The Hearth

# Chapter 1: Out of Saltgrass

The rain has softened to something that isn't quite rain anymore. More like the coast breathing on us, a fine, salt-heavy mist that clings to wool and hair and the tips of Bramble's ears where she rides in the sling against my chest. She is warm and deeply uninterested in the weather. Her nose tucks against my collarbone, and every few breaths she shifts, rearranging herself with the authority of a creature who has decided that her comfort is the expedition's first priority.

She is not wrong.

The Saltgrass common is grey in the pre-dawn, but it is a different grey than the one we walked into three days ago. That grey was exhaustion, the color of a place that had been slowly forgetting what it was. This grey is just weather. Honest early-winter cloud cover doing its job, holding the warmth of the sea against the land for a few more hours before the sun comes through and the cold follows.

I can feel the difference in my hands. They're raw from the cave work, two low tides of tending crystal and stone that wanted desperately to let go, but the ache is clean. Good-soil ache, the kind that means something grew.

Flint has the packs laid out in the common yard, two neat rows that he's been re-organizing since well before I woke up. He does this. I've learned over three months of travel that Flint processes uncertainty by achieving absolute dominion over the placement of dried fish and rope. The packs are flawless. The weight distribution is, I am confident, mathematically perfect. He's still frowning at them.