The living room curtains were still open. Moonlight painted the floor, the armchair, Da. Asher stared down at him and felt a pang of conscience. He looked so tired. But then he had a right to. Sailing towards sixty, Da was. When you saw him on the ocean, bellowing orders and hauling nets over the side of whichever family smack he'd chosen to captain that day, or watched him gutting fish and bargaining the prices afterwards, it was hard to believe he had seven sons grown and was a grandpa eleven times over. There wasn't a man in all the Kingdom of Lur, Olken or Doranen, who could beat back the waves like Da. Who could catch a leaping sawfish with just a hook and a rod, or snatch a bright-scaled volly from right over the side of the boat and kill it with his bare hands alone.

Looking at him now, though, all black and silver in the moonlight, his uncapped head sparse with greying hair, his weathered face sagging in sorrowed sleep, belief was all too

easy.

Da was old. Old and wearing out fast, from work and

worry.

Still holding his boots, Asher crouched beside the armchair. Gazed into his father's slumbering features and felt a great wave of love crash over him. He was going to miss this face, with its crooked nose, broke in a drunken brawl over Ma when they were courting, and its scarred chin, split by slipping on a storm-heaved deck five seasons

gone.

'Past time somebody did the worryin' for you, Da,' he whispered, 'Past time y'had things soft, 'stead of hard. I said I'd do this for you, one day, and I reckon that day's come.'

Trouble was, it was easier said than done. To make good on his promise he needed more than dreams, though he had plenty of those. He needed money. Lots and lots of money. But he wasn't going to find it in Restharven. Not just because it was Restharven, but because of his brothers. In a family business, money made was money shared ... and the youngest got the smallest slice of the pie.

Well, sink that for a load of mackerel.

He was off to find his own pie, and he wasn't going to share it with anybody. Not till the pie was big enough to buy him a boat of his own, so he and Da could leave Zeth and the rest of them to their own devices, sink or swim, who cared? He and Da wouldn't. He and Da would have their own damn boat, and with all the money they'd make fishing it, just the two of them, they'd live as grand as the

king hisself.

For two years now, he'd been scrimping and saving and going without, just so he'd have enough to get by. Enough

to get him all the way to the grand City of Dorana. He had it all worked out.