Prologue
The Cost That Isn’t Coin
 
The war hadn’t started yet, not officially.
 
But the shore already looked like a battlefield drawn in invisible ink.
 
From the bluff above Westreach’s harbor, Wiz could see the fault lines: not in trenches or cannon rows, but in patterns.
 
Ships came and went under Ward flags—some from the “free” side of the Painted Line, some from the side where chains were still legal. The hulls looked the same. The ledgers did not.
 
On one dock, a cargo of cotton bales was unloaded with casual efficiency. On another, a quiet line of Munchkins shuffled down a gangplank in irons, eyes on the planks, shoulders already braced for whatever waited on the dock.
 
The Painted Line itself shimmered far out at sea, a soft, iridescent scar across the water. Above it, the morning light looked thinner. Below it, heavier. Sailors claimed they could feel the difference in their teeth.
 
“Up there,” they said, “you can’t chain a Munchkin from scratch. Down there, you can.”
 
No one mentioned how easy it was to drag someone back down once they’d crossed.
 
Wiz wrapped his fingers around the weathered rail until his knuckles blanched.
 
“You’re counting again,” the Warden said.
 
She stood beside him in her dust-gray dress and plain sandals, cloak pulled close against the sea wind. Her pouch of sand rested at her hip like any worker’s tool. To anyone glancing up from the docks, she was just another figure on the ridge.
 
Wiz didn’t look at her. He watched instead as a small boat put out from a free-side Ward ship under cover of early fog—no flag, no lamps. Shadows hunched low in the hull. A second boat waited, lower on the coast, crewed by men with ropes and ledgers and the flat, practical movements of people who worked in flesh.
 
“They’ll call it ‘rendition’,” he said grimly. “Or ‘returning property.’ Or ‘honoring comity between Wards.’”
 
“Yes,” the Warden said. “They’re very good with names.”
 
They had a word for that current now, the one you fell into when you were Munchkin and dared jump for the free side: the Fugitive Undertow. Its pull was part rumor, part law.
 
And where that Undertow met secret coves and hidden lanterns and stubborn people who refused to hand anyone back, the water turned red.
 
Bleeding Seas.
 
Wiz had sailed them. He still smelled that copper tang when he tried to sleep.
 
“At least it’s all out in the open now,” he said. “No more pretending the line is a solution instead of a postponement.”
 
“Some of them still believe it is,” the Warden replied. “They’ve convinced themselves that neat ink on a map has more weight than iron on wrists.”
 
A shout rose from the harbor wall.
 
A Ward broadside—one of the louder papers—had just gone up on a post, slapped over yesterday’s headlines. People clustered to read. The breeze carried up snatches of words:
 
“…historic ruling…”
“…property rights must be respected…”
“…stability…”
“…all Wards bound to honor existing bonds…”
 
Wiz didn’t need to make out the whole text. He’d already read the courier’s copy that morning in the council hall.
 
The court-ship had spoken.
 
The judges, in their careful robes on their careful decks, had found that the Painted Line did not make anyone free; it merely marked where new chains could not be forged. A Munchkin once enslaved, they declared, remained so everywhere.
 
“It’s law now,” Wiz said. “If a man runs from a slave Ward to a free one, we are obligated—by the Charter we wrote—to help drag him back. For the sake of harmony.”
 
The Warden was quiet for a long moment.
 
“The Charter you amended,” she said at last.
 
He flinched.