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she slacked in her duties.
    There was no one else in the house ; each of their five lodgers was out at work and Kesh was unmarried, having been promised to a young man who’d drowned alongside her father several years back.
    The slow, sonorous clang of the wreck buoy beyond the harbour wall carried up to her on the breeze. From where Kesh had laid out the rugs, she could see its red-painted flanks bobbing on the tide. Further out, past the limits of the Harbour Warrant’s authority, floated the threatening shape of a House Eagle warship.
    Kesh frowned at the sleek warship before returning to her work. It had been there for a week now, not interfering with trade yet, but a silent threat that the harbour folk recognised well enough. With a shake of the head she attacked the rugs again, hammering away with the beater until her arm was near-shaking with fatigue, then moving on to the next after a gulp of lukewarm yellow tea.
    A smile appeared on Kesh’s lips as she took a second swallow. The spring sun was warm on her shoulders, the breeze coming in off the sea clean and salty. On such a day she could only enjoy the exercise as she put the strength of her thick arms to work. The courtyard faced south, catching the morning sun and affording her a fine view of the harbour’s three main wharves. The nearer two were long, wooden affairs for the fishing fleet and trading cutters that plied the Horn Coast – while the furthest was the old stone deep-water dock for ships ranging all across the Inner Sea and beyond.
    Kesh crossed the courtyard and hopped up a few makeshift steps until she could look over the perimeter wall. Their house was on an outcrop that loomed above the road leading to the nearer docks ; a district of taverns and cramped markets that had been Kesh’s whole life until her father died. From there she could see the glazed blue tiles of the fishermen’s market and glimpse piles of yellow cockles gathered from the sandflats off the coast.
    ‘A good crop,’ Kesh muttered, looking around the various stalls for her mother. ‘Let’s hope Mother thinks so and brings a bag home.’
    She sat on the top of the wall, brushing her fingers over the yellow petals of a flowering gull’s foot as she listened to the clatter and voices of the harbour. When she had gone away to sea to cover the last seasons of her father’s bond to the Vesis and Darch merchant house, which controlled the harbour and much of the shipping that used it, this view had been what Kesh had missed. The breeze over the wildflowers, the cries of gulls and the bustle of busy lives – not the unearthly sight of the Imperial Palace or the ice-white roofs of Coldcliffs to the east. As arresting as those enormous, ancient structures were, they never changed. The harbour was man-made and ugly to some, but it lived and breathed in a way the places of the old ones didn’t.
    She returned to her work and finished the last few rugs before hauling the pile up onto her shoulder and returning inside. There was still no sound of activity from her little sister so Kesh dumped the rugs over her father’s chair at the head of the table and headed through to the corridor beyond.
    ‘Emari,’ she called ahead, ‘Mother won’t be long coming back.’
    ‘Kesh, come look,’ came Emari’s reply at last. ‘Come look at this !’
    She followed her sister’s voice through to the stairs that ran up the centre of the house. Emari was sitting on the windowsill on the second floor, her favourite place to watch the busy streets of the Harbour Warrant and marvel at the Imperial Palace on its distant island hilltop. The street curved around the outcrop of their house so from that window Emari could see a hundred yards down the warrant’s public thoroughfare with the Palace rising behind. Today however, Emari was looking up towards the roof.
    ‘What have you found, little one ?’ Kesh asked, slipping an arm around her sister’s skinny shoulders. Emari was a bundle of