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A map with its arms folded
"Take us to the lighthouse," Captain Iona ordered. The folded nautical map drew a small blue door, then shut it in her face. Mara laughed before she could stop herself. Nineteen, with brown skin and short black curls, she stood on the teal-painted deck of Contrary in a sea-green coat and red woven waistband. Beside the map, a brass compass rattled with every approaching drumbeat. Beyond the rail rose the coral-red cliffs of Rillscar; its distant lighthouse blinked above a barred harbor.
Iona, fifty-eight, tightened her silver braid over an ivory shirt and dark blue vest. "I stole you fairly," she told the paper. Mara touched the opposite corner. "I want the people inside that harbor out." Luminous blue paths sprang across both their hands. Underneath appeared a sentence: TWO HANDS, TWO PURPOSES, ONE AGREED PASSAGE. "It objects to captains," Mara said. "Then it has expensive taste in enemies." Behind them, Commander Vey's toll cutter lowered a boarding boat.
Vey had chained twenty-four residents and their twelve house-barges inside Rillscar for unpaid passage fees. Tonight he would seal the harbor for the storm and take the barges at dawn. Contrary had four crew, twelve bales of stolen tollhouse cloth, six silver coins and one smoke pot. Fen, the cook, lifted that pot. They could make a decoy in the mist and slip away, or admit the inspector and use the smoke to strand his party at the nearby inspection pier. Iona looked at Mara. This time she asked.