The damaged fitment hull did not sink.
By dawn Rhea's watchers had it under a slate: towed back toward the clan channel, listing, arrays dark, no troop count worth the name. The other two lights had not rushed the quay. They had not vanished either. They sat in that ugly middle distance where a ship can still become a decision.
Sable called that a win and refused to let the terraces treat it like a feast.
"They learned we bite," she said in the side chamber, before the city could invent songs. "Now they learn whether we bite once."
Caelis answered faster than Phoenix did.
A Salt Court boat came in under a plain flag just after the second bell, small enough to look harmless and clean enough to look expensive. Caelis stepped onto the quay herself this time. No aides in the first rank. The grey-green leathers were the same. The face was tighter.
Lady Sable had the seized cutter hooked in plain view behind her, like a sentence already written.
