on that track, and how every decent instinct he had was pointing him in directions that were going to cost him something before this week was done.