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“Elder Moss⁠—”

“You want three of my people to take boats into water that has drowned better boatmen than any of them, on the word of a man who lied to this village for forty years, in the company of an off-worlder we have known for nineteen days.” He sets the staff upright. “No.”

There's a murmur of agreement that I feel in my back teeth.

Not too long ago I'd have apologized and sat down. I know that about myself the way you know the shape of a room you grew up in.

“Fair,” I say instead. “Then answer one question and I'll go.”

“Ask it.”

“When the men who shot at us on the causeway run out of places my uncle hid things, where do you think they'll start looking?”

Nobody answers.

“They've been in this marsh for ten years,” I say. “They were here while your children were growing up. The only reason they never came into Mountmend is that a stubborn old man kept giving them somewhere better to be. He's gone. I'm what's left, and I'm not going to be here long, and after that it's just you.”

Edda Hollowfen stands up at the back with her arms folded.

“She's Garrick's,” she says, and sits down again.

It is not, on paper, an argument. It carries the room anyway, and I put it away as something I did not know about villages.

Elder Moss looks at the ceiling for a while.

“Three boats,” he says. “Volunteers. Back inside four days or I send men after you, and I'll be memorably unpleasant about the cost.”

We leave at dawn with Joren, Tilda Mire, and — over my strenuous objection, Edda's mild one, and Elder Moss's total indifference — Pip, who has been Garrick's shadow since he was six and who informs me that the Long Quiet has three entrances and he knows two of them.

He isn't lying. He gets us through the weirs by a channel Joren swears wasn't there last season.

The Long Quiet earns the name inside an hour.

The water goes flat and black and stops moving. Trees stand in it in ranks, thin and very tall, and nothing grows between them at all, so you can see between the trunks for what feels like kilometers in every direction, which sounds pleasant and is not. Sound doesn't carry. When Tilda drops a spanner it makes a small unimpressive noise that ends immediately, as though the marsh has taken it and put it somewhere.

Nobody talks much. Even Pip stops.

The fishing settlement appears where the channel makes its second turn, exactly where his birds turned back.

It's smaller than Sedge End and much stranger, because it hasn't collapsed. Twelve platforms on low stilts, connected by walkways, with drying racks still standing in rows. Somebody folded the nets before they left. They're rotted to lace now, but they're folded, stacked in threes on a bench, the way you'd leave them if you were coming back on Tuesday.

“Nobody comes here,” Pip says.

“Because of the water?”

“Because Garrick said not to.” He's gone very still on the bow. “He made me promise. I was maybe nine. He said the platforms were rotten and it would all go into the water if a bird landed on it, and I promised, and then he gave me a knife so I'd remember I promised.”

Draeven puts his weight on the nearest walkway. He is a considerable amount of frontier tracker and the wood doesn't so much as complain.

“It's sound,” he says. “It's the best-built thing I've seen on this planet.”

Pip doesn't answer.

I go and sit down beside him on the gunwale, because I have had this conversation from the other side more times than I can count.

“He lied to you to keep you off it,” I say.

“I know.”