"Don't."
"I was going to say tall."
Rafe walked past him down toward the dock and Dex fell in behind him without being asked, because in seven years that was how it worked. The Ashvane sat in her mooring looking sorry for herself, the bent bow rail and the limp rigging visible even from the bank, and Rowan's crew had already started on the hull seam with caulking tools and the focused silence of people doing skilled work.
Rafe stood at the top of the gangway and looked at his ship and tried to do what he was good at, which was making a plan and working it. He had materials to source and a forge appointment to make and a damaged partition below to assess, and he had a week to get through in a town that now had considerably more complications than it'd had last night.
His wolf had chosen a storm fae. Of every creature in every port he'd run in the last ten years, every fae and witch and shifter who'd crossed his path, his wolf had looked at a woman who couldn't fully control weather, who had a history of capsizing boats, who had just implied that his concern about herhandling his ship was an overreaction and had gone quiet with recognition.
A storm fae. Rare the way disasters were rare. Powerful the way things were powerful when they had no ceiling. Carrying around enough suppressed emotion to take out a dock when her concentration slipped. Just his luck.
6
ISLA
She was at the shoreline for an hour before the water started listening.
The lake was patient with her in a way people rarely were. She stood with her boots off and her feet in the cold shallows and let the connection run loose, not trying to control it so much as give it somewhere to go that wasn't the sky. The afternoon had gone gray and soft, the kind of overcast that meant nothing threatening, just clouds moving through, and she breathed with it and let the tension in her hands drain down through her feet and into the water.
It helped. Slowly, grudgingly, it helped.
What didn't help was that every time she got close to quiet, his face came back. The moment he'd let go of her wrist and gone still, the anger just dropping out of him, replaced by something else. She could not read that man, and that bothered her more than the confrontation had. His anger she could work with. His silence was something else.
She picked up a flat stone from the shallows and turned it over in her fingers, the cold weight of it grounding her the way cold things did, and made herself think about what sheactually knew. He was a wolf shifter. He ran river trade and had been through Hollow Oak before. He was stranded because of her storm and he had every right to be furious, and she had apologized, and she had meant it. She had also told him that the town accepted her and he could deal with it, which was true, and she was not going to feel bad about saying so.
She threw the stone. It skipped four times before it sank.
Her father had never made it that far. Two skips, maximum, and he'd laugh about it every time, this big man with silver in his hair and salt on his jacket, standing at the edge of whatever water they'd found that week, throwing stones like he was trying to leave something behind him. He'd been the last of them besides her. Storm fae thinned out over generations the way fires thinned out when they burned everything available, and by the time Isla was ten there were only the two of them, moving from coast to coast and staying a season before the weather made them unwelcome.
He'd died on a dock. Different dock, different crew, same story. His storm had caught a fishing fleet in a bad turn of tide and two boats went under and the men who survived came back to shore with their losses and their grief and they'd found her father because he was the weather and the weather was him. She was seventeen and had watched it from the tree line because he'd told her to run and she had. She had never stopped running until Hollow Oak. She'd heard rumors of the town for years. A place that knew what magic was, that had its own relationship with the uncontrollable. A place that might let her stay and understand. She'd tested that theory carefully. A year of careful.
Another stone. Three skips.
She was so focused on the water that she didn't hear Twyla coming until the woman was fifteen feet away, picking her way along the shoreline path in soft leather boots, a cloth bag over one arm.
Twyla Honeytree looked, as she always looked, like someone's lovely younger sister who happened to have seen every war ever fought and remembered all of them. Wheat-colored hair loose over her shoulders, light brown eyes with those flecks of brightness that caught the light like something alive in them, a face that suggested late twenties and a presence that suggested something considerably older. She ran Griddle and Grind, she matchmade, she meddled and she knew things she had no business knowing, and she was the closest thing Isla had to a friend in Hollow Oak.
"You don't have to look like I'm here to collect a debt," Twyla said, setting her bag down on a flat rock and pulling out a thermos. "I brought tea."
"I'm fine."
"I know you're fine. I brought tea anyway." She poured two cups without asking and held one out until Isla took it. "I felt last night from the café. Woke me up at three in the morning, which I thought was rude."
"I'm sorry."
"You apologize like it's a reflex." Twyla sat on the rock beside her bag and wrapped both hands around her own cup and looked at the lake with the comfort of someone who had sat beside a great many bodies of water over a great many years. "What happened wasn't catastrophic. The dock held. The town held. You held." She paused. "Mostly."
"The ship didn't hold."
"Ships get repaired."
"Tell that to the captain."
Twyla's eyes moved sideways at her with a brightness that Isla had learned to be cautious about. "I saw you two outside Diana's inn this morning."
"Then you saw me walk away."
"I saw you walk away after a considerable conversation." The brightness did not dim. "He's been through here before. Lupeus. Runs a clean operation, fair trade, doesn't cause trouble. Rowan speaks well of him." She sipped her tea. "You know he's a wolf."
