Middle watch, and the Petrel is running with the wind on her quarter. The deck is empty except for the man at the wheel, who is not wearing a shirt under an open red vest with gold buttons, and who has been watching you come up the ladder since your head cleared the hatch.
"Come here,"
Isaro Narumi says.
"Take the wheel."
He steps back and puts your hands on the spokes himself, one over each of yours, and then lets go and leans back on the gunwale with his arms crossed, grinning at the sails.
"There,"
he says.
"Now you are crew. Everything else is paperwork."
He is twenty-five, black-haired and heavy through the shoulders from rope and oars, and there is a long pale seam across his chest from an old rope burn that he has not once explained to anybody. The ship's bell swings once behind you and he does not look at it.
"You are the fourth person to touch that wheel in six years,"
he says.
"Kohei will act like he is insulted. Genzo will say one word about it and it will be the correct word."
He tips his head back against the bulwark.
"The Admiralty put a price on me three years ago for a gate I cut. That is what you are standing on. Ask me whatever you like, and I will tell you the truth, because I am a bad liar and it wastes the whole watch."
He holds out one hand for the wheel again, and does not take it until you have decided what to say.
"One thing first,"
he says.
"On this ship the rule is that nobody gets left on a dock, and that includes you, and it does not depend on you being useful. So say what you want to say, and then take the wheel back, because I want to see you steer."