Three weeks south of the Unbound meadow, the road dropped down through the chalk hills to the glittering white shore of the great saline lake.
The last time they had walked these planks, a storm squall had been tearing the boats from their moorings, the fishermen had been shouting Little Harbor into the wind like a prayer, and their fear had thickened the translucent shell on Pip’s back until the rescue split its seam open.
As Ysabet, Chaska, Lilt, and Pip walked down the gravel spit toward the water in the bright late-spring noon, the smell of drying brine and tarred rope was the same, but the pier had changed.
Where the rotten, unguarded timbers had once dropped sheer into the deep channel, the village carpenters had bolted a waist-high railing of seasoned squared oak all the way out to the lantern post, with heavy rope life-loops hung on wooden pegs every twenty feet. Two hundred yards north of the boat slips, a line of painted cedar buoys marked off the shallow blue-stone cove where the salt singer lived. A carved wooden board nailed to the end piling read in plain black paint: SPAWNING COVE — NO NETS OR IRON HOOKS PAST THIS LINE.
