The cliff moved.
Felix had been watching the mast scrape past its dark face, feeling unhelpfully certain that a ship ought not lean that far. Then Jessa Brill pointed to the stone against a distant buoy, and the thing he had treated as fixed slid across the sight line.
Maren Kells’s vessel lay between moving shelves.
One side lifted. The other ground down with a sound that reached Gull’s Luck after the visible movement, slow and ugly. Torn cloth covered an upper shelter. Collectors had been rigged where the surviving structure could take them, and people watched from behind a rail repaired with mismatched timber.
Elsa saw the signal cloth.
“Father!”
Nobody could yet tell whether the person holding it was Jalen.
A dark strip of water opened beside the trapped stern and vanished again before Felix finished measuring it with his eyes. Ned used a sounding cord against the farther point, calling the movement without asking anyone to believe the cliff had become more polite.
