Prologue
 
The year the holy men took his parents, the harbor smelled like incense and rot.
 
They called it an audit, which was the Crown’s soft word for a slow, polite gutting. Three men came down the lane in robes stiff with embroidery, their hems never daring to touch the mud. Behind them, the sea was a sheet of hammered pewter and the cathedral-ship in the harbor rang its bells like a heartbeat the town had no say over.
 
“What is holy,” the first man said, “is what is fair.”
 
“What is fair,” the second added, “is what is shared.”
 
“And what is shared,” the third concluded, with a smile that never reached his eyes, “is what refines the soul.”
 
They said all this while sitting at Wiz’s rough kitchen table, wiping their fingers on linen napkins after refusing his mother’s soup.
 
Wiz watched from the doorway, knees pulled up under his chin. He was small for ten, all elbows and bright eyes. People called him Wiz because he was quick with cards and coin tricks at the docks, quick with words, quick with seeing where things didn’t quite add up. His real name sat in his mother’s mouth like something private; the town had decided the nickname fit better.
 
His father had scrubbed his hands raw for the occasion. He stood by the hearth, twisting his cap.
 
“We’ve paid our tithe,” his father said, for the third time. “We gave double, after the storm. The ledger—”
 
“—is never wrong,” the first holy man interrupted gently. His robe smelled of myrrh and salt. “But people are forgetful. That is why we come, good man. To reconcile.”
 
The second opened a leather book banded in brass, its pages edged in gold leaf. Wiz could see the columns even from the doorway: names, numbers, red lines where the ink bit down.
 
“Your blessings have outpaced your offerings,” the second said. “You asked for protection in the storm. For your son’s fever to break. For the price of fish not to drop below survival. You have been… heard.”
 
The third smiled. “Refinement, my son. You were born with a selfish heart, as we all are. The Crown, in its kindness, offers you the gift of want. Hunger polishes. Loss instructs. You do not wish to be left coarse, do you?”
 
Wiz’s mother sat very still at the table. Her hands were folded like a picture in one of the church books, but her knuckles were white.
 
“We gave what we had,” she said quietly. “We have no more.”
 
“There is always more,” the first replied, with the mild patience of a man explaining arithmetic to a child. “Time. Labor. Your home, if need be. What is holy is what is fair.”
 
Outside, a wave slapped the stones. The cathedral-ship’s bells rang again, and Wiz felt them in his ribs.
 
Up above the low clouds, something grumbled—a long, rolling complaint that made the window panes shiver. People would later say it was a storm front, or old timbers shifting in the cathedral’s spine. But it was Zeus, listening, and finding nothing in this scene that offended him.
 
Down beneath the harbor, currents turned in lazy spirals. Poseidon had his eye on bigger games than one family’s kitchen. The sea, like the gods, had learned to prefer the view from a distance.
 
The auditors stayed until dusk. They left with a signed parchment and the quiet satisfaction of men who had done their duty. The terms were simple: an increase in tithe, a “temporary offering of labor” at the docks for Wiz’s father, rights to the upstairs room until the debt was cleared. “A great kindness,” the third man called it at the door. “So you needn’t be cast into the street all at once.”
 
When they were gone, Wiz’s father sat down hard on the hearthstone.
 
“We can’t pay that,” he said, to the fire.
 
“We always find a way,” his mother replied automatically. Then, softer, as if speaking to herself: “Until we don’t.”
 
She was a plain woman, with the kind of face people forgot when they counted the beautiful. Wiz loved every line of it. It had weathered storms and shortages and the slack-mouthed fever that nearly took him when he was five. It had never looked afraid until the day the holy men left with his father’s signature.
 
That night, when his father had gone down to the docks to start his “temporary offering,” Wiz lay awake listening to the harbor creak. The cathedral-ship out there had hundreds of candles in its windows. It was the Crown’s floating sermon: towering, ornate, impossible to ignore, its reflection broken into shards on the dark water.
 
His mother came and sat on the edge of his straw mattress. The house smelled like boiled cabbage and salt and a trace of incense that refused to leave.