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Chapter ThirtyThree: The Net and the Knife
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2025-12-10 10:00:52By noon, the cold seam gave us back to the world like a favour returned, grudging, done. The wind eased two points and then one more, the kind of slackening that makes canvas sigh and men reach for oars they swore they’d sworn off at seventeen.
“Catspaws,” Harp muttered, squinting at the water’s cat’s-foot dimples wandering across blue. “Teasing bitch.”“Set sweeps,” Kade said. No drama. Just work. “No splashing like drunks. Quiet hands.”We ran out the long oars, six to a side, old muscle over new pride. The Wraith took the shove with melancholy and moved anyway. Ahead, the shore lines were low and sulking, a lee that would love to keep us. Behind and to windward, the swans reset their hymn: cutters creeping like beads on a string, frigates fanning, flagship keeping the measure.“Powder’s sweating,” Luth warned, shaking his head at the caisson like a disappointed uncle.“Keep it as dry as you keep me,” Jas said, and Luth snorted blasphem
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A Crown Cut with Salt Epilogue: The Morning After
The palace woke wrong.A bell tried to be the first to know and failed; a runner’s feet corrected it, slapping the gallery stone hard enough to make saints tremble in their frames. Doors opened too quickly. Torches guttered. Somewhere, a whistle remembered its job and made itself ridiculous.The dungeon yard gave its confession in parts. A warder came up from the west hall slick with bath oil and pride bruised, swearing the floor had moved under him like a river. Another discovered peas under his boots and thought for a full minute that God had taken his legs. Linen lay where it had been asked to muffle footprints and then, obedient, forgot where it had been told to be. The small river gate yawned like an old mouth that had found a song again.By the time the captain of the guard counted the empty hooks, the watch at the quay had a story ready: roads a mystery of lard and shadows, rowboats missing, two men out of the watch-boat sleeping like babes, their w
A Crown Cut with Salt Chapter ThirtySix: Dawn's Knot
The palace slept like a cat, one eye open, pretending not to see mice.Second bell. Torch change quarter. Stew, change half. I stood in the dark between the dressing screen and the window and tied the dull brown ribbon into my hair. The swan blue dress waited on its stand like a trick. I put it on. Silk bit ribs; the bodice made me a truth I couldn’t dodge. Knives went into the hem and sash. The marlinspike slid into my sleeve. The curtain cord rope coiled around my waist like a lie I planned to tell convincingly.Esme knocked twice on the garden door and didn’t wait for me to say enter. “Laundry’s up,” she whispered. “Bath oil’s gone. If someone slips, it’ll be a shame.”“Bless you,” I said, and meant it.“Bless yourself,” she said, fiercer. “I prefer saints who breathe.”We moved. The two guards on my door were new enough to pride themselves on being bored. They straightened; I let them see me, dress, hair, a princess taking air, the sc
A Crown Cut with Salt Chapter ThirtyFive: Silk and Steel
They gave me four guards, then six, then eight. They learned nothing. Palaces are ships if you treat them properly: there are companionways you only see when your hands smell of soap and doors that open for women with water on their sleeves. The guards tramped after my shadow through the big halls, boots loud on mosaic, and I stepped out from under myself in the laundries, the sculleries, the ribbon rooms where no one counts girls. Esme taught me which baskets pass walls like ghosts. I taught Esme how to make a key forget whose pocket it came from.Three dawns. The clerk had written it like a fact. On the fourth morning, I was to be sealed into a carriage with swan seals and a future tasteless as unseasoned bread. I smiled for it.The palace loved me or loved the trouble I made for the people it disliked. Maids became a tide with intention. They learned my stride, and I learned theirs. A seamstress with pricked thumbs palmed me a needle longer than it should be and
A Crown Cut with Salt Chapter ThirtyFour: Return, Without Relief
The three days back rode me like a borrowed horse, obedient, unloved. The flagship kept me above with officers who pretended my presence was air and not weather; below, iron measured my crew’s hours one clink at a time. I walked the rail and wore a path between anger and fear and something softer I refused to name. Every bell rang a different fate: my father’s face when he saw me; Seraphine’s smile when she decided who I was again; Kade’s shoulders going stubborn under chains. Vey kept his distance and his courtesy. Twice he brought me tea that tasted like apology. I drank it and did not absolve him.We made the royal docks at noon on a day that looked like it had been polished for the purpose. Guards lined the pier in their braids and borrowed bravery. The swan flag remembered its posture. And there, hatless, jaw set too carefully, stood Rowan. Not a king I had dreamed as a child, not a monster I had trained as a fugitive. Just a man who’d misplaced his daughter and found
A Crown Cut with Salt Chapter ThirtyThree: The Net and the Knife
By noon, the cold seam gave us back to the world like a favour returned, grudging, done. The wind eased two points and then one more, the kind of slackening that makes canvas sigh and men reach for oars they swore they’d sworn off at seventeen.“Catspaws,” Harp muttered, squinting at the water’s cat’s-foot dimples wandering across blue. “Teasing bitch.”“Set sweeps,” Kade said. No drama. Just work. “No splashing like drunks. Quiet hands.”We ran out the long oars, six to a side, old muscle over new pride. The Wraith took the shove with melancholy and moved anyway. Ahead, the shore lines were low and sulking, a lee that would love to keep us. Behind and to windward, the swans reset their hymn: cutters creeping like beads on a string, frigates fanning, flagship keeping the measure.“Powder’s sweating,” Luth warned, shaking his head at the caisson like a disappointed uncle.“Keep it as dry as you keep me,” Jas said, and Luth snorted blasphem
A Crown Cut with Salt Chapter ThirtyTwo: The Choir of Guns
The swans came on like a hymn you don’t get to choose, measured, layered, inevitable. Five hulls: two cutters quick and clean, two frigates with proper opinions, and the flagship with a jaw full of doctrine. The wind had decided they should be here, and wind is a politician when it likes the audience.“Northing holds for an hour,” I said, squinting past the glare, chart in my head. “Then the tide forks, warm edge, cold gut. They’ll take the fast water and think it’s wisdom. We’ll take the colder cut and let it give us a hand where it looks like a fist.”“Cold it is,” Kade said. “Harp, haul for northerly. Jas, teeth in, not out, no first bite. Freckles, eyes on the powder, not the prettier things.”“I don’t know prettier things,” Freckles lied, grinning because he was young enough to. “Aye, Captain.”The Wraith lifted her chin to the north, and the sea answered in cross hatch, little slants that promised more when you added speed. Lenses in the fla
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