Dark eyes, an unlined face, hair still tangled in a cloud of restless sleep. Just a child, delicate as any other. For a moment, compassion pulls at the seams of her skin, at the despair that pinches her throat. Molly could still salvage this. She could—

Hunger judders.

She leaps.

mothers, we dream

It would, Henrik decided, always trouble him to hear his wife described as a barracuda, a sobriquet inflicted by her jutting underbite and cold acumen for economics, her predilection for late-year swims in the harbour, when the water wore the ice like a wedding caul. Henrik loved her for those things. True, it had taken him time to acclimatize to the uncommon construction of her mandible, even longer to adjust to the idea that she wasn’t just clever but monstrously intelligent, frightening in her aptitude for retaining shipment calendars and accounting genealogies, the living cosmos of maritime trade in its storied fullness.

But that phase was inevitable in every matrimonial arrangement. Spouses, contrary to Grecian superstition, weren’t born conjoined at the heart. Love mandated adaptation, a commitment to personal revision, no matter how hideous the reasons propelling that change.

“I’d appreciate you not speak of my wife as so.” Henrik spoke the words breezily, with enough humour that his peers wouldn’t parse his remark as anger, but a dutiful concern for the conceits of decorum. He smiled over the brim of his tankard, the ale feeble, barely deserving of its title. In his pocket, the contract sat heavy.

Still, the room quieted and its drunks found reason to look elsewhere, their gossip turned again to discussions of how the king’s warship had not only foundered, but failed to escape the inlet, capsizing before the applause eddied away. Thirty sailors died that bright morning and Henrik would have made thirty-one in the list of casualties were it not for a miracle of abstruse circumstances.

“Come on, we wouldn’t call her that if we didn’t love her.” Jamie was his best friend, unique among the immigrant Scotsmen in that he was both scholastically inclined and intrinsically tanned; a polyglot with ecclesial standards of discipline, prone towards melancholy but otherwise likeable.

“Still,” said Henrik. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t.”

Jamie shrugged, loose-shouldered. The tavern’s population of regulars had been gouged by the recent debacle. Henrik, combing his gaze over the empty sprawl of tables, the faces of the barmaids creviced with boredom, doubted it would ever recover. Eight years ago, hundreds came lured by the prestige of the town’s pet project. Employers looked well on those who could advertise they’d laboured for a king: monarchs trended towards being lethally exacting on the subject of their whims, after all. However, no one of efficient mind desired association with failure, least of a catastrophe of such astronomic scale.