He set his cup down. "Have you used them?"
"Twice. Both times before Hollow Oak."
She watched him look at the pouches spread across the quilt, the labels, the careful organization of it, and saw him understanding something about her that she rarely let anyone close enough to see.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You've been in my bed twice now. I think you've earned a question."
"The legends. The ones about stormcallers. You said at the table that night that they made you into a legend you never asked to be. What did you mean?"
She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. The sun had moved higher, the light warming the bedroom, catching the salt crystals in the nightstand bowl.
"Every story about stormcallers is written by someone who survived one," she said. "The fisherman's account of the night the fleet went down. The village record of the season the sky went wrong. The ballad about the beautiful fae woman who called the wind and drowned the harbor. Notice what's missing from all of those."
"The stormcaller's version."
"We don't get to write our own stories. We're either the tragedy or the weapon. The woman who burned too bright and took everyone with her, or the weapon someone aimed at their enemies. Martyr or monster. Those are the options the legends give us."
"You don't accept either."
"I refuse both." She said it simply. "I'm not here to burn out beautifully for someone else's narrative. I'm not here to be pointed at a stretch of water so someone else can profit. I'm here because I want to live. I want to control what I carry and I want to stay in one place long enough to matter to the people in it. That's it. That's the whole ambition."
He was quiet. The kind of quiet she was learning to read as something other than absence. He wasn't formulating a response or building an argument or preparing to tell her how to fix the problem she'd just described. He was listening.
"Malrick offered me respect for my power," she said. "Dressed it up as partnership. The only man who sees what you really are. That's a seductive pitch for someone who's spent a decade being tolerated at best."
"But?"
"But the respect he was offering was for the power. Not for me. I can tell the difference. You haven't tried to fix me since you sat down at my table that first night. You haven't suggested I try harder, or practice differently, or move further from town. You don’t even hate me for leaving you stranded."
She held his eyes. "That's why I'm sitting here talking to you about salt pouches at eight in the morning instead of packing a bag."
He picked up his coffee and drank it and the silence between them didn't need words because they had already done their work.
After a while he set the cup down and stretched, the sheet falling lower on his hips. He glanced at the clock on the wall above the worktable.
"I should get to the dock," he said. But he didn't move. He sat there against her headboard looking at the salt bowl on the nightstand.
"Stay for breakfast," she said. "I'll make eggs."
"Isla, you dont–"
"I'm hungry. You're hungry. I have eggs. This isn't complicated."
He smiled, an actual smile, quick and warm, that changed his entire face for about two seconds before he pulled it back. But she'd seen it. She intended to cause it again.
She cooked while he dressed. Eggs scrambled with wild chives from the garden, toast from the heavy bread she bought at the bakery every third day, more coffee because one cup was never enough for either of them. He came out of the bedroom in yesterday's clothes with his hair roughly finger-combed and sat at the kitchen table, the same chair he'd sat in the night of the first storm, the same chair he'd sat in when she'd told him about the note. The table was becoming theirs.
"How many varieties of salt do you use?" he asked, watching her cook.
"Three. The coarse sea salt is for general grounding. There's a finer mineral salt from the mountains that works better for precision control, it has a higher iron content. Then there's a black salt that Freya blends for me with volcanic ash and charcoal. That one's specifically for neutralizing fae-charged water."
"Freya makes you custom salt?"
"She's the only apothecary I've ever met who didn't look at me like I was describing a disease when I explained what I needed." She plated the eggs and brought them to the table. "She asked questions. Good ones. Then she went away and came back two weeks later with three pounds of black salt that worked better than anything I'd ever tried."
"That tracks with my experience of her." He picked up his fork. "She told me to go see you about the hull plank with about as much sympathy as a dock inspector."
