Hedda gave Jiang one clean fish and enough time to keep it down.
She set it on the stone rather than offering it from her hand. Jiang swallowed before the smell could become another argument. Hunger eased from a blade to a knot. Deep Lung still kept each breath arriving after his body wanted it.
Brinehook's people blotted his feathers with old sailcloth. They worked around the covered mark and open shoulder under Dagna's watch. A fresh broad line replaced the damaged drain cord, and the fish-leather cradle stayed beneath the failed flipper. Nothing healed.
At the inner stair, Orra lay with her foot splinted between strips of boat wood. Senn's leg had stopped bleeding through its new wrap. Balen sat between them, one hand on each bench.
Hedda gave him her storm pole. "The west cellar stays flooded until the sea gives it back. If the east floor sweats green, take everyone uphill."
"And you?" Balen asked.
"I am taking Torren's knot where the living princess can make Eres look at it."
Aylin stood close enough to hear and wise enough to leave the sentence alone.
The storm bell changed.
Its blows came farther apart now, calling Brinehook's tide road open between surges. Hedda buckled the recovered royal ward inside her coat and tied Torren's cut braid beside it.
"The causeway will hold until the next long water," she said. "After that, you stay here or take the winter sea path."
Dagna looked at Jiang's unsteady breathing. "He rides."
"Beside the open cage," Aylin said.
"That was already the order."
Tovin brought the sled around while Brinehook raised its eastern shutter. He worked the yoke with his good hand and kept the wrapped one against his chest. Jiang climbed onto the floor by pushing with his right foot until Aylin lowered a plank without touching him.
He tapped once when the plank settled.
The sled crossed out of Brinehook.
Sea lay on both sides of the tide road. Black blocks rose above the water in a line just wide enough for Whitewake's runners. Salt runes beneath the bone edges gave the sled a slow pull east while waves broke below Jiang's belly.
Hedda walked at the rear with one hand on the rail. Aylin stood opposite her. Neither woman spoke about Torren, though the cut braid knocked against the royal ward inside Hedda's coat whenever the sled jolted.
The road bent around a low cairn of stones.
Tovin hauled the brake bar. Bone runners stopped with their front tips almost touching a grey cloth sleeve pinned beneath the cairn.
Someone had built a grave in the center of the causeway.
The cloak was not Whitewake's royal death shroud. Brinehook had sewn this one from sail scraps and stuffed it with river stones, giving the village something heavy to carry when Aylin's body never came home. A copper name strip lay across the empty chest. It read `AYLIN SERAN`.
Aylin climbed from the sled.
Dagna caught her guard cord before it ran across Jiang's line. "Tide first. Grief after."
"The runners cannot pass it."
"We move the stones."
Aylin approached the cairn and crouched beside the copper strip. She held her injured hand above her own name without touching it.
"Who carried this?" she asked.
Hedda stayed at the sled rail. "I carried the front. You had no body, so I put in the first river stone. I wanted your death to weigh as much as Torren's."
Aylin lowered her hand without taking the name strip.
Jiang saw three dark crescents beneath the lowest stones.
They resembled the teeth on the return ward, only larger and set into the causeway itself. Aylin's empty cloak covered the slots where each one entered the road.
He struck the sled floor twice.
Aylin turned. "You do not have to look at it."
Jiang pointed his beak beneath the cairn and tapped twice again.
She mistook the answer. Her gaze dropped to the salt-black cloth over his breast.
"I know what it means to see a grave built for a body that still breathes," she said. "Stay on the sled."
Jiang would have explained that he was trying to prevent her memorial from eating the vehicle. His throat produced a rough call instead.
Dagna shifted toward him. "Is your breath failing?"
One tap meant yes, but yes to what had become the entire problem.
Jiang struck twice and stretched his neck toward the lowest crescent until the safety line tightened.
Hedda followed his beak.
"He is not refusing the grave," she said. "He is telling us it has teeth."
Aylin looked beneath the stones.
The nearest crescent carried the same winter seal as the ward from Brinehook's drain. A narrow groove ran from it beneath the copper strip bearing her name.
Dagna ordered Tovin off the yoke. "No runner flare until we know what that groove receives."
Tovin set the brake hook. "It receives the name strip. Look at the lower edge."
A copper tongue descended from Aylin's name into the road. If the sled pushed the cairn, the strip would drive the tongue into all three tide teeth.
The grave had been built as a trigger.
"Route wardens set those," Hedda said. "Brinehook laid only the cloth and stones. They gave us the name plate and marked the place."
"Which warden?" Dagna asked.
A hammer struck iron beyond the next road arch.
The sound traveled through every block beneath them.
A man in an old route coat stood beyond the next road arch. Sea salt had whitened the seams of his black sleeves. He held a long tide key against a pin set into the eastern parapet.
"Rian Solk," Hedda said. "He kept the causeway after the royal wardens left."
Rian looked at the living woman beside Aylin's grave. His face changed once, around the eyes, before training put it back.
"Keep the returned face west of the cairn," he called. "Whitewake may cross after the road is cut."
Dagna raised the hooked spear. "I am Whitewake, and my charge is the woman you named. Put down the tide key."
"Then your charge ends on the west block."
Aylin stepped where he could see both empty hands. "You knew me."
"I knew Princess Aylin Seran."
"You are looking at her."
Rian's grip tightened on the key. "I watched a River-Open worker climb out of the western tide with his drowned face and his wife's private name. The thing inside him knew where their child slept. A memory proves the thief ate deeply."
He reached beneath his coat and drew out a folded strip of lead. A winter seal held one end closed; water had darkened the metal around it.
"This order came after River-Open," he said. "If Aylin Seran returns from the western sea, the east road dies before she crosses. No body was shown to me. No second instruction ever came."
Hedda took Torren's braid from her belt. "Her warning line was cut before the river struck. I pulled the proof from my wall today."
Dagna held one hand toward Hedda. The storm keeper passed her the copper ward, and Dagna balanced it across the hook of her spear with all three teeth visible.
"Name this," Dagna called.
Rian's gaze moved from the winter seal to the backward teeth. "A west-return ward. The route houses were ordered to melt them before River-Open."
"This one held Brinehook's flood blade open," Dagna said.
Rian's attention left Aylin and dropped to the black-green seam under his own boot.
"That is the road infection," Dagna said. "You are standing over it."
"Then I stay east with it, and the returned face stays west," Rian replied. "Eres receives neither threat together."
"Then someone kept a forbidden tooth," he said. "No surviving warden gave me the reason. My sealed instruction still names what I do now."
"I believe you found a cut line."
"You believe I cannot know her face?"
"I believe a stolen face can cry with the right mother's tears."
The answer hurt Hedda. It also came from a fear she understood well enough to keep listening.
Aylin pointed toward the road seam beyond him, where faint black-green light moved east under the salt.
"The thing you fear is already behind you. It used my voice at Brinehook and a royal ward under the wall. Let us cross, and I will show you both."
Rian planted the tide key deeper. "Give me the winter answer first. The phrase your father taught the route wardens when you were a child."
Aylin's mouth opened.
The black-green seam brightened near Rian's boot.
Jiang called from the sled. His two voices broke against the wind, but Aylin looked at him before she gave the road another word.
She saw where he was staring.
"No," Aylin said. "That road is carrying my stolen voice. I will not teach it a royal key to prove I am real."
Rian closed his eyes for one breath.
When he opened them, grief had become decision.
"Then I cannot risk Eres on your face."
He drove the tide key down.
The first crescent beneath Aylin's grave turned.
Her copper name strip folded into the cairn. Stones dropped between the runners, and the road opened a black seam beneath the sled.
Sea water struck upward through it.