...The captain's daughter was named to inherit the family fleet on her father's death, but not until she'd earned her sea green. Tradition required she work as a deckhand for a full year, earning the trust of the sailors who would be hers to command. Her first day in the borrowed sea green coat, three sizes too large, a weathered sailor tied her into a bosun's knot with hands that had worked forty years of rope. He said nothing. The coat, eventually, would fit her. And she would fit the coat.

In a chandler's shop near the docks, an old woman who'd never sailed a day kept her work clothes dyed in sea green, a choice that made the actual sailors smile. They'd given her the color as an honor years ago, when she'd cared for an injured captain through an illness that would have taken him. She'd never left the shop, never left the dock district. But in sea green, she belonged to something vast and important anyway.