TThe Lantern Coast Wiki

Episode 2

The Salt Barge

Mira Osk and Tobin Reed flee Port Hallow on the salt barge Patience with the tidecaller Seren of Esk, who drains the harbour to escape Captain Varr Dane's cutter after Varr reveals he knew Mira's mother. Tobin goes overboard but climbs back aboard, and Mira glimpses a silver Warden hook hidden in the collar of the deckhand Pell.

Synopsis

Mira paid her last three silver to Old Bettany, the one-eyed master of the salt barge Patience, at the Weir landing; Bettany did not ask what was in the oilcloth. Her deckhand, a silent boy called Pell with a gull feather in his cap, coiled rope and stared at the compass bundle.

The hooded woman was already aboard and introduced herself as Seren of Esk of Esk. When Tobin Reed recalled his gran's tale that Esk folk can call the tide, Seren pushed back her hood, revealing cropped white-blond hair and a tired face of about thirty, and confirmed that Tidecalling is real and that she is a tidecaller.

The barge pushed off at the second bell. At the harbour mouth, where the Gull Gate's chain hung across the water, a Warden cutter with shuttered lanterns intercepted them, Captain Varr Dane in the bow. Bettany insisted she carried only salt. Varr picked out Mira as "the girl with the burned hand" and called her Ada Osk's daughter, saying he had known her mother, though Mira had never told anyone her mother's name in the city.

Seren stood on the salt sacks, took the silver ring from her lip and spoke a word that was not a word. The harbour drained: the water fell away from the cutter until it sat crooked on the mud, and the Gull Gate chain sagged into a trench of silt. The Patience slid through on the falling water, and the returning sea smashed the cutter against the harbour wall.

Past the gate, Seren collapsed with a bleeding nose. Asked the cost, she explained that every call takes a memory she cannot choose, and that she no longer remembers her sister's face.

At grey dawn they counted heads: Bettany, Pell, Seren, Mira and Tobin, who was soaked to the waist and grinning. He had gone over the stern when the water dropped and climbed back up the rudder chain. Mira called him an idiot and hugged him.

Pell stood at the stern watching the wreck of the cutter. When he turned, his gull-feather cap was gone, and Mira alone saw a silver hook, the emblem of the Grey Wardens, pinned inside his collar.

The Brass compass now pointed south and west, out to open sea and toward Ilith. Though it was still dark, Mira held it in her bare hand, not caring what it pointed at.

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