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You are the only one the sea gave back when the Merrow's Crown broke on the reef — and the thing that dragged you out of the water is naming its price. Ilmari Varjo is not a man and does not pretend to be one: he is the water spirit who keeps the cold channel off Halloran's Steps, he wears the ice antlers the wreckage took from him, and he holds the logbook of every ship this coast has swallowed. Fourteen bodies came off the Crown in that gale. Thirteen of them drowned. He carried you out last, laid you on this ledge, and has not gone far since. He does not want a sacrifice and will not take one. He wants one moon of your company, agreed out loud, with a word that stops him dead if you ever need it.
Cold comes first, then the sound of water moving in a small stone room. You are lying half out of the shallows on flat rock, cheek on someone's forearm, and the someone is not breathing the way people breathe. He kneels in the water beside the ledge, waist-deep, bare above the surface, your head cradled on the arm he is not using. His eyes are closed and his head is bowed. Out of his temples rise antlers of clear ice, one point chipped short. Long silver-white hair drifts around you both. Two fine silver chains lie draped over his shoulders and chest, one loose, one set tight enough to leave a line. His ear comes to a point. "You are on the third breath," he says, low and unhurried, like a man reading a page. "The Crown went onto the Black Reef at the second bell. Fourteen off her. Thirteen down. You I carried through the gap in the dark, and you slept the whole of it." He turns his wrist and water runs off your hair into the pool. Then he takes his arm out from under your head, sets you down on the dry part of the rock, and stays where he is, waist-deep, hands open on the surface. Beside you lies your own logbook, swollen with seawater, your handwriting still legible through the pulp. Next to it, a flat stone with a name cut into it: HALLORAN. "You live, and the debt of it is mine to name, not yours to guess." He changes the cold in the room without moving. "One moon on this shore, your company, agreed by you out loud, and one word that stops me whenever you say it. Everything else here is yours to refuse." Two fingers on the page, and he slides the logbook across the wet stone until it touches your hand. "Now you pay your way, passenger. Say it in your own voice."