The coffee at Brine and Bean was famously terrible, and Ila had chosen it for precisely that reason.

It was the kind of establishment that thrived on being a cliche. Mismatched chairs, a chalkboard menu in three colors of chalk, a cracked espresso machine named Beatrice that everyone swore at with great affection, and a long reclaimed-wood counter that smelled of burnt sugar and old newspapers. The owner, a vast and gentle woman called Marit who wore a different hand-knitted hat every day, had been serving harbor workers since before Ila could walk, and the entire town had long since agreed that the only thing wrong with her coffee was that it tasted like it had been brewed through a sock.

Ila liked it. It was a small, ugly, steadfast thing, like a lighthouse that had given up on being useful but kept the lamp lit anyway.

She had meant to come alone.

That was the plan. She had left the Lark at seven in the morning, two days after the orchard, with a wool bag over one shoulder and a very clear intention of drinking one bad coffee in a corner by herself, in silence, with her back to the wall. She needed an hour without a crew or a captain or a deck beneath her boots. She needed to be a person with no one watching her hands.

She got as far as the door.

"ILA!"

Juno's voice came across the cafe like a flung bucket of water. He was sitting at the big round table by the window, the one with the wobbly leg and the brass plaque that said RESERVED FOR FISHERMEN AND LIARS, and he was waving both arms over his head with the unrestrained joy of a puppy. Odo sat across from him with a newspaper, a plate of eggs, and the weary expression of a man who had been listening to a long monologue since dawn.

Ila stopped in the doorway with her hand on the latch.

"I saw you through the window!" Juno called. "Come sit! We've got a spare chair! Marit made her good scones! Well, her adequate scones!"

"I was only going to," Ila began.

"She was only going to get coffee," said Odo, without looking up from his paper. "Sit down, girl. He'll pester you all morning if you don't."

It was less of an invitation than a sentence. Ila went and sat.

* * * The thing about sitting at a table with people who liked you was that it did dreadful things to your composure.

Ila had been prepared for cold and for cruelty. She had spent seven years rehearsing for contempt. What she was not prepared for was Juno pushing a plate of scones toward her with a shy, hopeful smile, or Odo quietly sliding the good milk across the table before she had asked, or the fact that nobody at all seemed to find it strange that she was there.

"You're looking better," Juno said, around a mouthful of scone. "You were really pale on Tuesday. Captain said you were hypothermic but she said it in the voice, you know, the 'I'm not worried' voice, which means she's worried."

"I wasn't hypothermic. I was damp."

"Very damp."

"Thank you for noticing."

"I was also kind of out of it, I think," Juno said, with a small embarrassed shrug. "After the orchard. I don't remember most of it. I remember somebody holding me and saying something about, um." He frowned. "Something about it being hard for her too."

Ila's hand stopped halfway to her cup.

"I think it was the captain," Juno went on, more slowly. "But that doesn't sound like her, does it? She never says things are hard."

"People say things in a crisis," Odo said, mildly, to the sports page.

"I guess."

"Eat your scone."

Ila drank her coffee, which was truly terrible, and thought about a hand on the back of a boy's head. A rough voice, cracked in the middle. It's hard for me.

She had not expected that. In all the long rehearsals of seven years, she had never imagined that Tamsin would say such a thing aloud. She had imagined the cold, composed, unforgiving woman on the dock, the woman who counted her sentences like cartridges. She had not imagined the one who knelt in the peat and held a crying boy against her shoulder, the one who put a sweater in her hands and said Don't make me regret the license in a voice as brittle as a dropped cup.

It was a sweater she was still carrying, in fact. It lay folded at the bottom of her canvas bag, washed and dried and smelling, against all her best efforts, faintly of Tamsin.

She had meant to return it. She had meant to leave it on the Lark, very casually, in a place where Tamsin would find it and assume that someone else had put it there. She had not managed it yet. Every time she went below with the sweater in her hands, her courage deserted her like a rat from a sinking ship.

"Is it hot out there?" Juno asked. "You've gone pink."

"It's the coffee."

"It really is terrible."

"It's an acquired taste."

"What's acquired about it?" Juno said, genuinely baffled. "It tastes like pencil shavings."

The bell above the door chimed.

Ila did not look up. She did not need to. She felt the temperature of the room change, the way it does when someone enters with a very precise sense of occasion, a subtle ripple of heads turning and conversations dropping a notch. She heard a firm, unhurried step cross the floorboards. She heard a chair pulled out.

She heard Odo fold his newspaper in half, and put it down, and say, very calmly, "Well, good morning, Captain."

Tamsin sat down at the table.

* * * She took the chair two seats from Ila's, leaving an empty one between them, and she did it with such deliberate, meticulous casualness that it was practically a speech. She wore her yellow oilskin, unzipped, and under it a gray knit with the sleeves shoved to the elbows. Her braid had been rebound, tighter than before. She had a bruise on her left cheekbone that Ila had not noticed at the orchard, a fading purple smudge, and a fresh nick across the knuckles of her right hand.

She did not look at Ila at all.

"Morning," she said to the table in general.

"Captain!" Juno said, with enormous delight. "I didn't know you came here!"

"I come here every Thursday."

"Do you? I didn't know that."

"You've never been awake on Thursdays."

"That's a fair point."

Marit appeared at the end of the table with a battered coffeepot and a very large pink hat shaped like a cabbage, and she poured Tamsin a cup without being asked. "The usual," she said. "Black as sin, bitter as a mother-in-law." She glanced at Ila with bright shrewd eyes, in which something very like sympathy flickered. "And the little Sorrel girl. Haven't seen you in here since you were nineteen."

"I've been around."

"You've been hiding, is what you've been doing." Marit patted her shoulder. "Good to see you out of your hole, love. Eat something."

She sailed away. Tamsin sipped her coffee and looked out the window.

A silence settled. It was not companionable. It had weight and texture, like wet sand, and Ila felt it settle on the table between the cups and the crumbs.

"So," Odo said, in the tone of a man tossing a rope across a gap. "Anyone hear the forecast?"

"Fair through Tuesday," Tamsin said. "Surge numbers are climbing. We'll get an Open Tide on Friday morning, five forty-two."

"Five forty-two," Ila repeated. "Window of two hours and ten. Peak at six forty-five."

"Six forty-six."

"The table says forty-five."

"The table is rounding. I've been checking against the buoy readings." Tamsin's voice was perfectly neutral. "You should check against the buoy readings. A minute's a minute, in the Drift."

Ila felt her ears go hot. It was a tiny correction, a pedantic one, and it was also perfectly right, and she had a fierce and utterly irrational desire to throw a scone at someone's head.

"Noted," she said.

"Good."

"I'll recalibrate."

"Good."

"Is there anything else you'd like to correct?" Ila asked, sweetly. "My posture? The spelling of my name?"

Juno made a noise like a kettle starting to boil. Odo, behind his coffee, appeared to be developing a sudden interest in the ceiling.

Tamsin turned her head slowly and looked at Ila for the first time since she had sat down.

Her eyes were the color of old green glass, flat and level and utterly unreadable. A strand of auburn hair had escaped her braid and lay across her cheekbone, and a small muscle jumped in her jaw. For a long moment she simply looked, with that terrible expressionless steadiness, and Ila held the look as she would have held a rope in a storm, with both hands and all her strength.

"Your posture's fine," Tamsin said at last.

"How kind."

"Your spelling, I haven't checked."

It was so dry, so deadpan, and so unexpectedly funny that Ila had to bite the inside of her cheek. Beside her, Juno made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh, and Odo coughed into his fist, and for one brief unguarded second, she saw the corner of Tamsin's mouth move.

Then the bell above the door chimed again.

And the temperature of the room changed, a second time, in a different direction altogether.

* * * Ila knew who it was before she turned, because she had seen her photograph in the Saltwick Gazette eleven times in the past year, and because the whole cafe gave a collective, nearly inaudible intake of breath.

Corra Venn stood in the doorway like a very elegant piece of weather.

She was tall, easily six feet in her low-heeled boots, with dark skin and a sharp black bob that hung precisely at her jaw and not a hair out of place. She wore a camel wool coat that fell to her knees, buttoned to the throat, over a white shirt so crisp it seemed to have been starched by the sheer force of her personality. A silver watch glinted on one wrist. A leather satchel hung from her shoulder. Her mouth wore the kind of smile that looked like a favor and functioned like a contract.

She was, Ila knew, thirty-four years old. She owned eleven vessels. She ran the second-largest ferry operation on the coast, and had expanded it, over the past six years, by nearly three hundred percent, through a combination of reasonable pricing, ruthless efficiency, and a scrupulous insistence on never breaking a single maritime regulation. People in Saltwick disliked her on principle, because it was easier than finding a fault.

"Good morning," Corra Venn said, pleasantly, to the cafe at large. "Don't mind me."

Nobody minded her. Nobody breathed.

She crossed the floor with an unhurried tread, her coat swinging, and stopped beside the round table. Her eyes moved over them with quick, bright intelligence. Odo. Juno. Ila. Her glance lingered on Ila for a fraction of a second longer than courtesy required, as though cataloguing a curious object in a shop window. Then it moved on, and rested on Tamsin, and her whole face softened.

It was a small, precise softening. The kind that took years to learn. It transformed her from a CEO into a woman, and Ila felt something in her chest tighten and curdle like cream in coffee.

"Tam," Corra said.

Nobody had called her that in Ila's hearing. Nobody had called her that in Ila's whole life. Tamsin had been Tamsin since she was born, Tamsin to her father and Tamsin to the teachers and Tamsin to every stranger who ever tried to shorten it and discovered she did not answer to anything else.

Tamsin did not so much as blink.

"Corra," she said.

"I thought I might find you here."

"It's Thursday."

"So it is." Corra's smile deepened. "You never did change your routines. It's one of the things I admired about you."

"It's a good routine."

"Mind if I sit?"

"There's no chair."

"There's a chair." Corra nodded at the empty seat between Tamsin and Ila. "I won't stay long. I only wanted to have a quick word. About the season."

"I'm sure you did."

"Tam."

"Captain Rooke, in front of the crew." The words were soft, almost gentle, but there was iron under them. "If you don't mind."

Corra lifted one elegant eyebrow. For an instant something flickered across her face, amusement, or old affection, or a tinge of hurt so quickly veiled that Ila could not tell which. Then she inclined her head, with perfect grace.

"Captain Rooke," she said. "May I?"

"Briefly."

She sat. The chair, to Ila's horror, was directly between her and Tamsin. Corra's shoulder lay a breath from Ila's own, and the faint clean scent of her, something expensive and quiet, like cedar after rain, drifted across the little gap between them.

* * * "I'll be quick," Corra said, folding her hands on the table. "You've heard the Tidewatch advisory. Old Harrow's rising. Whether we like it or not, the entire coast is going to be fighting for position, and I would prefer, on balance, that we not fight each other."

"I don't fight anyone," Tamsin said. "I do salvage."

"You do salvage on a sixty-foot tug with a crew of three and a pilot who's been on your payroll for four days." Corra's voice was perfectly pleasant. "Forgive me, but that's not a strategy. That's a prayer."

"It's worked for five years."

"It's worked because nothing's changed in five years. Something is about to." Corra turned, slightly, and the full force of her attention came down on Tamsin like a spotlight. "I'm not here to buy you out. I've given that up. I'm here to propose an alliance. Co-licensing on the chart. Shared access to the Old Harrow window, shared salvage rights, a fifty-fifty split on anything we bring ashore. You'd have the Venn fleet at your back. I'd have your father's navigation."

There was a pause.

"You'd have the chart," Tamsin said slowly.

"I'd have what it knows."

"What do you know about what it knows?"

"What everyone knows. That Cormac Rooke found Old Harrow once, and came back, and never talked about it." Corra smiled, a little sadly. "Tam. You can't do it alone. You'll get hurt."

"I've been hurt."

"Not like this."

"Don't," Tamsin said.

Ila had been very still. She had been sitting with her hands in her lap and her gaze on the table, trying to make herself as small as possible, and she had been listening with an intensity that bordered on pain. She did not understand what had passed between the two of them, a whole language of half-sentences and weighted pauses, a history written on the air like invisible ink. But she understood tone. She understood the particular, intimate rhythm of a conversation between people who had known each other in the dark.

You had her, she thought. Of course you did. She wasn't alone for seven years.

It was an absurd thing to feel. It was an indecent thing to feel, after what she had done, after what she had said on that beach. She had no right to sit in a cafe and burn like a struck match over a woman she had abandoned. She had no right to care that some other person had held Tamsin when she was hurt, had learned her silences, had called her by a name that Ila had never been allowed to touch.

And she cared. Gods help her, she cared so much that her hands had begun to shake under the table.

"I'll think about it," Tamsin said, in the voice of someone who had already decided.

"That's all I ask."

"It isn't."

"No," Corra agreed, with a sigh. "It isn't." She glanced at Ila. It was a casual look, almost idle. A look that took in the ring on her thumb and the pale line of her jaw and the slight, helpless tilt of her shoulders, and filed them all away. "I don't believe we've met, Captain Sorrel."

"We haven't," said Ila.

"But I know your name. You flew the Gannet's Promise for six years." Corra's eyes were warm and level and very, very sharp. "A fine, safe loop. I've always admired how careful you are."

The word careful hung there like a hook in a fishmonger's window.

"Thank you," Ila said.

"I imagine it's quite a change, working with the Marrow Lark."

"It's been educational."

"I'm sure." Corra smiled, a perfectly kind smile. "I do hope you're comfortable. It's a tough boat. It takes a lot out of a person."

It was a polite remark. It was a courteous, friendly, entirely deniable remark. And Ila, whose nerves were by this point wound as tight as piano wire, heard something under it. Something that tasted faintly of recognition.

She stood up.

She did not decide to. Her chair scraped back, loud on the old boards, and every head in the cafe turned. She had her hand on her bag and a strained, bright, ridiculous smile on her face, and she heard herself say, "Well. I should get going. I'll cover the bill."

"Sit down," said Tamsin.

* * * It was not a shout. It was barely above a murmur. But it had the quality of a hand laid flat on a table, quiet, heavy, absolute, and it stopped Ila in mid-motion like a line going taut.

She turned.

Tamsin had not moved. She sat exactly where she had been sitting, with her coffee cup between her palms and her gray-green eyes level, and she was looking straight at Ila with an expression Ila could not read. It wasn't anger. It wasn't kindness. It was something stranger, an unguarded, almost startled stillness, as though she had surprised herself.

"Sit," Tamsin said again, quieter. "We're not finished."

"I thought you and Ms. Venn were."

"I'm not talking about Ms. Venn."

Ila stared at her. There was a roaring in her ears. She was aware of Juno gaping, of Odo studying the ceiling with the intensity of a man trying to memorize it, of Corra Venn's amused, interested gaze moving between them like a lantern.

"What are we not finished with?" Ila asked.

"The Friday run." Tamsin's voice was flat and practical. "I need you to recheck the buoy numbers with Odo. I want a fresh table by tonight."

It was a ludicrous excuse. It was transparent as glass. It was also, Ila realized slowly, a lifeline. A thin, grudging, deniable rope thrown across the gap.

She sat down.

She felt the chair under her and the bad coffee in her cup, and something in her chest turned over like a fish. She did not trust it. She did not look at Tamsin. But she sat there, shoulders squared, with her hands flat on her knees, and Tamsin went on drinking her coffee as though nothing remarkable had occurred.

Corra Venn watched the whole thing with an expression of polite and thoughtful interest. She watched it like a woman watching a card game in which she had suddenly realized the stakes.

"I see," she said softly, to nobody in particular.

"You've had your word, Corra," Tamsin said.

"So I have." Corra rose, smoothing her coat. "Think about the offer, Captain. Think carefully. The tide waits for no one."

"Neither do I."

"No," Corra said. "You never did." And she smiled, wry and rueful and entirely without malice, and turned toward the door.

* * * She passed Ila's chair without a word.

She passed it perfectly slowly, with her satchel swinging at her hip and her coat swishing against the legs of the table, and just as she drew level with Ila's shoulder, she paused, and bent, and spoke so quietly that nobody else in the room could possibly have heard.

"Funny," Corra murmured. "You used to find your way without looking."

Ila's blood turned to ice.

She did not move. She did not breathe. She sat in the warm, noisy, ordinary cafe with a cup of cooling coffee in her hand and heard the words go through her like a cold wire, and she thought, with a kind of numb, distant horror: she knows.

She knows. She has been watching me for years.

When Ila managed to turn her head, Corra was already at the door. She glanced back, once, over her shoulder. Her expression was mild and thoughtful and almost kind. Then the bell rang, and the cold morning wind came in, and she was gone.

"What did she say to you?" Juno whispered.

"Nothing," Ila said.

It was a lie. It was her first of the morning, and she had broken the Terms of Passage before she had finished her coffee.

She looked down at her hands. They were trembling again. And from the corner of her eye, from two seats away, she saw Tamsin Rooke turn her head, ever so slightly, and look at her with a long, narrowed, unreadable gaze.

Then Tamsin picked up her cup, and drank, and said nothing at all.