On the other side of the door, the captain took my silence for agreement.
“Get dressed and put yourself together,” he said, turning away from the door. “I’ll be waiting in the boat.”
*
I stared warily at the dock beneath my feet as I waited for some of Demery’s crew to disembark. The captain sent most of them off on individual errands while three big men trailed after Widderow like oversized goslings. The old woman wore a hefty black cloak lined with white fur, worn but well kept, and I swore I saw a white crow fly over her head as she reached the shore.
She glared at me from beneath her hood before she merged with the crowd. She did not speak, but her warning was clear enough.
Don’t you run off, girl.
Well, I would, once I’d found my legs again. Neither Widderow nor the sailors appeared to have much trouble adjusting to the steadiness of land, besides sauntering with broad stances between stacks of crates, trundling carts and laboring dockworkers. But my world still tipped and tottered.
I gave up trying to stand on my own and put a hand on one of the mooring posts, using the time to examine Tithe. I’d imagined it would be like Whallum, with tall wooden buildings, clustered and jumbled. But this settlement looked more like the village I’d grown up in, with stone houses and slate roofs. I supposed it was much older, though—several huge standing stones protruded from the water, bedecked with snow, skirted with ice and carved with strange runes. Ruined fortifications also stood high on a forested hill to the east, melancholy and mysterious beyond a veil of smoke, steam and low cloud.
“Why is that castle abandoned?” I asked Demery as he paused beside me, tugging the collar of his coat against the cold. “Don’t they need it for defense?”
“Tithe needs no defenses,” the captain said, gesturing up the dock for me to precede him.
I lifted my hand from the post and tested my feet again. I didn’t fall over, so I took a cautious step, and we started for shore. “How is that possible?”
“It’s Tithe,” he said simply. “The Tithe to the Sea. It belongs to no nation—save the Usti, in a roundabout way, but that’s rather complicated.”
“I know all that,” I protested, offended. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It can’t just sit here, undefended. Someone will try to take it eventually.”
“Ah.” Demery sunk his hands deep into his pockets. His eyelashes were bleached by the sun, I noticed, but long and thick around his grey eyes. “Then you’ve been misinformed. Follow me and watch your pockets. Tithe is a good deal cleaner than Whallum, but there’s greedy fingers in every port.”
“I’ve nothing to steal,” I muttered. I sidestepped a pile of steaming manure as we turned onto the main street.
A flash caught my eye, and I looked up just in time to catch a coin singing through the air. I stared at it, flat and nearly filling my bare palm. A solem. A whole solem, silver and embossed with a relief of Aeadine’s matronly Queen Edith. The only other time I’d held one of these was the day I’d become betrothed, and my father had presented me with the single solem he’d put away for my wedding dress and other wifely provisioning.
I’d never gotten a chance to wear that dress. I imagined it was still packed away in the attic of the inn, along with everything else that might be called mine.
“You’ll need to buy new clothes,” Demery said, by way of explanation. He tucked his hands back into his pockets and started through the town. “I’ll not have my Stormsinger looking like an urchin.”
“I’m not your Stormsinger,” I grumbled, but I was distracted by the coin. I slipped it into the pocket of the short sailor’s coat Widderow had given me and held it there. A solem should be enough to buy passage back to Aeadine if I played my hand correctly.
But the word ‘Stormsinger’ dredged up a host of questions, the foremost of which slipped from my lips. “Does Lirr truly have my mother, Captain?”
Demery looked at me, his gaze level and without a hint of falseness. “Yes. But the street is not the place to speak of such things. Tomorrow, or tonight if your mind is fit for it, I’ll answer all your questions. But not now. There are some things that shouldn’t be spoken under an open sky.”
I pressed my lips shut. My questions still burned, but I kept my head down as we pushed through the crowd.
Scents wafted past me. Pastries, mulling wine. Woodsmoke and tobacco. Coffee too, along with the ever-present crispness of the Winter Sea, the musk of horses, manure and mud. They were the scents of early winter and the approach to Festus season, the month of celebration that marked the beginning of the long, hard winter. They were scents tied to a host of pleasant feelings and childhood nostalgia.
But as we wandered, a newer, stranger feeling overtook me. Vague and warning, it crept up from the ground, from the wood of lintels and beams, and it grew stronger as we went.
The people and buildings gave way to a churchyard on the northern side of town. The feeling was strongest here, where tombstones and statues were arrayed on a sweeping hill beside the sea, each sad monolith bastioned by snow and harried by wind. The abandoned fort rose on the forested hill beyond it, but only a few trees dared to grow in the graveyard itself: all huge, ancient, and unmistakably ghisten.
The central one was an ash, its unseasonably lush canopy covering half the churchyard and weighted with snow. Even without the greenness of its leaves, there was no questioning the tree’s nature—I felt its draw and I picked up my pace, edging ahead of Demery. He let me go, falling in behind on a narrow, well-worn path between banks of snow.
I paused under the branches and raked cool air into my lungs, relishing the familiar energy of a ghisten tree. It was an intangible thing, like the quiet of an empty chapel, or the hush of the graves all around. But the ash was more… alive, more insistent. It was fingers around my ribs, tugging me forward. It was the strongest pull I’d ever felt to a ghisten tree.
Then I noticed the coins. There were hundreds of them—no, thousands, tens of thousands—wedged and stuck and grown into the thick bark. They’d become part of the tree itself, like scales of a hundred different sizes and metals and origins. I scuffed snow away from the roots to find they, too, had been armored with coins, and when I looked up, even the highest branches bore the same.
“What is this?” I breathed as Demery drew up.
“The Tithe,” he said, offering me a small copper coin between two fingers. “Find a spot to stick it.”
“Why?” I took the coin, warm from his pocket, and held it as the cold sea wind blew around us.
“Because if you spend a night in Tithe without making an offering, this island will try to kill you.” Demery took his own coin, then circled the tree until he found a hammer hanging from a leather tie. He took it up and circled more, squinting. At length, he spied a spot where the bark had grown up around previous coins. Flipping the hammer around, he used a spike on one side to break the exterior of the bark, then set the coin in on its edge, and flipped the hammer back around.
Tapping rang out in the quiet churchyard. The coin sank in and Demery stood back, holding the tool out to me.
“Try to kill me, how?” I asked, taking the hammer. Its haft was cool and smooth. “Why?”