The Dragon Guardian's Hoard

1. Nerina

NERINA

The fish doesn’t care that it’s raining.

Neither do I, particularly, but I would like it noted somewhere that gutting mackerel in a downpour before dawn is a specific kind of misery that no coin I have ever earned adequately compensates for.

The dock boards are black and slick beneath my boots.

The harbor lanterns throw pale orange smears across the water, barely enough light to work by, and the drizzle comes in sideways off the Blaecwater — the dark sea that Blackwake has faced its entire life — not the honest kind of rain that falls and finishes, but the mean, creeping sort that gets down the back of your collar and stays there.

I drag the knife along the belly of the next mackerel. Split it clean. Dump the guts into the bucket at my feet without looking.

I have done this so many times that my hands work without me.

That is almost the whole problem with Blackwake.

Everything here happens without you eventually, the tide goes out, the merchants arrive, the coin changes hands, and I stand at the end of the dock in the cold and the dark and gut the fish that someone else will sell and eat the wage that keeps my brother breathing for one more week.

The harbor doesn’t care about me. The merchants don’t care about me.

The Blaecwater hasn’t cared about anything in a very long time.

The knife slips.

Not much, a quarter inch at most, but the blade catches the webbing between my thumb and forefinger and opens a line of fire across my palm that makes me hiss through my teeth and snatch my hand back.

Blood wells up dark and immediate, dripping into the gut bucket, and I stand there for a moment pressing my fist against my thigh while the pain makes its full announcement.

“Absolutely fantastic,” I mutter.

I pull the rag from my belt, the one I keep for exactly this kind of occasion, which tells you something about the frequency, and wrap it twice around my hand, pulling the knot tight with my teeth.

The blood soaks through in seconds but holds well enough.

I flex my fingers experimentally. Stings.

I add it to the running tally I keep in the back of my mind: the rope burn scar along my right wrist, the hook catch on my left forearm, the three knuckles that never quite healed straight after the crate incident two winters ago. One more for the collection.

Add that to the fucking list of scars from this shithole.

I pick up the knife and go back to work.

The mackerel doesn’t care about that either.

By the time the cargo ships begin unloading, the rain has committed.

The dock fills up the way it always does at this hour — longshoremen with their heads down, zagfer overseers moving through the crowd with the arrogance of a people who have decided the world owes them slightly more room than everyone else, merchants clustered at the warehouse gates with their ledgers and their soft hands and their complete indifference to the labor required to fill them.

I tie off the fish crates, wipe my knife on my thigh, and join the cargo line.

The work is simple the way brutal work always is: lift the crate, carry it to the warehouse, come back, lift another.

The crates are heavy, packed by someone who cared nothing for the people who would eventually carry them.

My shoulders know this route by now. My back knows it.

My knees, increasingly, are beginning to have opinions about it.

On my fourth trip I hear them.

Two merchants. I clock them by the cut of their coats, the kind that cost more than I earn in a month — standing just inside the warehouse doors, watching the line work.

One of them is holding a cup of tea or broth or something warmed.

Steam rises from it into the cold air. I watch it curl and disappear and try not to think about when I last had anything warm.

“That one,” the taller merchant says. He doesn’t bother lowering his voice. Why would he? “Ashvale’s girl. Hauls like a mule, they say.”

“Shame,” the other one replies, watching me approach. His eyes move over me like an assessment of cargo. “Might be pretty, somewhere under all of that.” He gestures, vaguely, at my face, my coat, the general situation of my existence. “The stench alone.”

“Dock girls.” The first one shrugs and sips his drink. “What do you expect?”

I set the crate down at their feet with more force than strictly necessary. The floor shudders. The taller merchant takes an involuntary step back, sloshing his drink, and I meet his eyes with the flattest expression I own.

“Another,” I say, and go back out into the rain.

I don’t let myself feel it until I’m past the doors.

Then I breathe out once, slow and controlled, and walk back to the cargo line with my jaw set and my wrapped hand throbbing and the familiar heaviness of a settlement that has been grinding me down since I was sixteen years old settling across my shoulders like a second coat.

I am not pretty. I am useful. There is a difference, and Blackwake has always been very clear about which one it values.

The brig is moored at the far end of the dock, past the fishing boats and the merchant vessels and the long customs warehouse that always smells of salt and mildew.

She is called the ‘Tenacious’ — it says so on her hull in letters that someone painted on in a slightly hopeful shade of white, and she belongs to a merchant named Caddick who has not been seen in Blackwake for two months and who owes me eleven days of unpaid wages for cargo work I completed in good faith before he stopped showing up.

I do not think of this as stealing. I think of it as arithmetic.

I stop beside the hull on my way back from the crate return and rest my uninjured hand against the wood.

The brig knocks gently against the dock in the swell, patient and quiet, a small ship and an honest one — nothing glamorous, nothing built for speed, but deep-hulled and sturdy, built for rough water and expecting more of it,ts to again.

“You’re about the only loyal thing on this dock,” I say quietly. “You know that?”

The brig says nothing. The rain drums on the deck above. The Blaecwater pushes against the hull and the hull pushes back.

I have been watching the ‘Tenacious’ for three weeks.

I know which dock workers watch this end of the harbor and when their shifts change.

I know how much water is in the hold and how many days of provisions I could carry if I was careful about it.

I know the harbor chain that closes the mouth of the channel is raised at midnight and lowered again at first light.

I am not sure, yet, what I know this for.

That is a lie. I know exactly what I know this for.

I take my hand off the hull and go back to work.

Mother Sevraine’s apothecary sits above the harbor on the hill where the buildings are old enough to have settled sideways into each other for warmth.

The sign above the door is hand-painted, the letters slightly uneven, the kind of sign made by someone who learned their letters late and was proud enough of the fact to display them publicly.

Inside, it smells of dried herbs and a medicinal sharpness I have never been able to name, and the walls are lined with jars whose labels I have memorized over years of sitting in the corner chair waiting for news I didn’t want.

Bren is in the back room. He is always in the back room now.

He is asleep when I arrive, which is both a mercy and a gutpunch — sleeping means the worst of the day is behind him, but it also means he is too tired to be awake.

They are not the same thing. He is fifteen years old and thin in a way that has stopped being temporary and started being structural.

The cough has been in his lungs for three years.

The healers in Blackwake have run out of things to call it that don’t sound like a verdict.

I sit beside him for a while without waking him. Watch him breathe. It is shallow and careful, the breathing of a body that has learned to treat its own lungs as fragile things on loan.

Mother Sevraine finds me there.

She is a small woman, Sevraine, with weathered dark skin and silver-streaked hair wrapped in faded scarves, and sea-green eyes that see considerably more than most people expect.

She has run this apothecary for thirty years and buried two husbands and a daughter, and she carries the particular settledness of a woman long past difficult news, who delivers it the same way she does everything else — cleanly, without decoration.

“The salt bark isn’t working anymore,” she says. She doesn’t sit. “I stretched it as long as I could.”

My jaw tightens. “What does that mean?”

“It means we’re past what I can do here.

” Sevraine’s voice is quiet but doesn’t waver.

“The remedies that could actually stop the damage, the deep-lung treatments, the restoration tonics, those come from the inland kingdoms. They cost what they cost because they work, and they work because there is nothing like them anywhere closer than three weeks’ travel by horse.

” She pauses. “He has months, Neri. Not years. Months, if the cold comes hard this winter.”

The word settles into the room and stays there.

I look at my brother’s face, the soft lines of it, the way his mouth goes slack when he sleeps, still somehow looking like the seven-year-old who used to follow me around the dock pretending he was helping, and everything goes very still in the center of my chest.

“How much,” I say.

Sevraine tells me.

I don’t react. I have learned not to react to numbers, because reacting to them means acknowledging that they are real.

I acknowledge it anyway, in the part of myself I don’t show anyone.