The brig woke with the work of men. Ropes sang in morning winds, and the deck smelled of sweat and tar and the faint, honest stink of fish. Marek woke with the gull's shadow slatted across his face and the scrap of map still folded and warm against his chest. For a moment he lay there, counting the new sounds — footfalls on planks, the shuff of canvas, someone cursing gently at a stubborn block. The world felt loud in a way Wyrmfield never had. Here, each sound meant something useful.
He learned very quickly that the sea had no time for wonder. It preferred hands that moved and lungs that could hold a rhythm. A man called from the rigging and Marek, fumbling at first, climbed because the ladder would not wait for his doubts. His legs burned; his fingers ached; the salt crystallized in the seams of his palms until they felt like small, sharp things. Someone barked a name; Marek answered. Ederis — the man with the calm voice Marek had noticed the day before — watched him climb the last few rungs with eyes like a map-reader's.
"You more used to pulling roots than masts," Ederis said when Marek dropped down into the slatted safety of the waist. It was not a question. He had the sort of face that made you talk only when you had something useful to say.
Marek opened his mouth, closed it, then said, "Aye."
"Good enough." Ederis's mouth twitched as if almost-smiling. "Keep your hands to the rope. Learn to listen to it. It speaks different when it's tired."
Rallo found him in the galley, already chewing at a bit of hard bread like it was a prize. He had the unbothered grin from the quay and a scar on his knuckle that still bothered to shine.
"How's the map?" Rallo asked, immediate and childish as always.
Marek felt the scrap against his ribs and answered carefully. "Where we go, every sound answers the question you didn't yet ask."
Rallo slapped him on the shoulder with a fist that was more threat than comfort. "Then listen close, Marek. The sea is an old lecturer. It does not forgive those who sleep through class."
The brig's crew had a rhythm. There was Bram, who moved with the economy of a man that knew how much weight the world would ask of him; Bram could shift a spar as if it were a child. There were other men and a few older lads — all shapes of tiredness and hope. At noon the captain, Thorne, whose voice had been warned in the quay like a blade, called them up. He had the scar along his brow and the sort of posture that made promises without needing to speak them.
"We sail till the Hollow runs thin," he said. "We take what the tide gives, and we do not waste hours on shore songs."
It was not the first time Marek had heard mention of the Hollow. The word had a particular weight on the captain's tongue, as if it were a place with teeth. Marek tucked the scrap further into his shirt. He watched the faces of the men find small agreement or dissolve into talk. A life of shipwork was a life of small certainties: the bell at a certain hour, the coil laid neat, the ration cut even and clipped. The map did not fit neatly into that system, but Marek had already learned to carry things that did not.
They ran into their first real weather by the third day. It began without warning — a bruise of cloud on the horizon that scuffed into wind and then into teeth. The brig pitched and the sea rose like a living thing testing its strength.
"Turn to heave!" Thorne shouted. Orders folded over the deck like a chorus. Men moved as if with unspoken choreography: reefing the sails, shifting the ballast, hauling lines until the ropes whined. Marek's hands memorized new shapes. He learned how to breathe through the motion, how to plant his feet on slick wood so that the entire ship felt like a single instrument and he a single note of it.
At a rope that would not pay out, a heavier lad slipped. The deck pitched and the marine air turned sharp. Marek reached; something inside him tightened — not a thought, then action. He threw his weight, caught the man's arm, and held. The line bit his palm; the rope ground his skin raw, and a sound like a surprised laugh broke out from Rallo somewhere behind them.
"You got your sea legs, then." Rallo's voice was half-derisive, half-parental. "Either that or you're stubborn as a barnacle."
Marek tasted salt and something like fear and then a quiet steadiness that did not belong only to his muscles. When they had the man safe, Ederis clapped him once on the shoulder and said, "That was… precise."
There are moments you do not recognize as beginnings until they have grown teeth. Marek only felt, as he would later remember, that his hands had found a chord. He went below later, licking small wounds and cleaning the skin with old bandages, and the action occupied him like prayer. No one said the word for what he had felt. No one had to.
The brig sailed toward a thin line on the horizon that the captain pointed out at dusk. It was a single light — not a lighthouse or city — a faint pulse like a heart-beat in the deep. The men went quiet at the sight. The captain's jaw tightened.
"That there is an old marker," Thorne said. "Used by smugglers and ghosts. Keep your valuables in reach and your tongue in check."
Marek studied the light until his eyes blurred. He folded the scrap of map out beneath his shirt and pressed his palm to it. For a second the ink felt warm through the linen — absurd, perhaps, but the idea of warmth in something so dead as paper made Marek laugh softly to himself.
That night the galley filled with stories. Men traded names of monsters and missed loves as if each tale were a different kind of map. Bram spoke little, but when he did it was in the blunt truth of people who had lived too long in the swell of things. Ederis told of charts that refused to be read and of maps that sang when you were too near the right island. Rallo offered crude jokes and a half-awkward question about whether Marek had ever seen a proper fight.
Marek let the talk wash over him. He was learning that the sea loved small ironies: you could be near land and still be lost, you could be drowning with a sky full of stars to guide you. The scrap's mark felt like a small stubborn ember inside his breast.
Around midnight, when the deck creaked differently and the moon made the water into shredded silver, Marek went up a-rigging to look. The little light had shifted. It pulsed once, and then another time as if it were counting.
Something in the scrap responded. Marek had the ridiculous impression — the sort that only the very young or the very foolish allow — that a line on old, soft paper had found its partner in the horizon. He could not say what that meant. He only felt the same strange steadiness that had held the falling lad earlier, and it drew him like tide to shore.
He did not tell Rallo or Bram or Ederis. He kept the scrap folded and secret as men keep small vows. Instead he watched the light until his eyes ached.
A sound from below — someone stifling a laugh, a rope that needed a knot — pulled him back to the present. The brig rolled, the stars sailed, and Marek felt that life had narrowed to two simple facts: there was a map in his shirt, and a light on the horizon that, for reasons he did not yet understand, made the scrap seem less like theft and more like a ticket.
When he crawled into his berth he tasted the salt of the day and the salt of the sea and something that might have been hope. He slept finally with the scrap against his skin, and when he dreamed the sea called him by a name he had never known.
At dawn there would be voices shouting, orders given and taken, knots to be redone. But for that one thin hour, Marek allowed himself a thought that would not stay still.
If the map was a promise, then the sea was the cost.
He turned the scrap once more in his fingers and, without fully meaning to, whispered to the dark: "Show me."
Somewhere beyond the waves the horizon answered only with the slow, indifferent pull of the tide. The brig rode it like a thing that had always belonged there, and Marek, for the first time, felt that he might belong too — at least enough for now to keep hold of the map and to keep his feet on the deck when the ship tilted toward whatever waited in the hollow of the world.