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And then Sedge End.

It was a village once. You can tell because the stilts are still standing, four dozen of them, stripped of everything they were holding up. Some carry a scrap of platform. One holds an entire doorframe, four meters above the water, opening onto nothing at all. The rest are just legs, dark and patient, walking nowhere in a formation nobody remembers.

“Fever came through,” Joren says. “Before my grandmother. They left and the marsh took the rest.”

Draeven is up on the bow before the boat has finished moving.

“Two hours,” he tells me. “If I say go, you're in the boat before you finish whatever sentence you're in.”

“What if it's a good sentence?”

“It won't be.”

I would like to report that I don't smile at that. I can't.

The bearing puts us at the fourth stilt in the northern row, and there is nothing on it, and nothing under it, and nothing carved into it, and for forty-five minutes I hang off Joren's boat with my arms in dark water feeling my way around a post while two grown men watch me do it.

Then I find the shelf.

He worked it into the inner face of the stilt, below the waterline, an alcove the size of a bread loaf, and my uncle put it there because at the time he cut it the water was lower and it wasn't below anything.

There's a plate inside, ceramic, glazed and fired and utterly waterproof, and he has scratched his notation into it before firing, the mark of a man who wants something to outlast paper, and weather, and himself.

I sit in the well of the boat with the plate on my knees and work.

“It's the notation,” I say, twenty minutes in. “The one that keeps turning up beside the bearings. He explains it here. It's not a direction, it's a warning. It marks the sites he considered dangerous to approach.”

Draeven turns.

“Dangerous how?”

“He doesn't say. He uses the same figure he uses for the deep channels near the village, the ones where the current can pull a boat under. Whatever he means, he means don't be careless there.” I check the sequence again. “And the site after this one is marked.”

“Of course it is,” Joren says, with enormous cheer, and starts the motor.

On the way back the light drops and the stilts of Sedge End go from gray to black behind us, and I sit with the plate wrapped in my jacket, watching Draeven watch the water.

He does it constantly. Not nervously, which is what I'd assumed for the first few days. It's more like listening. He reads the marsh the way I read a classroom, tracking the small wrong thing at the edge, and at some point in the last week I stopped finding it intimidating and started finding it restful, because it means I get to think about other things.

That's the part I'm not examining.

He cut his life into links, my uncle, so nobody could carry it off whole. And I keep thinking about the fact that he made every link require a person to be curious enough, patient enough, and stubborn enough to reach into cold water without knowing what's in there.

He wasn't hiding it from the world. He was auditioning somebody.

“Clara.”

Draeven says my name maybe four times a day and it still arrives like something set down carefully on a table.

“Yes?”

“Your hands are cut.”

They are. Post barnacles, or whatever the local equivalent is, and I hadn't noticed, and now that I've noticed they hurt considerably.

He takes the field kit out without discussion, and Joren tactfully develops an interest in the horizon, and Draeven wraps my palm with a care that seems mathematically impossible for someone built the way he's built.

Neither of us says anything for a while.