The oak door was nine feet tall, carved with rich details that resembled waves. A sun gilded in silver adorned the left door, while a silver moon adorned the right. A depiction of Skoverdant was carved in the centre, complete only when both doors were closed. Lyrua pulled the door open easily; it was not as heavy as the ridiculous steel in Manataklos. Those were more like sliding walls than proper doors.

Inside was a truly gorgeous marriage of architecture and decoration. The wooden walls were polished and lacquered to shine, and even the arching support beams were round and carved with pretty patterns. Embroidered crimson rugs embellished the floors of each hall, and the reception desk was polished and lacquered to match.

She assumed he would be on the upper floor, so she turned towards the stairs, ignoring the desk and the man who sat at it.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he called out, frantically waving her back. “You can’t walk around in here without an appointment. This is Town Hall, not a market.” He looked at her with disgust, leering at the boot prints she left on the rug. “Are you lost?”

It was such an uncomfortable feeling, to be looked down upon. She sighed, realizing she might have been better off asking Lander’s father to join her after all. She had to trust herself. It was not as though she spent her whole twenty five years learning nothing. She rolled the stiffness out of her shoulders.

“I need to speak with Mayor Osvaldus,” she told him, trying to return the scorn with her tone and posture, as the nobles would do. His well tailored and ironed tunic, with brass buttons up the front, was not so nice that he should be looking down on her.

“Well tell me your name and what your business is and I’ll see when he is available. Typically, for less urgent matters, the wait will be a month or so. Busy times.” He slipped a short paper onto the desk, and clicked open a case of stamps.

“My name is Sermeledy Forrow,” she lied. This was not someone she could trust her real name to. She needed to consider how these kinds of bureaucracies functioned, and the pessimistic attitude of the man she was addressing. If she spoke wrongly, he would immediately dismiss her as another stuck up, entitled commoner. How could she seem genuine, honest, and urgent? “I am an old acquaintance of his actually,” she said. The best lies were seasoned with truth, and the more the better. The man looked up at her, and she began to panic as she realised her mistake. “It has been a little while since I was in town; I wonder how he is doing. Is he even in today?” She stifled a sigh as the wrinkles of his scowl loosened a little. She almost had him thinking she was trying to slip past protocol.

“He barely gets to go home these days. Highest Tide means nothing but meetings.” He scribbled her alias on the paper, spelling it differently than she would have. He was not a Signature Recorder then, thank goodness. She had not even thought of that before speaking.

“What is your business with Mayor Osvaldus? Business, Complaint, Emergency, Other, or Personal?” He stared at her, his hand hovering eagerly above his stamps and their pad of ink.

“I… It might be a complaint, I am not sure if he would consider it an emergency.” She had no idea what she was going to tell him. She had to think quickly, but she kept getting distracted thinking of how much easier it would be if she could be the High Queen. Looking as she did, with her hair tossed about and her clothes still damp and muddy, her true name would likely only garner a laugh anyway.

“Describe it and I’ll decide.” The clerk lamented the delay with a disappointed tone. He took his quill again and began to write everything she said.

Unprepared, she blurted out the first thing that came to mind, drawing on her recent experiences for inspiration. “There are soldiers disturbing the Eddying Woods!” she said enthusiastically, trying to channel the energy of folk who came to the Citadel to complain. “Look what happened to my clothes!” She pulled at the side of her blouse where mud had dried enough to flake off. “Skoverdant was so agitated by these armed folk stomping about that he nearly tossed the entire place upside down. And this after talk of a dracolisk in the cliffs.”

She watched with satisfaction as his eyes widened, and gave him a moment before continuing. “Here I thought Manataklos was turning dangerous, with the Inquisitors bringing dracolisks in, but if they are marching on West Eddy already, I mean to be on the first ship out. Can dracolisks swim?” She prayed she was not applying too much urgency, but the look on his face told her he believed at least some of it.

“Uh,” he said blankly, “are you sure about all that?”

She nodded. “I am sure about the men in the woods and Skoverdant.” She brushed more dirt from her blouse. "Look at the stitching of this blouse. Do I look like some dirt-eating peasant to you? My servant was injured. Who is going to clean my clothes now?" Some of the dirt landed on his desk and he snarled at it. “I did not see any dracolisk myself but there are rumours. The Spellwards are trying to hold the rumours in, they are crawling all over the cliffs. I was lucky to get into the woods.” She sighed at the state of her clothes. “If you can call this luck.”

The clerk picked a stamp with a shaky hand. Sweat was beginning to leak from his brow. He pressed the stamp onto the ink pad and then stamped the paper three times across the bottom with ‘EMERGENCY.’

“Are you all right?” she asked, feigning concern.

He grunted. “Sounds like the invasion from Manataklos that Osvaldus feared is finally coming. They’ll seize our ships and force us to pay taxes. Likely hang the lot of us Town Hall folk and replace us with their own.” He filed the form in a bin by itself, then his shaking hands knocked the bin to the ground as he immediately took it back out. “The most dangerous place to be is under the foot of Manataklos, Osvaldus always said, and it’s only a matter of time before the boot comes down. The Crown has forgotten what Highest Tide looks like and now they think we’re not giving them enough. There is no way this ends well.” He stood up, stumbling over his bin, and hurried for the stairs, the form creasing in the press of his fingers.

She felt proud that he was wrong about her forgetting the threat of Highest Tide. They owed Lander and Ove for convincing her to heed Osvaldus’ words, else she may have followed through on her mother’s plan.

The clerk hurried up the stairs and she strained to follow him, but then he took off running. She jogged to keep up, feeling the ache in her legs with each step. She caught up with him when he stopped at a pair of intricate doors with winding copper handles. He knocked twice before pulling the door open and stepping inside.

She slipped in after him. Twelve large sailors sat around an oval table, each intimidating in their own way, but sharing the sweaty, salted stench of folk who lived and breathed the sea life. She only recognized Osvaldus; clean shaven and bald, his pointed chin made his head look like an egg. His clothes were neatly pressed as expected. She made eye contact with him, and had to hope the vacant look on his face was recognition.

The clerk held up the form to read from it, but Lyrua snatched it out of his hand before he could speak, and leaned to whisper in his ear. “You must have things you would like to take care of, let me report to the Mayor.” His eyes flicked back and forth between them before finally she simply shoved him out of the room.

She stared down the folk at the table. “I need to speak with the Mayor urgently.” She held up the bottom of the form so they could see the stamps. “Dismiss your guests,” she commanded Osvaldus.

He turned pale. “Why… why don’t we speak in the next room?” He limped over to the door, supporting himself on an elaborate jewelled cane that likely cost more than most people’s homes. Was that cane meant as a display of defiance against her? It seemed to have more jewels in it every time she saw it.

She let him lead her to a vacant room down the hall, and he shut the door behind her. She put the report in his outstretched hand.

“That form contains some truth,” she told him as he read it, “but mostly I needed to meet you without revealing who I am.”

He finished skimming the narrow form and looked at her. “You’re attacking West Eddy? No… then you wouldn’t be here. So you’re threatening me.”

“I am not my mother,” she said. The words resounded in her thoughts. “She was…”

“A bitch.” Osvaldus spat, unusually bold for the cowardly old man.

“Yes,” Lyrua admitted. “Though I would have said… Well, it does not matter. I am not here to threaten you. There was an attempt on my life, and I need to be away from the city for a time.”

He heaved with relief. Stumbling over to the window, he pulled the shutters open to let the air in. “Gods behave. Here I thought you had come to finish me off yourself before the attack… or something.”

“You overestimate your importance to me,” she said, looking down on the living disgrace disguised in fine clothes. “I am simply distancing myself from Manataklos for a little while.”

He dragged a chair out and placed it under the window to sit down. “Shame the assassins didn’t try a little harder.”

“You believe thousands of the King’s Army, hundreds of stalkers, two shrills and a dracolisk is not trying? Not to even mention the benaffrygt that wandered by, seduced by the shrills’ dark auras.” Lyrua scoffed. “I should have saved some for you.”

He stared at her with a slack jaw empty of words.

“The Spellwards destroyed them all.”

“Good,” he finally said with trembling lips, “very good.”

“A small group of Wards will be coming here, to ensure nothing endangers the town in my wake. They will not interfere with you. You will not even know who they are. Captain Spilde will be known to Stalherre, so ask him if you feel you need to know. The only things I need from you are a vial of Dew of the Moonflower Tree, and passage on a ship into Kraken’s Boundary. Or all the way to Morgen if any of the captains can be convinced to make the trip without being told my identity.“

“Why…? Dew of the Moonflower Tree? You could just purchase one… There is a merch—”

“No. I need it for Ove. Your idiot guards put her in silver and she is silverstale. I intend to buy Oil from that merchant if he truly has it, but why buy the Dew as well when I can take it from you while I arrange my ship? You certainly seem to be doing well enough to spare a little. Consider it payment for the Spellwards’s protection.” She indicated his opulent cane.

The Mayor slammed his fist into the wall. “You brought Ove the Forsaken here? I banished that pest for a reason!” His jaw shook with rage. She stepped away to avoid getting wet as his vitriol spat across the room.

“And I kicked your knee for a reason.” Images of his boot pressed to Ove’s neck as he brandished his rake returned to her. “You are lucky I had the mercy to count your broken leg as a year paid on your sentence, or you would have spent three years in that cell with the rest of them.”

“You did not even know her! You still do not know her! You have no idea what she has done, and you stick your spoiled nose in business that is not yours!” He whipped his cane across the room, and it shattered a clay pot of tulips on a table against the wall. “I understand what silverstale means. The most crippling exhaustion you could feel, coupled with horrible insomnia. She could be awake for days, lacking the strength to even eat.” He stood up defiantly against his crippled leg. “She deserves worse.”

She crossed her arms. “How can I know what you and she both refuse to tell me? If it is not horrible enough to speak of, I am not concerned.”

“It is beyond that!” Osvaldus said, squeezing his hands together to stop them from shaking. “ It is too horrible to speak of! This is exactly what I mean when I say you have no idea. If word spread that one of our Puppet Masters had done such a thing, West Eddy could fall to ruin. You know how important the Guild is, here. We’re barely recovering from you locking half the Masters away for three years.”

She waved her arm at him dismissively. “West Eddy is doing just fine. So what if you are no longer summoned by a couple of the nobles? Next time you want to avoid a cell, do not try and murder a young girl over nothing.”

“It was not nothing!” He took the shutters in his hands and tore them off with such force that he stumbled on his bad leg and fell to his knees. He cried out in pain, and Lyrua watched him writhe on the floor.

“You have told me nothing, so what am I to think? That every criminal who claims their victim deserved it must be honest? Do you think I will spread rumours like gossiping stable boys?” Lyrua had been craving that information since the day she met Ove. Asking her was always met with deflections, but she seemed to be disappointed by what she had done. She could not believe Ove would do anything that horrible, it had to be some silly breach of tradition or some other nonsense.

“Because you are always with Lander. That man likes to talk.” He limped over to the table, pulling up another chair, he laid the stamped form face down and unstoppered a bottle of quick-ink from the table to write. “You really want to know? I will tell you only if I have it in writing that you will not tell anyone. If word gets out because of you, then Manataklos will pay us to make up any loss of revenue the rumours cause, while also supporting the crushing of those rumours. That might be nothing, or it might mean quite a lot. I think that’s a fair arrangement.”

She took the paper as he slid it across the table at her. This was the sort of thing she needed Fourstaile for. After reading through it, she could not detect any tricks or loopholes, at least not the common ones Fourstaile taught her about. Most importantly, she did not intend to spread any rumours to begin with. She signed the paper and handed it back to him.

He did not look any happier about it. “Ove built a puppet out of the bones and flesh of a living person.”

He stared at her, watching for her reaction, but she was too shocked for her face to even twitch. Ove could not have done that. Her friend that she trusted with her child, and with her own life, could not be a murderer.

He tucked the page into his jacket, and withdrew a flask. He left it on the table and limped across the room to retrieve his cane. He held the door on his way out, looking coldly over his shoulder at her. “Captain Delibera of the Underbolge will take you to Flow if you have a few coins. You can find the Legendarisk there. Easier than trying to distract the other Captains from Highest Tide.” He slammed the door behind him.

Lyrua was shaken. Ove was odd, but she was a sweet woman who loved her son. She could not be a monster who made dolls out of people. She could not be. And she would not even be able to ask her about it until she was no longer silverstale. Bile churned in her stomach. She could not banish the thought from her mind. Even thoughts of her son playing with puppies, or her serene gardens, could not prevail against the image of Ove gutting an innocent to use their body parts for… for what? If she had made such a doll, had they destroyed it?

She took the flask from the table. There was a shimmering liquid she knew was Dew of the Moonflower Tree inside. She had even more reason to get the Oil from that merchant, now. With Ove the only one carrying coin, she expected to have to expose her identity to get it.