A Crown Cut with Salt

They say the sea forgets. It takes and takes until the memory of what it swallows softens into silt and broken shells. I used to believe that. I do not anymore.

I remember everything.

The barrel smelled of tar and pears. My mother had refused to store wine in them because the old cooper’s seal was cracked, and King Rowan—my father—insisted the royal barrels be flawless. On the day she died, the cracked barrel became perfect.

“Quiet, little gull,” she whispered, her breath warm against my ear as she lifted me into the dark. “You are my secret, and secrets must be kept.”

I was eight. The docks clanged with evening—winch bells, gulls, the slap of rope on wet posts—while lanterns turned the water to melted copper. We had come without escort to bless a fisherman’s new skiff because my mother believed the crown should know the smell of its people’s hands. I didn’t understand why she pressed the lid down with shaking fingers. Didn’t understand the terror in her ocean-blue eyes or the way her crown lay tucked beneath her cloak.

They stepped out from behind a stack of casks—men in tidy coats with ledger-smooth voices. Not pirates. Merchants. The kind that haggle over grain prices with smiles like straight edges.

“Your Majesty,” their leader said, pleasant as a prayer. “Your route changed. Unwise.”

Steel flashed. My mother moved so I could not see, drawing them away along the pier, each footfall, a soft apology to the planks. I listened to her negotiating as if her words were a lullaby—soft and careful and brave. Someone laughed. Boots scuffed. The sky cracked open when a crate fell; no one shouted to help.

She screamed once—once—and then the sound cut like a rope.

They threw her into the harbour. Her body struck the water with the dull, human sound that lives under every wave. I shoved my nails into the stave and tore the pads of my fingers to keep from pushing up the lid and letting daylight swallow me whole. Through the bung-hole, I watched the rip current seize her and whisk her beneath the pilings, out toward the black mouth where the river kisses the sea and is devoured for its trouble.

When the dockhands’ voices settled and the lamplight steadied, I crawled out, knees knocking, and peered between the pilings. Foam licked barnacles where my mother was supposed to be. The tide had taken her. The tide had forgotten her.

I have not.

—

I grew tall in the shadow of Seraphine’s smile. It is the sort of smile that makes you feel foolish for flinching at its edge. She arrived in the court of Avarayne with a mourning veil heavier than her bones and eyes that did not redden when she wept. She was the daughter of House Morcant: old, rich, and polished like a blade. They said she was a balm for the king’s grief. Balm can burn if you slather it over raw skin.

She married my father ten months after my mother never returned.

“What is grief but love with nowhere to go?” Seraphine told him over mulled wine in the winter room. I heard her through the tapestry; I had learned to listen where I was not invited. “Let it flow into what remains. Your people. Your future. Your new son, perhaps.”

I told my father what I had seen. Not pirates—merchants. Men whose boots were too clean for the lower piers. Men brought to end us both. Men who knew our route had changed without a herald.

“They were hired,” I said. “Their hands were ink-stained. They smelled of cedar oil, not brine. They called her Majesty while they killed her.”

He kissed my hair like I was made of spun sugar. “They will pay,” he said, and then he stopped hearing me.

He blamed pirates because the sea cannot bow and beg forgiveness. It can not blush. It does not move into your home and hang the tapestry of its house over your hearth. Seraphine’s hands never smelt of salt.

When Prince Corin was born, bells rang before the afterbirth cooled. Three days later, my father signed the decree that stripped me of my right and placed the crown’s promise on a child who could not yet hold up his own head. I watched the ink dry in the candlelight. It looked like blood aging into brown.

“Riley,” he said, not meeting my eyes, “this will steady the realm.”

I had been steady. I had been ready. I had been first. None of that mattered against a name written beside “male” in the book of law that Seraphine had already opened for him.

I was never close to my siblings, nor was I given the chance. Corin was kept perfumed and cosseted behind nursery doors and nurses with soft-spoken knives for eyes. I saw him in passing, the way you see your reflection in a window at night: faint, not meant for you. He gurgled and grasped at the air, and the court swooned. He took my title the way all infants take without malice, without mercy.

Elowen arrived with her mother’s trunks, our age the same by proclamation and nothing else. She made herself my rival the way cats pick the highest sunbeam. When she wasn’t polishing her smile, she was using it like a blade.

“Riley,” she would say, catching my sleeve in corridors where tapestries could listen, “your posture makes your shoulders look broad. You should try the lilac gown; it draws attention up. To your face.” She paused, kindly. “Where you need it.”

On feast days, she trailed powder on my bodice; on hunt days, she “accidentally” swapped my boots for a size too small; on ordinary days, she rearranged mirrors so that the light loved her best. She curated beauty as if the court were a gallery and our faces were art she could hang and unhung at will. She made sure everyone knew which portrait was the masterpiece.

I learned to swallow replies until my throat was raw. I learned that silence can be a shield and also a shroud.

Seraphine became queen the way water becomes ice: without permission from the sky, simply because the air was cold enough. She changed rules while the kingdom blinked away its tears. The Succession Act fell with a soft legal thump that echoed like a hammer in my bones. When my father spoke of my future, it came out as consolation prizes.

“You will be my Envoy,” he said after the decree. The candle between us guttered as if it were tired of being burned for nothing. “You will travel. Advise. Our kingdom is the sea—we have room for many kinds of greatness.”

“I am the firstborn,” I said, and felt the words stack up and topple inside me. “And I remember. They were merchants.”

He flinched—not at the first part, but the last—and turned away. Seraphine placed a hand on his sleeve and looked at me with sorrow as pure and brittle as glass. Behind her, Elowen smiled into a window, admiring the way the light adored her.

She began trying to kill me on a Tuesday.

It was the horse first. My mare, Oona, slipped her bit and bolted toward the cliff path where the bracken grows thick over thin stone. Oona never bolts. The stableboy swore a buckle had snapped. It had not; later, I found it cut clean through.

Then the wine, faintly bitter, an aftertaste like a penny flattened on a rail. Elowen demanded a toast to Corin’s fourth day of life imagine, a celebration for a yawn and a nap and pressed the cup into my hand herself. I let it touch my lips and then coughed as if I’d swallowed wrong. The cup shivered against the floor as I let it drop. Elowen laughed at my clumsiness and called for more.

I waited, always, to see if my father would hear me. The waiting became heavier than the danger.

So I left.

—

The night I chose my new name, Avarayne’s harbour was a tangle of masts against a silver coin of moon. Fishwives hummed as they salted the day’s last catch, and the docks creaked with old gossip. The tide had just turned, and with it, me. I wrapped my breasts tight with linen until my breath caught shallow and bound my dark brown hair in a knot I stuffed beneath a black bandana. I rubbed soot onto my cheeks and flattened my lashes with saltwater. My hands were quick and sure in the way only hands trained in court can be curtsies teach balance, dance teaches footwork, and archery teaches the grip you hide with gloves.

“Boy,” a man with a rope-burned neck called to me from a pile of nets. “You headed to the lower docks? Watch yer purse.”

“I’ve got no purse,” I said, barking my voice down an octave. It came easily; I had swallowed a decade of words that weren’t welcome. What’s another pitch to learn?

His eyes slid off me like oil off steel. He believed what he saw. People always do. That is why Seraphine’s smile works and why I now judge my life in barrels and bandanas.

Rye. That’s what I told myself to answer to. Rye, as in bread, as in whiskey, as in the colour of the fields that hold the wind. Rye, as in something simple and hearty and not worth noticing twice.

There is a ship sailors spit before they name. They call her the Gilded Wraith, though her hull is the colour of stormwood, and her figurehead is carved into a woman who does not have a face so much as a suggestion of one. Rumour says she is captained by Kade Thorne, the Wolf of the Azure, whose bounty posters Fletchers’ Square displays more lovingly than saints. Rumour also says he is a gentleman to his crew and a knife to anyone else.

I had looked at the poster often enough to know he had a face meant to be remembered by ballads if ballads were honest about danger. He wore a grin like a secret and a scar on his jaw like it had been put there to give the wind something to hold on to.

“Don’t be a fool,” I told myself now as I watched the Wraith’s lanterns burn low. “Don’t be a fool and do exactly this.”

A skiff cut across the moonglow, and two men hauled a wrapped crate toward the Wraith’s shadow. I slid into the water, cold biting the breath I had left, and gripped the skiff’s side as it bobbed. The men swore at each other in the dialect of South-Quays—sharp and messy—and did not look down. I hung northern still, then let their wake pull me toward the shadow of the Wraith’s midships.

Up close, the Gilded Wraith’s hull was a cathedral of tar and iron nails. I found the knotted rope ladder and climbed, fingers throbbing from old barrel-memories and new splinters.

The deck was quiet, only the murmur of sleeping men and the low hum of a ship resting like a beast after a run. I ducked beneath coils of line and a stack of canvas, then belly-crawled toward the forecastle where the crew’s hammocks creaked.

A boot stepped down in front of my nose.

“Lost something?” The voice was amused and awake and far too close. “Or looking for it?”

I looked up. The man had moons for eyes and a knife that looked as if it had introduced itself to more than one person’s ribs. His hair was a crowded roof of dark curls bound with a leather thong, and he smiled like this was all a game he’d already won. Pirate. Quartermaster by the look of him, or a man who wanted to be.

“My berth,” I said, pitching my voice low, weary with a day I had not had. “Signed on down at the Rooks’ Nest with a man named Gar— Garlan. Said he’d pass word.”

He laughed. “Boy, if I had a coin for every Garlan in a dockside tavern, I wouldn’t be on this deck. Get up.”

I stood. I kept my shoulders square and my chin down. Men like him respect posture the way hounds respect scent.

“Name?” he asked.

“Rye.”

“Rye what?”

“Rye.” I let my mouth go stubborn. “Just Rye.”

He squinted at me. I shifted my feet apart, braced like I’d been told there was a wave coming. There was. It was him. He was going to shove me back over the rail, and I would have to choose whether to scream or sink.

“Jas,” a voice spoke from the dark. Wry. Quiet. Unbothered, like the sea when it is thinking about swallowing a fleet. “If you’re truly going to throw the boy overboard, do it without the lecture. I’m trying to sleep.”

He stepped out of the shadow of the mainsail, and the ship seemed to tilt toward him. I was not ready for him in motion. I had made a creature out of the poster, carved a man out of rumour and wool and ink, but he was neither rumour nor ink. He was a long coat shrugged off a storm and a shirt unbuttoned one too far, and the cut of his mouth told me he laughed easily but not often. His eyes were a colour I had not expected; I had imagined grey, like the posters, but they were a warm amber, sharp and bright and unkind only if they had to be.

Captain Kade Thorne looked at me the way men look at something they can’t quite classify on a plate in a king’s hall. He tilted his head. The lantern light made a soft bruise of shadow along his jaw.

“What do you do, Rye?” he asked. Not who. What. He was practical, then. A man who would prefer a useful lie to a pretty truth.

I offered him the only thing I had that wasn’t a crown or a memory. “I can climb. I can tie. I can read currents and wind maps. I can fix a bow, and I can pull one. I can speak three tongues from the Straits and one you haven’t heard of unless you’ve been to Morcant and been bored.”

“Can you fight?” Jas asked because, of course, he would.

“Yes,” I said. My voice didn’t shake, but my hands did a little. I hid them in my sleeves.

Kade’s gaze flicked to my face and then away and then back again, quick as a gull checking a wave for fish. There is a particular danger when men think you are something you are not. A different kind of danger when they think you might be what you seem. I stood between those two. He frowned a fraction, then smoothed it, like a man who knows the sea will not tell him why the colour of the water has changed, only that it has.

“Why this ship?” he asked.

“Because the others are slow,” I said before I could think better of it. “And because men who do the wrong thing for the right reason sometimes live longer than men who do the right thing for the wrong.”

Jas barked a laugh. “Philosopher,” he said. “We’ll feed him to the bilges and see if he enlightens them.”

Kade’s mouth curved without quite being a smile. He tapped a finger against the railing, and in that moment, I understood that the decision was already made. Men like him decide before their mouths speak; their bodies simply go through the motions so the crew does not feel left out.

“Fine,” he said. “Rye stays. For now. You’ll be bilge and ballast until you’ve scrapped the stink off you. No shore unless I say. No questions unless you’ve already thought of the answer. Touch my charts, and I’ll take your fingers. Touch my coin, and I’ll take your tongue. Touch my crew, and I’ll take your eyes.”

“Charming,” I said before I remembered boys are quieter when their throats are on the line.

He looked at me as if he could hear the parts of me I was trying to bury. His gaze lingered on the bandana at my forehead. On the softness, I could not ash out of my cheekbones. A flicker crossed his face, something like recognition or suspicion or the kind of trouble a man enjoys making for himself. It was gone before the lantern could catch it.

“Jas,” he said. “Find him a hammock. If he snores, I want him on rat duty.”

“Yes, Captain,” Jas said, grinning like the moon had given him a secret.

“Welcome to the Gilded Wraith,” Kade said to me. He did not offer his hand.

“Thank you,” I said, because boys are grateful when they get what they ask for. Inside, my heart beat against my ribs like a trapped gull.

As Jas led me toward the ladder that would take me below deck, we passed the figurehead. Up close, the woman’s face was smoother than rumour said; she had no features because she did not need them. She was whatever anyone feared most when they looked at the sea.

“Don’t stare at her,” Jas said. “She stares back.”

I kept walking. The air below stank of sweat and tar and something sweet that had died wrong. Hammocks swayed. Men snored. Someone muttered a prayer to a god who loved fishermen and was indifferent to thieves. I slung my new life up between two beams and climbed into it. The canvas cradled me. The ship creaked. Above me, the water shushed against the hull like a mother quieting a crying child.

“Tomorrow,” I told myself. “Tomorrow I will become another thing the sea forgets.”

But my mother’s last breath has lived in my ear so long I can not sleep without hearing it. When I finally slept, I dreamt of barrels and pears and a woman with no face, her wooden hands reaching not to drown me but to hold me steady while the world rolled.

When morning came, the sun crawled up the horizon like a wounded cat, and Captain Kade Thorne stood at the rail, amber eyes fixed on the royal pennants far beyond the harbor mouth, where the gulls twisted like torn paper. He did not look back when he said, softly, to the air:

“Raise her. We ride the line.”

And I, princess of Avarayne no longer, sister to no one, heir to nothing, boy of the bilge and liar by necessity, rolled from my hammock and learned how to pull a rope before it flayed my palms, and to swallow my name the way you swallow seawater: only when you must, and only enough to survive.