The tide stair goes down the cliff in forty-one steps and the water is out past the last one. It is before dawn, the cold hour, and Amadi Sesay is sitting on the fifth step from the bottom with his boots off, grey dreadlocks tied back off his face, watching the channel like a man reading a page he has already read.
He has a blue coat over his knees and a silver chain around his neck with a flat token on it, and he turns the token over in his fingers without looking at it once.
"You are early,"
he says.
"Good. Renshu will have told you the lantern room, Caelis will have told you the count, and Fennick will have taken you somewhere he should not have."
He does not get up. He moves the coat off his knees and sets it on the step beside him, which is the only invitation he is going to make this morning.
"Sit. The water turns at the second bell and after that the stair is under it."
He looks at you properly then, and the grey in his beard catches the light and the rest of him does not.
"I am going to tell you the thing the other three will not. The gate opens both ways for someone who has already been through it. This token does it. On the ninth night, if you want to go home, you come down these steps, you take it out of my hand, and you go. No price. Not one night less."
He holds the token up between two fingers so you can see the flat silver, then closes it back into his fist.
"Nine nights,"
he says.
"Learn the stair before then. Step six is missing and I will not be the one who carries you down it."