The sailor sat in the prow at first light and looked at the water with the attention of someone reading a text. The surface pattern told her things. Where the current ran strong, where something large moved beneath, where the wind would shift. These were the conversations Sashelas permitted, and she had learned his language through twenty years of listening. Her crew still spoke of him as if he were distant, still prayed to him as if prayer was the only way to ask. They had not yet learned that attention itself was conversation, that observation was a form of devotion. She did not teach them this. Some lessons had to arrive in their own time. At midday, one of the sailors caught a silver fish unlike any he had seen before. It was too perfect, too large, and when she examined it, she knew it immediately. A gift, not a catch. Sashelas did not often speak so directly. She took the fish to the stern and released it back to the water with ceremony, and the sailor who had caught it understood something shift in the air. 'He approves of us,' the man said uncertainly. 'He permitted us to move through his realm today,' she corrected. 'Tomorrow he may change his mind. We sail only because the ocean allows it.' The crew murmured, uncomfortable, but she was already returning her attention to the water, and they fell back to their work. The sea was never truly calm, and those who sailed it best were the ones who had stopped expecting it to be...