The Wrack-Crafter's Lighthouse
The lighthouse was in worse condition than the survey suggested. So was the plan to be left alone.
Aurora Voss came to Tidewatch with three things: a lighthouse to restore, a cover identity as a retired wrack-crafter (mostly true, which is the worst kind of cover), and forty years of excellent reasons to keep the world at a precise distance. She did not come for a body on her rocks. She did not come for a harbour master with the maddening habit of looking in exactly the right direction. She did not come for a town of four hundred people who have collectively decided she belongs there, whether she has agreed to the terms or not.
The murder is technically solvable. Aurora has worked in courts considerably more dangerous than this remote headland. The difficulty is that solving it requires abilities no retired wrack-crafter should possess. The difficulty is that the lighthouse was never only a lighthouse - it was the signal that held an ancient pact in place, and the pact has been fraying, and she is apparently the solution whether she consented to be or not. The difficulty is that when Tidewatch is worried about someone, they bring food, and she has run entirely out of protocols for this.
Her familiar, Scratch - dinner-plate sized, abyssal, deeply opinionated - communicates exclusively through strategic object placement. He has been telling her she is wrong about everything for approximately four months. He is not wrong.
For readers who loved Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Nettle & Bone and Legends & Lattes. Dry wit, practical deadpan, and an apex predator in reluctant retirement discovering that the most dangerous thing on this coast is a community that simply will not stop being decent.
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