What the Tide Owes

At low water the harbour gives back what it borrowed, and the clerks walk out onto the mud with their boots wrapped in sacking to read it.

Every year the same argument: whether a thing the sea returns is salvage or simply late. Maren's father had held that lateness was a kind of debt, and that debts were owed by someone.

She found the second ledger where the mud had kept it, still legible, still wrong in the same three places.