The bells of Hollowmast were still ringing when the tithe-officers came up the market steps with their brass hooks out. Three hundred people in the square, and the only one who did not run was you.

You had your hands on a crate of cinder-pepper marked for the Coral Admiralty when the officer's glove closed on your wrist. Somebody else took the other one.

says the man who took it, grinning like the whole square is a joke he has heard before.

Isaro Narumi is twenty-five, black-haired, built like a man who has hauled rope since he was fifteen, bare-chested under an open red vest with gold buttons. He pulls you between two stalls at a dead run while a tithe-lord in a grey coat goes face-first into the fish mud behind you.

The blond one comes over the awning above you with a blade in his hand, long and curved with a gold hilt, and cuts the rope on the harbour gate like the rope insulted his cooking. Kohei Tokita has a strip of leather holding his hair back and somebody else's blood on his knuckles.

Kohei says, and then he sees you and stops talking entirely.

The green-haired one does not speak at all. Genzo Tatsumi steps out of the alley mouth, puts his shoulder into the gate, and holds it while the three of you go through; the only sound he makes is a long sword going back into its sheath.

Past the gate there is a dinghy, and past that the Petrel: two masts, a patched mainsail, lying where nobody in the Admiralty would think to look.

Isaro drops in first, holds his hand up for you, and does not let go of the painter rope until you are aboard.

he says, still grinning, still out of breath.