Played Tuesday. Three weeks later, nobody remembers the harbormaster's name.

Last time, you came into Greywater Crossing on the morning barge, three strangers with three reasons to brave the Reach. The coast looked like it always did out here—mud, tide, and the old story of bells that should not have kept ringing after their kingdom drowned.

On the quay, Brindle appeared at Ollo Brambleknock’s elbow like a practiced trick. He sold “relics” with a grin sharp enough to cut purse strings, holding up a “royal spoon” that Sera Duskhallow identified at a glance as stolen tavern flatware. Maren Voss shut the pitch down with the calm authority of a tide-warden who counted scams as part of the job. Ollo, delighted anyway, paid Brindle a copper not for the spoon, but for the audacity, and Brindle vanished back into the crowd.

You followed the spoon’s trail to the Brined Lantern, where Petch served chowder and hard truths in equal measure. Sera asked after Aldric Fenn’s family, and Petch’s stirring stopped long enough to point her toward Candlewick Row, the third door with blue shutters. While the bowls steamed, Ollo’s eyes kept catching on the ring of keys at Petch’s belt—one long, greenish-bronze key that looked wrong, wardless, made for something other than a common lock. Petch noticed the stare and tucked the keys out of sight without a word, as if even being seen was too much.

Magistrate Corvis Hale arrived with dry boots in a room full of wet ones. He did not waste time with charm. He offered a delivery across the flats to the survey camp: instruments, ledgers, and a strongbox. He paid half up front and promised the rest on delivery, while making it clear he trusted three strangers more than the Low Tide Charter. With the money came equipment—most notably a brass diving-bell lamp built to burn sealed oil even under water. Ollo accepted it like a gift meant for him and named it Lampbert, as if a name could make it part of the party.

After Hale left, Petch finally spoke plainly about the Low Tide Charter. She called their reputation a sign on a door, not the work behind it, and warned you not to cross them on the flats or play cards with them under a roof. When pressed, she returned to stirring chowder and shut the conversation down.

With hours before the evening low tide, you split your time. Sera went up to Candlewick Row and found Old Mother Fenn waiting at the door like she had been listening for footsteps. Sera returned Aldric’s pipe and delivered the promise attached to it: that it had happened gentle, facing the water, boots still on. Mother Fenn asked only whether her son still owed anyone money. Sera answered that his debts were settled, and the old woman touched Sera’s wrist—blessing, thanks, and farewell all at once—before closing the door softly.

Ollo, meanwhile, went looking for the ferryman people spoke of in the same tone they used for fogbanks and undertows. Ferryman Quill waited at a channel post with a sign that made the price clear: PASSAGE PAID IN QUESTIONS. ONE PER SOUL. The cost was not coin. Each of you would have had to surrender one genuine question you wanted answered, and then lose the ability to ask it again. Sera recognized the bargain for what it was, and Maren decided the job route did not require any deep-cut crossings. You left Quill unbought and untested, but noted him as a danger you could not measure yet.

As the tide began to turn out, you prepared the sledge and the strongbox—and the drowned bells rang. Eight slow, heavy strokes rolled in from the flats while the sea was still too high for them. Ollo counted without thinking. Maren froze with a crate in hand, because everything she knew said the bells rang only at low tide, when drowned towers rose closest to air. The quay went quiet around you: sailors staring, Petch on the tavern step with her ladle dripping, even Brindle pausing mid-hustle. Sera named the question aloud so it could not be dodged—who rang the eighth at high tide? No one answered. Petch met Sera’s eyes for a heartbeat and went back inside.

You crossed anyway, because the flats did not wait for mysteries to be solved. Maren led from withy to withy, keeping you on the marked path and away from the half-revealed bones of the drowned kingdom: weathervanes, chimneys, stone shoulders furred with weed. She held to the warden’s rule that the roofs looked like ground and were not ground. Ollo hauled the sledge through the sucking mud. Sera walked drag with Lampbert, a steady light and a steady pace behind.

At Old Bell ridge, you saw something your charts did not contain: a dark bowl of flats off the path and, in its standing pool, a barn-door arch of carved stone. Ollo lifted Lampbert and used its thick lens to peer at the distant crown. A green-bronze glint answered back—too like Petch’s odd key to be comfort. Sera felt the pull of it and hated how familiar that feeling was. Maren checked her charts, trusted them, and refused to gamble the strongbox on unknown ground. She took a bearing, wrote it down where it could not be forgotten, and turned you back to the path.

The survey camp appeared where it was meant to, lanterns steady against the returning tide. The young survey master accepted the strongbox with relief, signed Maren’s docket, and paid out the remaining twenty silver herring-marks. Maren counted them back in front of him and made sure the paperwork matched the money. With the water rising, the camp offered bunks, and you took them, because nobody sensible recrossed at night.

[Content of a private scene between Maren Voss and Ollo Brambleknock was not included.]

Near the deepest hour, out on the black flats, a single bell rang once—low and proper, at the right tide, like a correction. You ended the night at the survey camp with your fee earned, Lampbert in hand, an uncharted arch marked on Maren’s page, and the wrong-tide eighth bell hanging over everything, unanswered and impossible. Next time, you had to decide whether to follow the charts back—or follow the bearing into the bowl and learn what that green-bronze glint belonged to.