But he had seen it. Once, precisely once. In the marine light of a sinking ship, skirts billowing from her taut frame, countenance ragged with worry until she beheld him in the gloom. She had smiled then and she had kissed him, exhaling air into his lungs, and to the end of his days, he would recall that kiss, that taste of her, scalding and strange and sacred.

That sight of her, beautiful, exultant, bloody as a messiah, her mouth razored, her eyes abyssal and utterly absent of all light.

Ingrid sat in the atrium, stranded in the last light, a statuesque horror.

“What are you?”

There was an underwater quality to the scene, a sense of the world slowly distorting, swaying to the tempo of distant currents; a lack of static dimensionality, as though the universe might, at any second, concave into something more fantastical. Standing there, rooted in the vestibule of a home that no longer felt like his, its every casement shut save for the ones haloing his wife, an aurora of polished glass set in rosewood bruised black by the storm-tossed dusk, Henrik felt lost. Submerged again in the Baltic, swallowing saltwater with every scream.

His wife raised her head, a discreet motion. Though her expression held immobile, the needles in her hands continued to flash, the loop of felspar-colored wool—a shade of flesh that brought to mind a memory of scalded skin—draped over her lap expanding visibly between one breath and the next. Henrik had not known his wife to knit, but this came as no surprise to him. It was, as it stood, simply another aspect of her nature she had kept private, separate from their marriage.

Their eyes met and her frown tensed.

The door closed behind him.

Queensmen rode into the shipyard, flanked by wolves with doleful human faces, testaments to the wages of misdemeanour. Henrik glanced up as the men stabled their horses. Their uniforms were hornet colors, gorgets embossed with the symbol of the crown: an antlered skull, grinning balefully from the steel.

“Sweet as babes, the guilt-boys. Could pet them if you wanted.” Jamie slouched an arm over the net-swaddled barrel and crossed himself with his spare hand. “Not that I would. They say they can smell the sin on a man from a thousand miles.”

“They can bring as many guilt-boys as they want. They’re not going to find anything here.” Henrik mopped his brow. Even in the cooling year, the nights already annexing more than half the clock, dock-work remained strenuous. It was not his vocation, however, and Henrik proved dismal at its execution, an ineptitude that alternately amused and aggravated the longshoremen.