Tinwright was about to knock, but stopped when he saw the long, knurled horn, as long as a man’s arms outstretched, hanging over the door. A superstitious prickle ran up his back. Was it a unicorn horn? Or did it come from some even stranger, more deadly creature?

“Planning to steal it?”

He jumped at the unexpected voice and turned to see a short, lumpy shape blocking the entrance to the alley. Thinking of the Skimmer men with their scalloped blades he took a step back and almost fell down the stairs. “No!” he said, waving his arms for balance. “No, I was just…looking. I’ve come to see Aislin the tanglewife.”

“Ah.” The figure took a few steps forward; Tinwright balled his fingers into fists but kept them behind him. “Well, that would be me.”

“You?” He couldn’t help sounding surprised—the voice was so low and scratchy he’d thought it a man’s.

“I do surely hope so, drylander, otherwise I’ve been living someone else’s life this last hundred years.” He still couldn’t see much of her face, which peered out of a deep hood. He could see the eyes, though, wide and watery, yet somehow quite daunting even in the darkened alley. “Move out the way, you young clot, so I can open the door.”

“Sorry.” He sprang to one side as she shuffled past him. He felt uncomfortable watching her mottled hand reach out with the key, so he turned his eyes up to the great horn above the door. “Is that from a unicorn?”

“What? Oh, that? No, that’s the tusk from an alicorn whale taken up in the Vuttish Seas. Unless you’re in the market for a unicorn’s horn, that is, in which case I could be persuaded to change my story.” Her laugh was halfway between a gurgle and a hacking cough, and she emphasized it by leaning into him and jabbing him with her elbow. If this really was Aislin, she smelled to the high heavens, but he found himself almost liking her.

The door open, she went gingerly down the steps. Tinwright followed her inside and found himself beneath a ceiling so low he could not stand straight and so crowded with objects hanging from the rafters that he might have been in a hole beneath the roots of a huge tree. Dozens of bundles of dried seaweed and other more aromatic plants, sheaves of leathery kelp stems and bunches of flowers brushed his face everywhere he turned. Countless charms of wood and baked clay dangled between the drying plants, spinning and swinging as he or the tanglewife brushed them, so that even just standing in one place made him dizzy. Many of the charms were in the shape of living things, mostly aquatic beasts and birds, seals and gulls and fish and ribbony eels. Those not hanging from the ceiling had been set out on every available surface, including most of the floor.

Tinwright had to walk carefully, but he was fascinated by the profusion of animal shapes. Some even had little glass eyeballs pressed into the clay or glued to the wood, making them seem almost alive…