Chapter 1 — Part C: Seawind Hollow
Solenna taught him the names of winds before she taught him numbers.
"Offshore is a liar," she would say, squinting at the white seam beyond the black rocks. "Looks gentle, steals heat from your bones. Onshore is honest—pushy and loud, but it brings you home if you listen."
She spoke like this while mending nets on the step, the needle flashing and the hemp rasping, while Aeneas sat cross-legged with a ball of twine the size of his head and practiced knots until his fingers went raw.
Their house was a salt-gray box shouldered into the slope, more patch than plank, roof tiles held by stones.
The air smelled of kelp and smoke and the iron sweetness of rusted hooks.
In winter, the sea climbed the street and left wrack and glass as offerings.
In summer, the gulls screamed as if telling jokes no one else understood.
Solenna rose before the light, and Aeneas with her.
She carried her years like a basket—plainly, without complaint.
Once, when he was five, he asked if she had always lived here.
"No one always lives anywhere," she said, and laughed at how that answered nothing and everything.
He learned the work by doing.
He hauled crates and didn't drop them because dropping meant fish ruined and coin lost.
He learned to coil rope so it didn't tangle in panic, to keep a knife where no one saw it but where his hand could find it blind.
He learned the rhythm of the boats: the big luggers that came heavy with distant catch and the narrow skiffs that went out and returned like thrown bones.
When his back hurt, he kept moving.
When boys his age shoved him into pilings and called him "storm eyes," he smiled in the way that made them angrier and then helped Solenna anyway.
"Let them waste their mornings," she told him, matter-of-fact. "The sea notices who works."
At seven he could lift a crab from a pot without getting his thumb broken.
At nine he could read chalk marks on the dock ledger well enough to see the fishmaster shorting Solenna.
He pointed once.
Solenna peered, grunted, and corrected the shortfall with three brief words that were not unkind but could not be argued with.
After, she pressed a copper into Aeneas's palm as if he had found it in the sand and she was only returning it.
"You see?" she said. "Keep seeing."
They did not speak about parents. Not at first.
The village, being a village, carried its own story nets.
His mother was a ferry girl who drowned.
His father was a soldier who left.
Or a farmer who died of fever.
Or merchants from the north who made a bad bargain with weather.
People threw stories over what had no shape.
The only things Aeneas owned that weren't tools were a pale pendant shard on a thin chain he wore under his shirt, and a plain ring Solenna kept in a clay jar on the mantel.
Sometimes she took the ring down and polished it with old linen.
He never saw her wear it.
"When it fits you," she said, and left the sentence there with more edges than it showed.
Nights, when work allowed, he climbed the cliff beyond the last house and lay where the grass grew short and mean to watch the sky arrange its patient arguments.
Seawind Hollow had no temple and no old shrine with a roof, but even the drunks spat twice before cursing the moons.
People said storms came when Shyrahn was full and fish ran when Selvara thinned.
People said a lot of things.
Aeneas preferred to watch for himself.
He liked the cold bite on his cheeks.
He liked the shape of his breath leaving him, as if trying to climb and failing.
He liked thinking without anyone asking him to talk.
At the edge of days the village showed its bones—broken posts in the tide flats from a pier that had stood once; the line of the old road that led nowhere now except into saltmarsh; a hunched, ruined beacon on a rock like a knuckle out in the surf.
One night when he was eight, the air went strange.
He had climbed with a heel of stale bread and a strip of dried fish, planning to watch Selvara rise and go home before fog.
Clouds moved like slow ships.
The sea was the sound of a large animal sleeping.
He lay back.
He might have slept a moment. He wasn't sure.
When he opened his eyes, both moons were out—Selvara higher, pale and thinned at one edge; Shyrahn lower, deepened to old ember.
Nothing unusual.
He breathed and counted because counting had become a way to make time behave.
Four in. Four held. Four out.
He shut his eyes and saw light anyway.
Not brightness—memory of brightness on the inside of his lids.
It pulsed once, slow and deliberate, as if a heart he didn't know he had had decided to make an argument.
He sat up too quickly and the world tipped.
Heat ran along him, not on his skin but under it—tracing lines he hadn't known existed and yet were terribly specific.
Fingers drawn along a map he did not own.
The feeling lifted from the base of his spine to his collarbones, then poured down his arms into the cup of his palms.
He hissed through his teeth.
Not pain. Not exactly.
More like a muscle aching right when it finally wakes.
He held out his hands.
They were only hands—scar on the middle knuckle from a crate, healing scrape near the thumb, the crescent of ground-in tar that never left.
No glow. No miracle.
He laughed once at himself for being the sort of boy who lay on cliffs and thought his blood might make the sky notice.
Then the wind shifted.
Selvara's light cut blue across his left eye.
Shyrahn threw red across his right cheek.
For a breath the colors laid themselves on him with such quiet tidiness he felt foolishly catalogued: this piece here, that there.
The feeling under his skin surged—and withdrew into some patient place.
A gull cried. He flinched, then exhaled his laugh and shook his head.
He was eight. Boys were dramatic.
The sea didn't care.
After that, he could never stop being aware of himself in a way he hadn't before.
Not vanity—placement.
The way a dockworker knows where his shoulder is in a crowd because barrels don't forgive inattention.
He began, without meaning to, to breathe deeper when Selvara rose, and to set his teeth when Shyrahn's rim cleared the horizon.
He said nothing.
There was nothing to tell that wouldn't sound like a child mistaking weather for message.
Solenna noticed the way people who love notice—without announcing it.
She found him on the cliff once, set a parcel of warm sweetbread between them, and said, "Careful. The rocks bite harder than the sea."
Like most of her sentences, it was true and not all she meant.
He asked her, cautious, if she believed the old talk about the moons.
"I believe fishermen drown on full nights same as thin ones," she said, chewing. "I believe people like reasons. I believe some things don't want to be looked at straight on."
"That's not an answer," he said, half-teasing.
"It's the best kind," she said, chin toward the sky. "Keeps your eyes open."
He carried her sentences the way he carried the small knife in his boot—weight you forget until you need it.
When coin thinned, they took other work.
Solenna dried weed for a woman who made tinctures that tasted like docks and burned like fire.
Aeneas scraped salt from hulls for men who spoke of the mainland as if it were a story meant to frighten children.
Once, on a day of high wind and thin catch, a trader with a mast-creak voice sold them a bolt of dyed cloth cheap, and Solenna turned it into shoulder wraps and sold those dear.
She didn't call it luck. She called it "saying yes to the right wrong thing."
He grew. Not fast.
The way rope grows—tighter, more useful, less likely to betray.
He learned to keep his sarcasm for when it would hurt least.
When older boys cut his rope and laughed, he asked if they wanted to borrow his knife to make it even.
When they didn't, he fixed the rope and said nothing.
Months later, when one of them went into the water and hit his head on a piling, Aeneas hauled him out first and took the man's mother's gratitude like nettle tea—because it stung and it was good for him.
He dreamed of mountains sometimes.
Not pictures—shapes.
Stone underfoot. A cold that wasn't wind.
Waking, he could never say what the dream contained.
Only that he wanted to set his hands against something older than the sea and see if it moved.
On market days, outsiders brought baskets of what Seawind Hollow never made—copper pins, beans that burned the tongue and brightened the chest, paper fans with painted cranes.
He liked the noise and the colors and the idea that the world had corners his feet hadn't found yet.
Once, a scholar from the mainland came in a hat that pretended not to care about weather, asking after tides with a smile that made everyone polite even when they didn't know answers.
Aeneas carried his case for a copper and listened to words like "celestial periodicities" and "rare alignments."
Later he tried the sounds in his mouth, the way you try a food and discover you don't hate it.
"Don't let words make you forget the weight of things," Solenna said when he repeated them proudly.
"Don't fear them either," she added. "Tools."
He watched the moons more closely after that.
The village noticed nothing about him except that he worked and didn't cause trouble—which, here, might as well be a blessing.
Old men at the pier called him "Solenna's boy" in the tone that means you belong without a ledger.
The fishmaster grunted when Aeneas hauled and didn't undercount Solenna again.
There were hard years and better ones.
A winter sickness came with iced rain, took two children in as many nights, and left as if bored.
Aeneas carried water and held bowls and watched Solenna sit with a mother until the woman's breathing learned itself again.
One summer the nets rose silver and everyone forgot to be angry for almost a month.
A boat didn't come back.
Solenna lit a lamp in the window and did not say the names.
Aeneas learned that silence can be a kind of prayer.
At the end of a long day he asked Solenna if she had ever seen the mainland.
"Once," she said. "Long time ago."
"What was it like?"
"Larger," she said. "And smaller. Crowds make people look big until you notice they're just many of the same size."
She smiled at his face. "You'll cross one day if you want."
He didn't know if he wanted.
He only knew the map inside him kept drawing itself without asking.
When he was eleven, he tried the ring.
He slipped it on because boys do that with objects that seem to be waiting.
It sat loose and felt like nothing.
He took it off—ashamed without reason—and put it back with the care of someone returning a borrowed thing.
Solenna was in the doorway.
He didn't know how long she'd been there.
She said nothing.
When he turned, she nodded once—neither forbidding nor blessing.
Afterward that nod was a memory he stepped around the way you step around a cracked board on a pier.
On the night before the eclipse—the one the scholar would have stayed for if the boats hadn't needed men and the weather hadn't rolled in wrong—the village grew restless.
Dogs barked and then fell silent as if persuaded.
Lamps burned late.
Someone sang a song Aeneas didn't know about a woman who married the sea and regretted it.
Solenna sat up carding wool and pretended not to watch the door.
"You're going up the cliff," she said, not a question.
He shrugged. "Just to look."
"As if looking made a difference." She set the combs down and wiped her hands. "Take the thicker cloak. Fog after midnight."
"I'll be careful."
"You'll be yourself," she corrected, which was kinder.
He went.
The path knew his feet.
He stood where he always stood, above the black water where the tide worked at its knot.
The sky wore that thin, breath-held quality it gets when change is near and everything pretends it isn't.
Selvara rose clean.
Shyrahn followed, red rim fat with weather.
He watched, wanting only the satisfaction of being the kind of person who witnesses.
Below, Seawind Hollow breathed and argued and settled like a living thing finding a sleeping position.
Above, the moons regarded each other with the old suspicion of partners who know the worst habits and still share a roof.
Aeneas folded his arms and let the cold keep him honest.
He did not know that far away, on a continent he had never seen, a woman in a tower that wasn't supposed to have a window woke from a dream of a dark ring, set a hand to stone, and felt it answer almost imperceptibly.
She frowned, laughed at herself, wrote three characters in a book, and told herself she was getting old.
He did not know that in mountains no fisherman here could name, two sealed chambers cooled along their edges the way rooms do when a draft you cannot feel finds a way in.
Or that a man in armor whose sigils had outlasted four dynasties paused on a stair, touched a railing, and—for reasons he could not have explained—looked up.
He knew only that the night was coming to attention the way nights do when something larger than weather draws near.
And that his breath had begun to count itself without his help.
He pulled the cloak tighter and set his jaw against nothing in particular.
The sea turned over in its sleep.
And beyond the reach of Seawind Hollow's lamps, the sky began to rehearse an old trick.