She stared at the coin in real surprise. “I’ll not help you murder someone,” she breathed, but she looked as though she wasn’t even certain about that.

“It’s…it’s complicated,” he said. “Oh, gods, it is horribly complicated. Bring me a beer and I’ll try to explain.”

“You’ll need another starfish to pay for the two beers, then,” she said, “—one of them for me, of course!—if I’m to be getting that whole gull.”

He couldn’t remember the last time he had visited the neighborhood around Skimmer’s Lagoon in daylight—not that he had come here so many times. It was surprising, really, since the Mint, the tavern in which he had lived and spent most of his time, was only a few hundred steps away on the outer edge of the lagoon district. Still, there was a distinct borderline at Barge Street, which took its name from an inn called the Red Barge at one end of it: except for the poorest of the Southmarch poor, who shared the lagoon district’s damp and fishy smells, only Skimmers spent much time in the area. The exception was after nightfall, when groups of young men came down to patronize the various taverns around the lagoon.

Tinwright turned now onto Barge Street and made his way along it toward Sealer’s Walk, the district’s main thoroughfare, which ran along the edge of the lagoon until it ended in Market Square in the shadow of the new walls. There was no sun to speak of, but Tinwright was grateful for such light as the gray, late-morning sky offered: Barge Street was so narrow that he could imagine Skimmer arms reaching out to grab him from doorways on either side. In reality, he saw almost no one, only a few women emptying slops into the gutters or children who halted their games to watch with wide, unblinking eyes as he passed. There was something so unnerving about these staring children that he found himself hurrying toward Sealer’s Walk, a street he knew fairly well, and where he might find a few of his own kind.

Sealer’s Walk was perhaps the only part of Skimmer’s Lagoon that most castle folk ever visited, fishermen and their women to purchase charms—the Skimmers were said to be great charmwrights, especially when it came to safety on the water—and others to visit the lagoon-side taverns and eat fish soup or drink the oddly salty spirit called wickeril. Many though, especially from outside Southmarch, came for no purpose more lofty than to see something different, because Sealer’s Walk, the lagoon, and the Skimmers themselves were about the strangest things that anyone in the March Kingdoms could see this side of the Shadowline. Even visitors from Brenland and Jael and other nations came to the lagoon, because outside of the lake-folk of Syan and a few settlements in the far southern islands, the Skimmers of Southmarch were unique.