The Storm That Keeps Us
The storm came up out of the southwest on the afternoon of the second day after the oath. The signs had been in the sky since dawn — a long, high bank of cloud the pilots called *mare's kidneys* for the shape of it, and a drop in the glass that no experienced shoreman needed to be told about — and by mid-afternoon the harbourmaster had struck the small-craft signal from his yard and the outer roads were emptying of every fisher with the sense to come in. By the turn of the second bell the wind was at a steady force seven, rising, and a rain had started that was not a rain in the way the rain on the quay had been a rain. It was solid water moving horizontally.
Reyna had been moved, for the third time in four days, to a house belonging neither to Venna nor to Hest but to a member of the pilots' guild who had sheltered her overnight out of the oath and would shelter her another night out of the oath but made it clear, over a supper of salt pork and boiled greens, that the oath would not stretch to a third. She did not resent him. He had three children and a wife and an apprentice, and the Chancellor's people were known now, and the house had been watched since noon. She would go back to the Crescent at dusk. In the meanwhile she sat at the window and watched the harbour go from grey to black.
It was while she was watching that the *Stormhold* came in.
She was a seventy-four,