"Something like that."
The man shrugged and went back to his drink, which was the right outcome. Rafe finished his coffee, left a fair tip and walked back out into the noon light.
Malrick Sloane did not captain his own vessels anymore. That was the first thing to understand about him. He had three ships registered under two different names, ran three separate trade identities depending on which port he was working, and moved through the river networks with the kind of layered misdirection that took years and a particular kind of patience to build. Rafe had known him for nine years. He'd trusted him for the first two.
They'd started on the same coast, running similar routes, young enough to think that goodwill between competitors waspossible and stupid enough to say so out loud. Malrick had been charming in the way of people who understood how to be useful to whoever they were talking to. He'd also had a faster ship and a looser relationship with port registry requirements, which Rafe had overlooked until he couldn't.
The Kellert account. Six years ago now. Malrick had undercut him on a standing contract Rafe had held for four years, and the undercutting had been clean, technically legal, and built on information that Malrick should not have had access to. Rafe's cargo schedule, his rate negotiations, the contents of a private bid. None of it was information that moved through official channels.
He'd never proven where Malrick got it. He didn't need to. He knew the shape of how Malrick moved, the way you knew a current by what it did to the surface, and what had happened to the Kellert account had Malrick's methodology all through it. Patient, plausibly deniable, and personally satisfying to a man who kept score.
Coming to Hollow Oak to ask after the Ashvane by name was not a casual thing. It was not trade interest or route overlap or professional courtesy. It was Malrick determining that Rafe was stranded and calculating what that was worth. The question was what he'd decided it was worth, and to whom.
Rafe was at the forge by two, which gave him something productive to do with the rest of the afternoon. Silas Greystone ran a tight operation, the space organized and hot. He was enormous, 6'5" with arms that looked like they'd been built for the work rather than developed by it, rich brown hair and dark amber eyes that assessed the bracket Rafe handed him with the quiet thoroughness of someone who'd been doing this long enough to see the problem before it was explained.
"Torqued under load," Silas said. "The rail bent and the bracket tried to compensate. You can't reshape this, the metal's stressed through the base."
"Recast it?"
"Full recast. I'll need the rail measurements too, the wood's going to want a new fit when you put it back." He set the bracket on the bench. "Two days."
"I've got time." Rafe looked at the forge, the tools laid in order along the wall. "I was told you'd worked with unusual materials before. Properties that weren't strictly standard."
Silas looked at him sideways.
"I'm not asking about your business," Rafe said. "I'm asking because I may need some advice on materials that interact with magical conductivity. My hull took a static discharge in the storm. I want to know if there's anything in the caulking or the iron fittings I should be concerned about long-term."
Silas picked up the bracket again, turned it over. "You could talk to Freya at the apothecary. She'd know more about the residual effects than I would." A beat. "My wife would too, but she's not taking consultations at the moment."
"The fire witch," Rafe said.
"Word gets around, even to passerbys I see."
"My crew is thorough in looking into people helping with our boat."
Something that might have been the beginning of a dry smile moved across Silas's face and disappeared. "Tell Freya what kind of discharge it was. She'll know if it left anything in the wood worth worrying about."
"Appreciate it."
Rafe left the forge with two days to wait on the bracket and one more name added to his working list of people in this town who knew more than they said about the relationship between magic and the physical world. He was building a picture ofHollow Oak the way he built a picture of any port he worked in, by accumulation and cross-reference, understanding who knew what and who talked to whom.
It was the same process he was using to build a picture of what Malrick was doing here, and the two pictures kept finding unexpected edges in common.
Dex was at the Ashvane when he got back, checking the cured caulking on the port side with a penknife, pressing the seam at intervals with focused care.
"North channel freight runner," Rafe said. "Goes by Hent, I think. Runs out of the Ardenmere basin. He saw a private charter last week he didn't recognize."
"I had a similar conversation this morning," Dex said, without particular emphasis, still pressing the seam. "Petch at the dock bar mentioned a small charter that didn't file a mooring record. Came in quiet, single night, gone by morning. That was four days ago."
"Before we arrived."
"By one day." Dex folded the knife and put it in his pocket. "Someone was here ahead of us."
"Someone who knew we were coming."
Dex's expression did not change but he'd gone still in the way of a fox that had just identified a smell it didn't like. "Malrick has contacts on the north channel. Always has. If he knew your route schedule?—"
"He knew it," Rafe said. "The question is what he's planning to do with the week I'm giving him."
