Evening put a copper edge on the water and told the day to mind its manners. Briar's Tooth shrank behind them until the rock looked like a tooth someone had decided not to floss. Ahead, the Cindershelf ran in a black seam along the horizon, a shelf of old lava that had refused to learn humility even after meeting the sea.
Ace stood at the bow with Demon, the shipwright's fingers drumming a message into the rail: eager, wary, eager again.
"What eats ships here?" Ace asked.
"Stacked currents and vent burps," Demon said. "Cold water climbs like a thief, hot water falls like a drunk, and the meeting makes shear. Then there are gas pockets in the shelf—volcanic temper. They burp, the surface turns slick, and a keel loses grip the way a boot loses it on a peeled onion. Add fog spun from the heat difference and you have a polite little catastrophe."
"Polite?" Ace said.
"If it wanted to be murderous," Demon said, "it would be. This just asks you to make your own mistakes."
Pelly drifted forward, cigarette unlit out of respect for wind and for the lecture. "We lay a path, not a law," he said. "Marks a fisher can read by moon. Nothing permanent—permanent things make men lazy." He looked at Ace. "Can you set the sea's temper so a fool can pass without teaching him he's clever?"
Ace took a breath that tasted like iron filings and kelp. "I can try."
Grae's voice came from the quarterdeck—low, sure, a tide moving through bones. "Try," he said. "Fail once. Correct. That's the work."
They entered the channel at slack tide because Pelly didn't gamble when he was teaching. You could feel the Cindershelf under the hull the way you feel a sleeping animal under a blanket: present, powerful, pretending.
"Watch," Demon said, nodding at the water. Where the shelf dropped, the surface greased—a shine that wasn't wind. Farther in, a sheet of ripples marched sideways, rude to everything that had planned to go straight.
Ace let Observation unfurl. It was easier now to see without sight: the threads of motion, the places where cold climbed through warm like fingers pushing into dough, the slick moons where gas licked the underside of the skin of the sea. He set palms low, just above the rail, and pulled a slow sip of heat out of the warm band running crosswise. It came into him with the familiar cool that wasn't cold. He carried it in his chest like a coin and returned it in a thin sheet to the chill upwelling ahead, just enough to narrow the temperature difference.
The ripples lost their swagger. The chop softened. The surface lost that treacherous grease and became merely wet.
"Again," Pelly said, as if asking for a card he knew Ace already had.
Ace walked the foredeck with fine hands. Borrow, return. Borrow, return. He learned to lay a Thermal Lamina the width of the bow—a skin of moderated temperature that smoothed shear without stealing the sea's voice. He learned the feel of a vent burp early, the way the air ticked just before bubbles touched daylight. When he felt one coming, he reached down through water with a Heat Sink, drinking the heat from the pocket until the gas gave up trying to rush and bled into the surface in a politeness of pearls instead of a shove.
Demon grunted appreciation. "You're talking the water out of bad decisions."
Andrew appeared with a hand on the rail and the other holding a slice of salted pear because cooks have priorities. "If he can talk water out of boiling, perhaps he can talk onions out of treachery."
"Onions have unions," Demon said. "Water is management."
Ace smiled despite himself and kept working.
They marked as they went. Not with buoys—that would invite theft and laziness—but with a wake shaped on purpose. Ace returned thin strokes of warmth into the surface in a staggered chevron pattern. In moonlight, chevrons carried a duller sheen than the wild surface around them. A fisherman who wanted to see would see. One who didn't would miss it and blame fate.
"Left shoulder," Pelly warned.
The shelf rose without rising, the way guilt does when it's ready to be recognized. The sea's music sharpened. Ace felt pressure under their keel, a hand wanting to drag them sideways. He stepped to the bow sprint, pulled a long swallow of warmth from the starboard band and laid it port, tipping the balance back. The Blackflame's nose corrected as if the wheel had found a better idea.
"Good," Grae said, and nothing else. The nothing meant more.
They were halfway through when fog began spinning itself from nothing: pillar after pillar of white twisting up like ghosts deciding on costumes. "Here it is," Demon said. "Shear plume. If it gets smug, it eats your mast."
Ace didn't need to be told not to fight fog with brute heat—hot punches make fog angry. He tempered instead: he borrowed a breath of warmth out of each new pillar's spine the instant it formed, then returned the same breath into the cooler air around it, flattening the contrast that feeds fog's vanity. The pillars collapsed into honest mist that a man could see through if he tried.
The channel narrowed itself to a throat. The shelf leaned in, and somewhere under them the Cindershelf sighed like old coals. Observation brought a flavor Ace hadn't tasted yet: a pulse, slow and wide, beating under all the other noise. He touched the rail. The beat matched his own for a moment and then slid away.
He looked back without thinking. Grae had turned his head too, the angle of a man who hears the same drum. Their eyes met. There was weight in the air—as if the shelf itself were listening to see whether the ship would speak.
Not now, Ace told the pressure that rose in his ribs, the one that had tried to stand last night. It acknowledged the request like an ocean acknowledges a pebble: it allowed the moment to be small and passed.
"Mark the throat," Pelly said.
Ace set chevrons on both sides, denser now, a dotted line a patient mind could follow. He sank heat into a vent just as it thought of making a speech, and it settled for clearing its throat instead.
They came out of the far side into a blue so clean it felt like an apology. Stars were coins a generous god had spilled. The Cindershelf lay behind them looking innocent.
"Not bad for a first dance," Demon said.
"Ships?" Pelly asked, as if speaking to the night.
"Two," Ace said, Observation threading the dark: one small, sails cut square by a thrifty hand; one longer, lazy wake, hull light. The smaller was coming in, nose pointed at the channel's worst manners; the larger sat off the shelf like a man with a notebook.
Grae's glance touched Pelly and returned. "Guide the small one through," he said. "Ignore the watcher until he decides to be interesting."
They tacked back to meet the little trader. Up close she wore patches sewn with love and rigging knotted in the grammar of men who can't afford grammar school. Her lantern was the sort of lantern that had survived falling more than once.
"Ahoy!" Pelly called, voice plain as rope. "The shelf is in a mood. Follow our marks; don't argue."
The trader's captain—hat older than his boat, eyes the color of honest debt—hesitated the way pride does before it pays. He nodded, because men who live get good at nodding at the right time.
Ace took the bow, relaid his Thermal Laminaes, refreshed the chevrons, and drank the heat out of a vent that had been saving up its courage. The trader followed, rock steady because someone else had done the work. When they cleared the throat, the old captain took off his hat like a man grateful to a church he didn't trust and called, "What do I owe?"
"Next man you see in trouble here," Pelly answered. "You owe him what we just did."
The old man grinned. "Aye," he said, and made a private business of being alive.
Now the watcher decided to be interesting. The longer vessel slid closer, a knife drawing nearer to see whether its reflection looked like something worth cutting. She had a clean hull and too many eyes. The name on her quarter read Gravelark, which is the kind of name men paint when they intend to be polite wolves.
"Salvage," Demon guessed. "The kind that sells your grandmother back to you with a receipt."
The Gravelark didn't hail. She let the Blackflame do the math first: crew counts, canvas, where the captain stood, how tired they looked. Pelly let her look. Grae leaned a hip to the rail as if he had time to raise vegetables.
Ace felt Observation turn the Gravelark inside out: intentions like threads, some cut, some tied, some fraying. There was hunger aboard, but the professional kind—the hunger that charges interest and appreciates competence. There was also a single bright thread that pricked his skin: someone curious in a way that became dangerous with the right weather.
A woman in a dark coat finally stepped to the Gravelark's rail. She wore her hat like a truce. "Pretty marks," she called, voice like a coin flipping. "You sell the path, or keep it for friends?"
"Neither," Pelly said. "We leave it for anyone who wants to live."
She laughed—not unkind. "Then you're poor businessmen." Her eyes slid to Ace and lingered a heartbeat too long. "New fireman?"
"Deckhand," Pelly said, making deckhand sound like poet.
"Mm." The woman considered the shelf, the marks, the two ships that had passed alive. "You'll make enemies giving things away."
"We'll make choices," Pelly said.
"Good luck with your charity," she said. "My charity is a shorter leash." She touched her hat, and the Gravelark ghosted back toward deeper water, leaving curiosity snipping behind her like a tail.
"Will she trouble the shelf?" Ace asked.
"No," Pelly said. "Trouble's her product. You don't poison your own stock."
They let her go. The channel shone behind, chevrons dimming already as the night swapped masks. That was the point: a mark that helped a mindful sailor and refused to be an idol.
Ace's arms shook a little with used-up work. Heat Ledger inside him tallied borrowed and returned heat like a sailor tallying salt. He found he liked the arithmetic.
"Back to the cove?" Demon asked.
"Back," Grae said. "The sea has learned one please. We'll teach it thank you tomorrow."
They reached open water, and the wind turned agreeable in the way it does when it's tired of listening to men. Andrew produced cups with something smoky and honest in them; Collin inspected Ace's hands like a proud uncle; Pelly made a notation in a small book he always claimed was for knots and never let anyone read.
Ace went to the bow because the bow had adopted him. The ache behind his sternum—his old citizen—sat quiet on its porch. The pressure that had tried to stand last night stretched once in his ribcage and lay down again, like a big cat deciding not to hunt.
I was dead. I am not. He added the night's clause: I can make a bad place ask permission first.
He looked back toward the shelf. For a moment he thought he saw a faint line of light running along the marks he'd set—the sea remembering him in a language only water speaks to itself. Then the line went out, and it was just night, and that was right.
"Hungry?" Andrew asked at his elbow, because Andrew appeared wherever hunger could be predicted.
"Famished," Ace admitted.
"Good," Andrew said. "Starving men taste better to their food." He handed over a bowl and didn't explain the philosophy because some philosophies work better hot.
They ate leaning on the rail, and the world—thanked, tempered, marked—sailed with them toward the kind of sleep you don't have to bargain for.