The living ship did not run clean.
Whatever Isolde had shoved it through to leave the condemned slip behind kept arguing with the hull. The coral rail shivered under my hand. Once, in the dark water between the clan coast and the first honest current, the whole ship leaned as if a bigger mouth had tried to take it and missed. Isolde swore at the sea in a language I did not know and bit the hull back onto the line she wanted.
No one slept well.
Feng Lan's palms were worse in the morning. The cloth had stuck. Elizabeth cut it free without asking permission and did not flinch at the raw skin underneath. Vale sat with her back to the mast and cleaned blood off a blade that had already been cleaned once. Sael finished the corrected sketch of the yard and then started a second one from another angle, as if memory might cheat her if she only drew the place once.
