Greenvale's river port ran loud in every hour.
Dockhands shouted across cargo that never stayed still, merchants argued prices that never settled, gulls screamed at everything on principle. Iskaris's veil had eaten the sea epochs ago, and the trade that should have sailed outward now rode the rivers inland.
A hooded figure moved through the middle of it without drawing a single eye.
Pink hair tucked under the cowl. Floral tattoos climbing the skin at her wrist where her sleeve ended. She cut around a crate of lacquered pottery, past a stall of fresh-cut river eel, past two navy officers who did not so much as glance at her.
The last warehouse fell behind her. The last pier followed. She kept walking until the port's roar had thinned into river-sound and the bank beneath her feet was all smooth stone and low reed.
She did not slow.
She stepped off the bank into the current.
The water swallowed her to the waist, then the chest, then the collar.
