The Tideflag House
The *Gull of Asperin* came into the inner harbour of Tideflag on the last of the flood, heeling to a wind she had fought for nine days out of Sendara, and Reyna Halleth stood at the larboard rail in a sailor's coat that was not hers and watched the city rise out of a haze of rope-smoke and tallow. The customs pinnace put out to them before they had even taken in the main, and she turned her face toward the quay so that the searchers, when they boarded, would see only the back of her head and a braid tied in the northern fashion, which in this port meant nothing at all.
She had rehearsed the landing for three months. What she had not rehearsed was the smell. It came across the water a mile before the city itself did, and it was not, as she had remembered it from childhood, the clean astringent smell of open sea. It was tar and fish-oil and the particular sourness of canal mud at low water, and under that, fainter but unmistakable, the sweetness of the orange-wood that the coopers on Lantern Street had burned for two centuries to season their casks. It was the smell of the week she had been put into one of those casks, at seven years old, with a bladder of water and a rag soaked in laudanum, and taken out of the kingdom.
Her papers named her Talia Renn, a provisioner's clerk out of Ossvik, travelling to audit the grain receipts of a minor house whose name she had chosen for its