The morning haze over Port Mire did little to soften the dockyards. Here, the air was sharper, laced with the bite of tar and the damp chill coming off the sluggish tide. Ships groaned against their moorings, their timbers creaking like old bones. Finn moved through the chaos with a practiced ease, his senses alert. The market was a place of whispers and shifting alliances; the docks were a place of open friction, where a misplaced crate or a short count could ignite a brawl.
He was watching the tide of workers when the shouting started. Two dockmasters, their faces flushed and ruddy, stood toe-to-toe on the main pier. Gulls scattered as their voices rose, echoing over the water.
"The manifest says twenty crates of Rift-spun silk!" the first one bellowed, jabbing a thick finger at a ledger. "I counted nineteen!"
"Then your man can't count!" the second shot back. "Or maybe one of your 'ghost crates' grew legs and walked off. The kind that don't exist on paper."
Finn slowed his pace, pretending to inspect a coil of rope near a piling. He'd heard that phrase before—cargo that doesn't exist on paper. It was the language of the smuggling currents that ran beneath the city's legitimate trade. He filed the dockmasters' faces away, noting the way the second man's eyes flicked toward a ship flying the colors of a southern merchant house. Another entry for his own mental ledger, filed right beside the image of a coiled serpent on a grimy wall.
Later, under the afternoon sun, the sting of the docks' raw politics was replaced by a more familiar ache: hunger. Finn had laid out his salvaged goods on a worn blanket in the upper market—a handful of brass fittings, a length of clean rope, a small, unbroken bottle of foreign make. It wasn't much, but it was enough for a few days' meals.
He had just started calling his prices when a rival vendor two stalls down slashed his own prices on nearly identical stock. The man caught Finn's eye and gave a thin, triumphant smile. It was a petty move, a small scar on the day's trade, but it was effective. Customers, ever loyal to the lighter coin, drifted away from Finn's blanket. He watched them go, the frustration a bitter taste in his mouth. He couldn't drop his prices any further without taking a loss.
He packed up early, the weight of the unsold goods feeling heavier than before. The morning's overheard secrets were valuable, but they couldn't be eaten. Kael's offer of "work" echoed in his mind, no longer a matter of pride or independence, but of simple, sharp necessity. The tide was going out, and he was in danger of being left stranded.