Auberdine smelled of salt and wet rope, and somebody in it was selling moonwell water by the cask.
It went out on ships with no names. It came back, eventually, as rumor: a sorcerer's tower humming somewhere south, a ritual that needed a sacred thing in profane quantity. The Sentinels had searched every hold and found nothing, because they searched like Sentinels. They came down the pier in a line with their glaives on their backs, and by the time the third boot struck the planking there was not a cask in the harbor that held anything but salt fish.
Nyssara took a room over the net-mender's and became, for a season, a dock clerk with ink on her cuffs.
She was good at it. That troubled her a little. She had been many things for the Hidden Bough in the years since Ashenvale: a lamp-trimmer's niece, a pilgrim, a girl who sold thread, and, for longer than any of those, the friend of Faelen Starbough, who wore the Enclave's green these days as though it had been cut for him. None of them had fit. The clerk fit. She stood at the tally-desk at the head of the long pier with a slate and a pot of oak-gall ink, and the harbor came to her to be counted: kelp-ash by the hundredweight, Darnassian wine in wicker, timber from the south with the bark still on, and fish, and fish, and fish. She found she liked a column that balanced. In her second week she caught the harbormaster in an error of nine barrels. He looked at her as if she had pulled a coin from his ear, and after that he let her alone.
She found the water in her third week, by weight. Eleven casks came down the hill road chalked as lamp oil, and the porters under them walked like men carrying stone. Oil is light. That night, when she passed the shed where they waited, the staves showed a faint glow at the seams, like a hand held over a candle. By morning they were gone, and the night tally had them down as oil in a neat, anxious hand.
The hand belonged to the harbormaster's nephew. Corwen Tidegrass kept the night tally and rang the harbor bell when the fog came down, which in Auberdine was most evenings. He oiled the bell's pin himself and let nobody else touch the rope; the fishing boats came home on it, he said, and you did not hand that to a boy. He was friendly the way nervous people are, all at once and then not at all. He was thin, and his cuffs were worse than hers. On market days he brought his daughter to the pier because there was nobody to leave her with. Lirelle was seven. She wore a yellow ribbon and had opinions about gulls.
"She counts them," Corwen said, by way of apology.
"How many?" Nyssara asked the child.
"They don't hold still."
"No," Nyssara agreed. "That is the trouble with gulls."
It took her two weeks more to learn that Corwen kept two ledgers, and one evening after that to find the second, which lived behind a false panel in the tally-house that would have embarrassed a dwarf.
She read it by the light of a shuttered moonstone, with the fog pressed to the window and the bell silent on its post outside.
Dates. Casks. A sum that would have bought half the pier. And beside each entry, in a different, cramped hand, another number: what Corwen owed, and to whom. The debt had begun with a third share in a fishing sloop called the Patient Wife. Nyssara knew the name from the wreck-list. After that the cramped hand had simply gone on writing, month upon month, and the number had never once gone down. On the last leaf, in place of a figure, the same hand had set out three things: the child's name, her age, and the color of the ribbon she wore to the pier on market days.
It did not say what would be done. It did not need to.
Nyssara closed the book very gently.
It would have been clean to hate him. She had come prepared to.
She opened it again, because there was a third column, and she had been trained not to leave a room with a column unread. Every shipment carried a buyer's mark, a little stamp in green ink no bigger than a fingernail. She had expected a sorcerer's sigil, something with too many points. She tilted the moonstone.
She knew it. She had seen it most weeks for years, on the satchel Faelen carried and on the requisitions he was so proud to be trusted with. It was the seal the stewards of the Cenarion Enclave set on goods bound for the Archdruid's own stores.
For a while the room was very quiet. She thought, for no reason she could have defended, of a night when she was fourteen and counting a Sentinel's breaths, and a priestess had handed a sealed scroll to a druid at the edge of a moonwell. She had put that away without understanding it. She did not understand it now. But the drawer she had put it in was no longer empty.
There was no tower in the south. The ships with no names cleared the bay, stood out until the fog took them, and came about for the tree.
She was still sitting with it when Corwen found her. Of course he did. She had lingered, and lingering was a kind of noise. He had a boat-hook and shaking hands, and he swung it like a man who had never hit anything. She took it away from him, and put him in a chair, and for the first time in her life drew her daggers on a person only so that he would sit still and listen.
He looked at the daggers. Then he looked at the open book, at the last leaf, and something went out of his face.
"She's asleep at the net-mender's," he said. "Under your room. I leave her there when I ring."
"I know where she is."
"If I stop, they will..."
"I can read."
He put his hands over his mouth. She waited until he took them down again.
"There are two ways this ends," she told him. "In the first, the Sentinels find this book. They will, in time; even Sentinels find things. You go north in chains with the men you are afraid of, in the same hold, and your daughter stands on that pier and watches the boat. In the second, you tell me which night, which ship and which channel. This book reaches your uncle's desk with certain pages missing, and what is left says that a frightened man kept a careful record of a crime so that one day he could hand it over." She put the daggers away. "I prefer the second."
"Who are you?"
"A clerk. Which night, Corwen?"
He told her. It took him a while, and he wept through part of it. She let him, and wrote it down in a fair hand.
Three nights later the ship with no name was met at the mouth of the bay by Sentinels who had somehow known precisely where to wait.
Nyssara watched from the end of the long pier with her slate under her arm, a clerk kept late. There was little to see. Lanterns unhooded all at once on the water. Four boats closed. A voice carried flat across the bay and did not need to be raised twice. The officer in the lead boat stood in the bow without holding on to anything, and Nyssara would have known the set of those shoulders at twice the distance. Captain Moonspear had received a note, unsigned, in a clerk's hand. She had evidently despised it and used it, in that order.
The men Corwen feared went north in chains. The second ledger arrived on the harbormaster's desk with certain pages missing. The cramped hand was gone from it, and so was every leaf that bore a green stamp, which the harbormaster did not miss, never having known they were there.
Those leaves went into the lining of Nyssara's coat. Before they did, she sat up one night over the net-mender's with a fresh sheet and copied one of them out, stamp and all, line for line. She did not decide to. A clerk makes a fair copy. It is the first thing they teach you.
Maethril came over on the morning boat with a basket of mending, like anybody's aunt. She sat on the one stool in the room over the net-mender's and read the pages through once. Then she drew toward her the clay dish in which Nyssara burned her blotting, laid the first leaf in it, and lit it from the lamp.
Nyssara watched a season's work go up in a smell of scorched gall.
"You knew," she said.
"I suspected. Now I know. In a moment I shall go back to suspecting, which is a position one can hold for years." Maethril fed in the second leaf. "Say what you came to say."
"That is the Enclave's seal. Those casks went to the Archdruid's stores. Something on that tree is drinking moonwell water by the shipload, more than the Temple would ever give, and druids are buying it from men who threaten children."
"Yes."
"Captain Moonspear took that ship on a note. If she saw this..."
"She would walk it to the Enclave gate by noon, because she is honest. By nightfall there would be Sentinels on one side of the Temple gardens and druids on the other, and the priestesses being asked to choose. I have seen what our people do when they are asked to choose. So have the ruins." The third leaf. "Some truths would start a war inside the tree. My work is choosing which fires Darnassus can afford."
"And who chose you for it?"
"Nobody." Maethril did not look up. "That is the trouble with it. Do you imagine I have not noticed?"
The last leaf caught and curled. For a moment its green stamp stood out perfectly clear, and then it went.
"In Ashenvale you told me I chose correctly," Nyssara said.
"You did."
"I have been waiting some years for that to feel like anything."
"It will not." Maethril brushed ash from her fingers. She looked old, for the first time, and looked as though she knew it. "I shall go on watching them. Quietly, for as long as it takes, and without one page that anybody can wave in a square. That is not nothing. It is merely slow. Is this all of it?"
"Those were all the pages."
It was true. Nyssara stood with her hands folded and the copy sewn flat inside her left cuff, under the ink stain, and waited to be told that she was wanting too loudly. Maethril looked at her for a long moment, and heard nothing, and picked up her basket.
She had taught that herself.
On Nyssara's last evening in Auberdine the fog was late. Corwen Tidegrass sat at the head of the pier mending a net, very badly, having given up the tally and kept the bell. He did not look at her. He had not looked at her in nine days, and she did not blame him.
Lirelle had no such difficulty. She wanted to know why the clerk never made the boards creak.
"They don't creak. They speak," Nyssara said. "Each one says where you are. So you don't step on the board. You step on the nails, there, where it sits on the beam and cannot move. Outside of your foot first. No, don't hold your breath. Everyone can hear a person not breathing. Let it go, and walk as if you had every right."
The child tried it. A board announced her at once, and a gull on a piling laughed.
"Again," said Nyssara, and heard whose voice that was.
"How many boards are there?"
"Two hundred and twelve."
"You counted."
"I count everything. It is a bad habit. Don't start."
"I already started," Lirelle said, and went back to the first nail.
It took until the lamps were lit. Then Lirelle went out along the nail-lines with her arms a little away from her sides and her ribbon coming loose, forty yards over black water to the last piling, and the pier said nothing at all. At the end she turned around to see who had been watching. Her father had. He had put the net down.
Nyssara picked up her bag. The page lay flat against her wrist, where the pulse was. As she went up the shore road the fog came in off the bay behind her, and the harbor bell began to ring, slow and even: a man counting, for people he could not see.