Rafe took the paper. It was a modified version of his supply manifest from the Vanewright run, the same document format, the same layout, but with additions. Handwritten notes in themargins citing weather-related losses on competing routes that corresponded, line by line, with dates Rafe had been running the same stretch of river. The implication was surgical. Every storm that had cost another captain cargo in the last three months was matched to a date Rafe had been in the area.
None of it was true. The correlation was manufactured. But it was built well enough that a tired freight runner glancing at it over morning coffee would see a pattern.
"This isn't mine," Rafe said.
"I know that."
"Someone altered my manifest. They had access to my route schedule, my delivery dates, my cargo documentation." He read it again. The handwriting in the margins was practiced. "This took time. This wasn't thrown together this morning."
"No. It wasn't."
Rafe glanced at the dock, the tavern, the tree line beyond the eastern bank. The morning was bright. Clean. The kind of morning that made last night's storm feel like something he'd imagined.
"The timing," he said. "Me going to Isla's cottage, the rumors at the bar, this manifest showing up on the board. All in the same twelve hours."
"Someone was watching you," Dex said. "They saw you go to her place. They had the manifest ready. They planted both at the same time."
"Malrick."
"That's where my money is."
Rafe folded the paper carefully. Put it in his jacket pocket. The anger that moved through him was not the explosive kind. It was slower, colder, the kind that settled into muscle and stayed there. Someone had watched him walk to Isla's cottage. Someone had been close enough to the western path to see it. Then they'd gone to the dock tavern and laid the groundwork fora story that tied him to a stormcaller in a way that made every captain on the river nervous.
"He's not just going after my routes," Rafe said. "He's building a case. Tying me to her publicly, making the connection look strategic. If the river traders believe I've been using weather magic to sabotage competition, I lose every contract I've got."
"Which is exactly what he wants."
"And Isla becomes the weapon in the story whether she knows it or not."
Dex was quiet. He eyed the coffee in his hand like he was considering its merits against something stronger.
"I want the name of every person at that table this morning," Rafe said. "Who they run for, what routes, how long they've been on this stretch. I want to know who the third man was, the one you didn't recognize."
"Already working on it."
"And I want to know how Malrick got my manifest. The original is in my cabin. The only copies went to the Vanewright account and the harbourmaster's office."
"Corwen's office." Dex said it flatly. "Anyone with dock access could have pulled the filing copy overnight. Corwen locks the front but the side window hasn't latched properly since the last storm."
Rafe drank his coffee. It was bitter, over-extracted, the way the dock tavern always made it. The Ashvane was sitting in her mooring with the hull partition open, Rowan's men working steady, the bow rail still bare where Silas's bracket hadn't come back yet.
He was stranded in this town for at least four more days. His ship was open. His manifest was compromised. His presence at a woman's cottage was already turning into a weapon. Every hour he spent here gave Malrick more material to work with.
He finished the coffee. Crushed the cup and threw it in the dock bin.
"Get me those names.”
14
ISLA
The hull plank had carried a residual charge. Faint, embedded in the grain like a fingerprint pressed into wet clay, but unmistakable once she'd held it long enough to feel the frequency. She'd wrapped it in a strip of linen treated with grounding herbs and walked it back to the dock that afternoon, expecting to leave it with one of Rafe’s crew and be gone before anyone noticed.
Rafe had been below deck when she arrived. She could hear him working, the sound of a mallet on wood and his voice giving someone directions that were more detailed than they probably needed to be. She'd left the plank with a man of a short but wiry frame, skittish yellow-green eyes but more inquisitive then threatening, and pale blonde hair at the gangway along with a folded note explaining what she'd found and what the treatment would neutralize. Clean exchange. Professional. Nothing in it that required her to stand on his dock and think about the way his hands had felt on her hips twelve hours ago.
She was thinking about it anyway.
Walking back through town, she took the main path instead of the western cutoff because she needed things from theMercantile and because avoiding the square would feel like hiding, which she refused to do. The afternoon was warm, the storm damage from last night already being managed. A crew was clearing debris from the drainage channel near the bakery, branches and silt packed into the grate. Two women she recognized from the seasonal market were sweeping the steps of the community hall, talking in low voices that stopped when she passed. They'd never stopped talking when she passed before.
