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Nikli carries Rysn to the port rail, where the crew has bunched up around twisting black anxietyspren and a few globs of fearspren. Plamry sets out a high stool so she can sit and see over the side; Captain Drlwan takes the place beside her. In the water, flipped on its side, is a santhid — nearly a third the length of the Wandersail — eye whited and staring at the sky.

Rysn had thought santhidyn extinct. Her babsk's stories cast them as half-spren, lucky beasts who calmed sailors and led the drowning home; no sailor she knows will speak ill of them. A dead one at the side of a Thaylen ship is the worst possible omen, and the crew sense it instantly. They have been waiting for a third sign, after the dead ship's pet and the wormy grain. Here it is, and it is far beyond anything a saboteur could fake. Even Rysn finds her certainty wavering. She had once dismissed the Voidbringers and the Lost Radiants as fancy, and both have walked onto her ship.

Alstben, a spike-browed sailor, announces flatly that they are turning back. It is not a question. The captain folds her arms and does not contradict him — a crew this loyal will not kill its officers, but a Wandersail that returns with its rebsk and her captain locked up for madness will find no one to blame them. Rysn nearly gives the order herself. She knows when to walk away from a stalled deal. But walking away means surrendering to whoever is spooking her people, and means giving up on Chiri-Chiri. Sometimes the trade is too important to leave.

So she asks instead why a creature of that size would float at all. Kstled obligingly explains that bloated corpses ride the surface for days, that he has seen greatshell shells do the same. Another sailor agrees. Rysn does not know enough sea-lore to keep pushing the line. She switches tactics and tries attitude. "Get the boarding hooks," she tells them. "We will tow that body and give it a proper funeral." The sailors are scandalised — she cannot mean to profit by the shell — and she insists on the opposite: the queen will receive the shell as a relic, the corpse will be burned with the respect it deserves, and the bad luck attached to it belongs to whoever killed it, not to a ship that happens to find it. Look at the gouges on its side. Someone else paid that price. To them was given the privilege of bearing witness. This is a good omen.

She knows the argument is full of holes. She has spent the chapter decrying superstition and now she is buying superstition back at retail to save her voyage. It works anyway. A few sailors nod. Someone points out that the body is not stinking, that no rotspren cluster — proof, surely, that it wants to be near them. The captain adds her endorsement: she has burned prayers for years to meet a santhid in the wild, and this creature's soul must have known. *Grab the hooks.* The sailors move.

Drlwan stays beside the chair. She does not say she believes Rysn's reading of the omen; she says, more carefully, that passionate people make their own luck — the Thaylen Passions, dressed as confidence. She also makes the boundary clear: she will not turn back on a whim, but she will not throw this crew away either. If the omens turn out accurate, she will say so. Rysn watches the lines fly out and tries to imagine the climb someone will have to make down to the body to secure it.

The sailors get a hook into the corpse, and the corpse comes apart. It does not roll, does not slough — it disintegrates, the whole length of it breaking up into thumb-sized cremlings that pour into the sea. Sailors drop the ropes and scramble back. The shell breaks with the rest. Even the staring eye splits into pieces, exposing legs and shells underneath, before the swarm dives and is gone. In moments there is nothing left of the santhid at all. What had seemed a mythic carcass had been, end to end, a body assembled out of crawling things — sealings, as the ocean variety are sometimes called — and now they are loose in the water beneath her ship.