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The lower market ran along the harbour wall, and it took her a while to work out why it felt so different down here.

Then she had it. The city climbed behind her, tier on tier, and from down on the fish steps the rooftops stood between the harbour and the northern cliffs. You could not see the Fracture from this street. Not a seam, not a glow. Nothing above the chimney skyline but sky.

And it showed. People talked to each other here.

She found her galls at a stall kept by a woman with salt-cracked hands who weighed them on brass scales and did not haggle.

It was the first hour since she arrived that nobody had wanted anything from her.

The tide was out, and the whole harbour smelled of it: weed and tar, and the particular sweetness of fish that has not yet turned. Boats lay over on their sides in the mud with their ropes gone slack. Three women sat along the wall above them, mending a net between them, passing its weight back and forth without once looking down at their hands. Further along, a man was frying something in a shallow pan of oil, and whatever it was, the queue for it went round the corner of the fish steps.

There were cats everywhere. Under the stalls, along the barrels, one asleep in an empty crate in the full sun with its paws turned up.

She bought a twist of hot fish from the man with the pan because the queue had convinced her, and ate it standing with her back against the warm stone of the wall. For a while, she was simply a girl on a sea wall with oil on her fingers. Her village had a wall like this one. Smaller, and with worse fish.

For an hour, Eryssan was any coastal town.

Then she began to notice things.

Where the market met the fish steps, a wall had been cracked in some recent tremor and had since been patched with fresh mortar. Strangely, there was glass in the mortar. It was tiny and bright; scattered through the grey like sugar through bread. A small girl had her fingers pressed flat against it, and as Maia watched, her mother snatched the hand away and scrubbed it hard against her apron, as if the child had put it in something filthy.

Further along, in the lee of an upturned boat, children were playing. One boy stood inside a chalk circle with his arms held out. The others chanted and threw pebbles at him, and whenever he flinched and stepped over the line, they cheered.

“What’s the game?” Maia asked, walking up to them.

A girl with her front teeth missing looked up at her. “Guardian. He has to hold the gap.”

“I see, and what are the stones?”

“That’s us,” the girl said. “We’re the town.”

“Right,” she replied. Of course they were the town.

She was about to go back to her room when she saw a young man walking the length of the harbour wall with a satchel over his shoulder. He was pale, lightly armoured, unhurried. People stepped aside for him without looking at him, as if they were stepping around a puddle.

He stopped at a baker’s stall and set a coin down on the board.

The baker looked at the coin. Then he drew a cloth over the loaves, all of them, still steaming.

“I’m ’fraid we’re closed now,” he said, not looking up.

The man picked up his coin and to Maia’s surprise didn’t argue. His face and his posture did not change at all. She watched as he simply walked on.

The afternoon sun was already low over the western water and every shadow on the harbour stretched long and east behind its owner. Curiously, she noted this man’s ran north. It lay along the stones against the grain of all the others, pointing north past the rooftops, at the one thing you could not see from this street.

Umbralyn.

She’d heard this story before - the one about shadows that would not obey a lantern - and always assumed it was a storyteller’s flourish. But now, she stood very still on the harbour steps and knew it to be true, and wondered how true some of the other stories were.

She walked over to the baker.

“He had the money?” she asked.

“Yes, ’e did.”

“Why did you say you were closed? The bread is still steaming.”

“Not for them it isn’t.” He looked at her properly then, at her father’s satchel and whatever her accent had given away. “You’re not from around ’ere, are you, Miss?”