Her Father's Poison

The tide chart for the night of October the third said the water would peak at eleven forty and fall back clean by one in the morning. I had copied it out myself that afternoon, the lamp hissing at my elbow, my father's cough coming through the floorboards from his bed above. The numbers were good. The numbers were always good.

So when the harbor began to breathe wrong at midnight, I was already on the wharf with my coat buttoned to my chin, telling myself I had come down for air.

The Bay of Fundy does not have tides the way other places have tides. It has a hand that lifts the whole harbor by its collar and sets it down again, and if you know the hand, you know the night. I had read the water since I was six years old, sitting on my mother's lap in the pilot boat with her hand over mine on the tiller. The water says where the rocks are, she told me. The water says where a ship went down. All you have to do is listen.

That night the water said something new.

It came in against the pilings at a rhythm I had never charted, three short slaps and then a long drag, like a wolf testing a fence. The fog lay on the harbor in a thick white fleece, and the foghorn at the point sounded twice and stopped, which it never did. My wolf came awake in my chest and turned her ears, and I felt her nose lift to test the air.

Salt. Diesel. Kelp. And under those, faint as a stain on a handkerchief, a smell I had not met in the harbor before. Wet iron, and something green and bitter.

I went along the wharf at a run, my boots ringing on the planks. The lamp over the fish house threw a yellow circle onto the water, and past the edge of the circle, out where the bar should have been smooth and harmless, the sea was churning. Something long and pale rolled in the surf and slid back.

The bell at the harbor mouth began to toll, pulled by no hand I could see.

I did not stop to think. I pulled the rope from the cleat, dropped the skiff into the water, and was rowing before the fog closed over the wharf behind me. The current took the bow and turned it toward the bar, and I let it, because I could hear the wreck now, the deep grinding groan of a hull being worked over rocks like a tooth in a jaw.

The schooner was on her side. Two masts down in the surf, the sails wrapped around the rigging like wet laundry, and her name washed away under a scum of foam and splintered wood. She was not a Tidal boat. No pack marks on her bow, no green stripe of ours along her rail. Rogue, my wolf said, and her hackles lifted.

I heard a voice in the water. Not a call for help. A curse, low and even, the way a man swears when he is too cold and too tired to shout about it.

I shipped the oars and leaned over the gunwale with the lantern out. A hand came out of the foam and caught the edge of the boat, and then a head, then shoulders. The man hauled himself up the side of the skiff with the last strength left in his arms, and he rolled into the bottom of it and lay there on his back, breathing.

He had platinum blond hair, short and flattened to his skull with seawater, and when he opened his eyes they were light brown, the color of strong tea held up to a lamp. Water ran off his jaw. His coat was torn across the shoulder and there was salt crusted white on the seams of it.

He looked at me for a moment without any surprise at all, which told me more about him than the wreck had.

"You picked a bad night to be out rowing," he said. "Tide reader."

My hand was still on the lantern. I had not told him what I was, and no one in Tidal Bay had to say the word out loud when I was in the boat. "How do you know what I am?"

"I know a pilot boat when I see one." He pushed himself up on one elbow. "And no one else would come out onto the bar in this fog for a strange ship. The pack up there would let a rogue drown and call it law."

"Maybe I should have."

"You still can." He said it without any heat, as if it were simply one of the options available to me.

The current shoved the skiff against the wreck, and the wreck shifted, and the sea around us rang with the sound of iron and wood finding each other. I grabbed the stern line and got the boat turned, and I rowed us back toward the harbor mouth with my teeth set, because the tide was already falling under me and the bar was not done taking things tonight.

He lay still and let me row. Now and then the lantern light found his face, and I saw that his eyelashes were long and dark, and that there was a half smile on him that had nothing to do with being rescued. It was the smile of a man taking stock.

"You are going to want to know what was on my ship," he said.

"I know what was on your ship." The bitter smell had followed us off the wreck. I had taken a deep breath of it when I leaned over the side, and my wolf had sneezed and shaken herself, and I knew the green bite of it. I had smelled it in the healer's cabinet three years ago when my father first began to cough. "You had wolfsbane aboard."

The half smile did not move.

"What is your name?" I said.

"Roan."

"I have heard that name." My hands were steady on the oars. That surprised me. "The Council of Alphas has a price on it."

"I have heard that too." He turned his head and looked at the dark water slipping past us. "The price goes up every year. It is flattering, in its way."

We came out of the fog onto the back side of the wharf, and I tied up in the black water between the fish house and the old boathouse, where the lamp does not reach. He climbed out onto the ladder and stood dripping on the planks, taller than I expected and not shaking.

The harbor smells reached him all at once. I watched him lift his head and take them in, one slow breath, and I watched him go still.

"What is it?" I said.

He did not answer me. He turned his head toward the pack house on the hill, and the windows where the lamps burned in my father's rooms, and his face changed. Whatever he had come to Tidal Bay for, it was up there.

I stepped back. "You need to go. Before the patrol comes down the hill. If they find you here with me they will ask me questions I don't have answers for."

He looked at me, and he nodded, and he did not move. "One thing first." He reached inside his coat, and my wolf surged up hard enough to make my hands curl, but he only brought out a small flat tin, beaten and dented, sealed with wax. He held it out to me. "You read the water. Read the tide chart you made for tonight and tell me why my ship went onto a bar that should have been deep."

"I made that chart. It was right."

"Then someone moved the channel." He put the tin into my hand, and his fingers brushed my wrist, and the touch went up my arm and into my chest and set off something behind my ribs like a struck match. I felt my wolf come to her feet and turn her whole body toward him. His hand closed over mine for half a heartbeat, and his eyes went wide, and I knew he felt it too.

He pulled back first. He was quick about it. He turned and went down the ladder into the dark between the buildings, and the fog closed over him, and I stood on the wharf with the tin in my hand and my heart going like a bird in a box.

The harbor water slapped the pilings. Three short, one long.

I looked down at the tin. The wax seal was pressed with a mark I had seen a hundred times, stamped into every crate that came through the dockmaster's office.

It was the mark of my father's own pack.