The docks stretched longer than Ray remembered them looking from a distance — pier after pier disappearing into fog rolling thin off the water, boats moored in uneven rows, most dark, a few still lit with the low glow of a night watchman's lantern. He'd lost count of how many they'd checked already, hulls and names blurring together in the dark, none of them the one that mattered.
"This one's empty too," Corvin said, straightening from where he'd been checking a smaller fishing vessel's deck. "No crew, no cargo."
Ray didn't answer right away. His eyes were fixed on the water instead, on the black shapes of masts swaying gently against a sky gone starless with cloud, and something in his chest had gone tight enough to ache in a way that had nothing to do with the running.
Where. Where is it.
He'd told himself, walking away from that alley, that this was simple. Find the ship. Find her. Bring her back. The kind of task he'd built his whole life around — clean, straightforward, solvable through effort and patience.
It didn't feel simple anymore.
"Ray." Corvin's voice, careful. "We'll find it."
"I know."
"You don't look like you know."
Ray exhaled hard through his nose, forcing his hands to unclench at his sides. He hadn't realized they'd curled into fists until Corvin pointed it out with nothing but a glance.
Get it together. Panic doesn't find ships.
But his mind kept circling back regardless, unbidden, to a forest three seasons ago — rain coming down cold and relentless, and a girl he hadn't known yet kneeling in the mud beside a stranger she had every reason to leave for dead.
He remembered the pain first, sharp and constant, a wound gone half-septic from days of running with no one to tend it. He remembered thinking, distantly, through the fever, that dying alone in that mud was probably fitting, given everything he'd done to earn a life like the one he'd been living.
And then he remembered her hands. Small, steady, unafraid in a way that made no sense at all for someone finding a bleeding stranger alone in the dark.
You shouldn't help me, he'd told her, voice barely more than a rasp. You don't know what I am. Bringing me in — it'll only bring you the same rot that's been following me. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked.
She hadn't argued with him. She'd simply kept pressing cloth against the wound, calm and unhurried, like his warning weighed nothing at all against whatever she'd already decided.
Then I'll carry it too, she'd said. If that's how it works. I'm not leaving you here to prove a point to yourself.
He hadn't understood it then. Hadn't understood, honestly, for weeks afterward — why a girl running for her own life, hunted by her own kingdom, would spend what little safety she had on a stranger with blood on his hands and a past he still hadn't told her the whole of.
He understood it now. He'd understood it for a while, if he let himself admit it — standing on docks in the dark, chest tight with something he didn't have a clean word for, some feeling too large and unfamiliar to fit inside the careful, controlled shape he'd built his whole self around.
I was supposed to be the one who protected her. Not the other way around.
"Ray." Corvin again, closer now, something gentler in his voice than the urgency from before. "You've gone somewhere else."
Ray blinked, the fog and the water and the endless dark line of moored boats rushing back into focus.
"I'm here," he said, though his voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
Corvin studied him a moment, something understanding dawning slowly behind his eyes. "Are you afraid?"
"I don't get afraid."
"You're allowed to, you know," Corvin said quietly. "Even you."
Ray didn't answer that directly. He kept walking instead, eyes scanning the next row of boats, the next dark hull, the next hopeful, useless absence of what he was looking for.
"She found me half-dead in a forest," he said finally, low, almost to himself. "Told me my past didn't matter. That she'd carry whatever came with helping me, if that's what it cost." His jaw tightened. "I spent months waiting for her to regret it. Waiting for the day she'd realize what she'd actually taken in."
"And?"
"She never did." Ray's hands curled again, this time around nothing but the cold night air. "I don't know what I am, if something happens to her tonight. I don't know what any of this was for, if I let her disappear onto some ship because I wasn't fast enough finding it."
Corvin was quiet a moment, letting that settle between them.
"We have to find them faster," he said simply. "That's the only answer either of us gets to have right now."
Ray nodded, jaw tight, and pushed forward into the fog toward the next stretch of pier — chest still aching, still afraid in a way he'd have denied outright a season ago, chasing a debt he'd stopped thinking of as a debt some time ago and started, quietly, without ever quite deciding to, thinking of as something closer to...