The mud at the western mouth of Crown-Reach settled into an icy, rotten-egg grease that gripped a man’s work-boots like drying pitch.
Low tide had dragged the salt-reach back four hundred paces into the gray throat of the estuary. It exposed the Rotten Spit. A tongue of river-bed silt, dead bladderwrack, and black river ooze littered with the skeletal rib-frames of eighteen decommissioned naval hulls. Some had lain grounded for thirty winters, their white oak knees bleached like sheep bone and their keels sunk deep into the clay. Between their broken frames, stale pools of bilgewater caught the pewter glare of an overcast noon, filmed over with rancid animal fat leaking from the refitting docks upstream.
Tomas Reed paused on the salt-crusted cobbles of the lower boat ramp. The north wind off the Great Channel smelled of rusted drift-bolts, decomposing kelp, and tarred oakum. He reached beneath his wool coat to adjust the calfskin brace on his right forearm. He felt the wet sea damp sink into the scar tissue where eel-glass had torn his tendon sheath twenty months before. The gristle dragged against the forearm bone with every curl of his fingers. Sixty-five percent grip—enough to haul a painter rope or hoist a folio chest, though if a sudden lateral wrench hit his wrist, the fingers would fail before the bone did.
