He had dragged himself up the spiral stairs on sheer venom, each boot-fall striking the risers like a deadweight mallet, before the door to his roost slammed shut above. Otylia remained in the kitchen, her knuckles caked in brine and ash. The iron key pressed into the meat of her palm, sharp enough to indent the calluses. She had plucked it from the nail behind the lard-crock while he choked over his tea three mornings ago, banking on his isolation, on the arrogance of a man who believed no one dared steal from a ghoul. Now, the tower was dead quiet. Only the wind outside shaved the granite ledges, spitting grit against the leaded panes. Down in the belly of the foundation, where the salt had eaten the mortar down to black hollows, the locked oak door sat under an arch of dripping limestone. She took the cellar steps three at a time, keeping her weight along the outer curve where the treads made no sound. The air smelled of wet slag and ancient fat. She fitted the key into the heavy iron plate. The tumblers resisted, crusted with verdigris, then gave way with a dry, shearing snap that sounded to her ears like a rifle shot. She slipped inside and closed the door until it caught against the jamb. The room had no hearth, no window, only a round aperture high up that opened into the sea-cliff flues, coughing back the sound of breakers. A brass tallow lamp sat on an oak workbench. Otylia struck her sulfur match against the stone sill. A feeble, oily tongue of flame bloomed, casting long, greasy shadows against walls papered in nautical parchment. Charts of the Shale Cays hung pinned by copper tacks. Most were scribbled over with black squid ink: tide markers crossed out, sounding depths replaced with strange, erratic notations. *Fathoms shallowing. Seabed calcified. Gulls sinking.* This was not Voron’s austere roost. Voron kept only sheepskin blankets, dried lingcod, and iron picks. This place was cluttered, scholarly, and rotted by sea air. Stasya had been right. Another man had occupied the Gorgon's Tooth before the beast took the light. On the center of the table lay a calfskin register, swollen to twice its thickness by damp. The covers were dusted with a crust of dried sea froth that crumbled like chalk under her fingertips. She pulled a stool forward and turned the first brittle leaves. The handwriting began neat, the script of a clerk assigned to the outer maritime reaches. It bore the name *Marek Vanev, Master of the Low Beacon*. The entries dated back thirty years. *Seventh of the Reaping.* *The oil delivery was three casks short. The sea-leopard hunt failed off the reefs.* She skipped forward, leaves crackling like dried bladderwrack between her fingers. The hand deteriorated. Ink strokes fattened, ragged with sudden tremors. *Third of the Frost.* *The gannets struck the glass at midnight, but they did not shatter. Their wings were turned to pumice before they hit the rocks below. When I took my cleaver to the breast of one, the blade turned on grey marrow.* Otylia leaned closer, the stink of the tallow lamp filling her nostrils. Her thumb tracked down the water-warped page. *The grey crept up through the tide-pool stairs today. It answers the marrow in my skull. When the silence here sits too thick—when the memory of Marzena's coffin leaving the pier in Odrin won’t wash out—the crust advances ten paces toward the vegetable patch. It does not move by tides. It moves by bile. It smells the rot behind my ribs.* A cold sensation settled beneath Otylia's collarbone. Voron’s outburst on the beach. His snarl when she swept the kitchen. The sudden, violent surge of grey scale that had nearly swallowed the spit this afternoon—it had arrived on no natural swell. It had risen because he had been unraveling. The Blight wasn't an airborne pox drifting from the deep trench. It was an excretion. An agony made mineral. She turned another leaf. A page had been torn out, leaving only a serrated stub. The entry following it was penned in thick, brownish fluid—dried gore or iron-gall ink cut with salt water. *The lichen in the fissure blooms only when fed. I laid my open wrist upon the root, and the red sprigs drank until they turned that deep, bruised violet. The mainlanders call it Vespertine Algae. They pray for a sprig of it to scrape over their children’s scabs.* Otylia’s throat pinched tight. Her vision swam, the lines of handwriting doubling. *Fools. It does not cure the rock. It drinks the life that would otherwise calcify, holding the decay in suspension. The island requires a heart to feed the cure. It has taken mine. My blood is thick as brine now; my fingers barely bend to grip the quill. He who follows me will think he guards a beacon. He guards an altar.* She dropped the ledger. The vellum thudded onto the desk, sending up a puff of grey mold. "No," she whispered to the damp room. Borys lay in Stasya’s attic, his shins already stiffening into grey, chalky slate. She had pictured herself returning with a pouch of the purple moss, boiling it down into a bitter syrup, pressing the tin spoon to his cracked lips until the colour returned to his cheeks. She had imagined dragging him onto a skiff and leaving the Cays behind forever. It wasn't an herb. It was a siphon. Voron was not hoarding a remedy out of cruelty; he was the carcass the remedy grew on. If she took the Algae, she would be taking the petrified residue of his marrow. And if she bound herself to stay—if she traded her life for Borys’s, as she had secretly resolved to do if the keeper demanded it—she would not be an island scraper. She would be the next stone in the wall. Her pride, that stiff, unbending core that had carried her across the channel and kept her chin level before Voron’s sneer, felt like dry glass struck by a hammer. There was no victory here. No clever bargain to strike. If Voron died, the Blight took the whole cay, and the Algae died with him. If she took the plant by force, she took his lifeblood—and Borys would drink a dead man’s sorrow only to need more when the bottle ran dry. She reached out, intending to shut the book, to erase the sight of those scrawled words. Behind her, at the threshold, the oak flooring groaned under heavy leather. Otylia made no sound and kept her seat. Her ribs locked tight, copper souring the back of her tongue. She turned on the stool. Voron filled the low doorway. He had shed his oilskin coat. His woollen shirt hung loose, unlaced at the throat, revealing the grey scale creeping up his neck like a collar of lichen-crusted slate. His right arm hung limp at his side, the sleeve rolled high, the stone crust thick and cracked from the day’s exertion on the shoals. His face was carved out of shadow by the single lamp flame: cheekbones hollow, mouth a flat, bloodless line. In his left hand, he held a heavy iron pry-bar. He offered no shouts. He demanded no answers about the slipped bolt. He merely stood there, the silence between them thick as grease, his grey eyes fixed on the open ledger beneath her hand. "You read it," he said.

The Salt-Stained Ledger