1
RAFE
The river knew something was wrong before Rafe did.
He'd run this stretch of water more times than he could count. He knew the slow bend east of the gorge, the widening current that announced the valley, the first glint of Moonmirror Lake through the tree line like a coin dropped at the bottom of a green glass. In late spring it was usually easy water. Swollen from snowmelt but predictable, manageable, the kind of current that let a man's mind wander if he let it.
His mind wasn't wandering, though. His wolf wouldn't let it.
Rafe stood at the helm of the Ashvane with one hand on the wheel and the other braced against the rail, watching the sky do something he didn't like. The clouds to the northwest had been building since midday and not the slow gray stacking of normal weather. This was something faster, darker, with an interior light that flickered in patterns too rhythmic to be natural. He'd seen storm fae work before. Twice, at distance, both times at sea. He recognized the precision of it, the way lightning didn't scatter but chose.
"Cap." Dex came up from the hold, wiping grease from his hands onto a rag that had long since given up on beingclean. Short, wiry, with a river-rat's permanent squint and a fox shifter's inconvenient knack for smelling trouble early. "You seeing what I'm seeing?"
"I'm seeing it."
"Because that doesn't look like spring weather."
"No."
Dex tucked the rag into his back pocket and leaned on the rail beside him, studying the sky with the particular expression he wore when he was deciding whether something was worth worrying about. He'd been with Rafe seven years. He knew when to push and when to shut up.
He shut up.
The Ashvane was a fifty-foot working boat made of river-hardened timber and iron-reinforced hull, built for cargo and built to last, with a shallow enough draft to navigate the channels feeding into Moonmirror Lake. She wasn't fast, but she was steady, and Rafe had learned to trust her the way he trusted few things: absolutely, and based on evidence. Right now she was pulling slightly to port for no reason he could see, the wheel resisting his hand with a subtle, strange pressure.
He let the wheel go for three seconds. She drifted left.
"The current's shifted," he said.
Dex peered over the rail at the water. "Upriver from a dock town that's been getting squalls. Probably runoff from the higher elevations."
"The current doesn't shift left in this channel. It never has."
The fox had no answer for that.
The lake came fully into view around the next bend, spread wide and dark between its wooded banks, and Rafe felt the hair on his arms stand up. The water had gone a color he had never seen in a lake. Not the deep green-blue of a healthy spring source but something closer to pewter, flat and matte and lightless, like the surface had stopped reflecting anything above it. The mistthat usually hung at the far edges had pulled inward, condensing over the center of the lake in a column that shifted and breathed.
Rafe's wolf rose to the surface of his skin the way it did before a fight.Pay attention.
"Get Pell and Orick up here," Rafe said. "And break out the storm lines. All of them."
Dex was already moving.
Rafe had made this run over four times since Hollow Oak opened trade with his network. It was a straightforward stop. Radio ahead, come in on the eastern dock, unload Maren's wool order and two pallets of dry goods for the Mercantile, spend a night at the dockside tavern if the weather allowed, and push back out by morning. Simple. He did not linger in Hollow Oak. It was a town that had a way of pulling people in and keeping them, and Rafe had routes to run and contracts to honor and no interest in being kept anywhere.
That had been the plan when he left port three days ago. The plan he had the moment the water called to him.
Pell came up from the stern looking foul-tempered about it. He was a big man, half-troll on his mother's side, with hands like harbor cleats and a dislike of weather changes that he traced back to a childhood near the sea. "We stopping here or pushing through to the north landing?"
"Eastern dock. Same as always."
"Storm's coming in fast."
"I know."
"I'm just saying, if we pushed another two hours upriver we'd clear the worst of it."
Rafe looked at him and Pell stopped talking.
