Read Chapter 5: The Debt

The ledger was written in a hand so tight it might have been carved, the ink faded to the color of dried blood. Isabelle had spread the pages across the reading table in the east tower, her finger tracing columns of dates and names that meant nothing to her. Until she reached the final page. There, beneath a list of leases and shipments and debts paid in salt and timber, someone had written in a larger, looser script: *To the house of Le Goff, one life owed. Taken at the turning of the tide.*

She read it three times before the words settled into meaning. Then she closed the ledger so hard the dust rose from its leather cover in a pale cloud.

The storm had blown itself out overnight, leaving the morning raw and gray. Yann was in his boat shed when she found him, bent over a tangle of rope that needed mending. He straightened when he saw her, and the look on his face told her he already knew why she'd come.

"You didn't tell me it was the other way around," she said.

He didn't play ignorant. His hands stopped working the rope and lay still in his lap. "That ledgers is old. Older than my grandfather."

"Your family serves mine. I've heard that from your own mouth." She stepped into the shed, the smell of tar and salt thick around her. "But my family owes yours a life. A debt taken at the turning of the tide. What does that mean, Yann?"

In the gray light from the open door, his face was all hard angles and shadows. He set down the rope and stood. "It means the sea doesn't take its tithe without witnesses. Someone has to mark the taking. Someone has to let the water know a Marchand woman is ready to be claimed."

Isabelle felt the locket warm against her chest beneath her coat. "And your family is the one that marks it."

"My grandfather was the marker for your great-aunt. Yvonne Marchand." He spoke the name like it hurt him. "He went out on the full moon the night she vanished. The story in the village is that he tried to save her against the covenant. That he broke the rule and paid for it."

She remembered what Corentin had said about Yann's grandfather and Yvonne both vanishing on the same night. "His boat was found empty. The sea gave him back to the rocks."

Yann shook his head slowly. "He was never found. The boat was found. The boat washes up every few years, in a different harbor, always empty, always with his coat still folded on the bench like he was coming back for it." His jaw tightened. "My grandmother searched for him her whole life. She died watching the horizon."

The weight of it pressed against Isabelle's chest. She sat down on a stack of crates near the door, the wood rough beneath her hands. "Your grandmother asked you to stop the deaths."

"Among other things."

"What other things?"

Yann crossed to her, his boots heavy on the plank floor. He stopped close enough that she could smell the sea on his skin, could see the line of weather-darkened freckles across his nose. "She made me promise I wouldn't let another Marchand woman go into the water alone. That if the choice came again, I'd be the one to stand at the edge and break what my family helped make."

Isabelle looked up at him. "You could have refused to help me. The day we met, you could have refused to even talk about the castle."

"I tried." A ghost of a smile crossed his mouth. "You don't take hints well."

"And the locket?" She pulled it out, the moonstone hanging on its chain, pale and cold. "You said whoever wears it becomes the one the sea will come for. But my great-aunt Yvonne isn't the one in this portrait. The woman in this miniature—" She unfastened the clasp and held the locket open. "I don't know who she is."

Yann looked at the tiny painted face. Something shifted in his expression, a door closing over a room she hadn't been allowed to see. "Her name was Amélie. She was a Marchand. She wore that locket two hundred years ago and disappeared on the first full moon after her wedding day."

"But my grandmother kept her portrait inside the diary. Why would she keep a portrait of a woman who disappeared?"

"Maybe because she wasn't the one the curse took," Yann said slowly. "Maybe the locket was hers, and the sea came for her—and missed."

Isabelle studied the miniature again. The woman's face was small and serene, wearing a dark gown, and there was something in the set of her mouth that reminded Isabelle of the painted eyes in the family gallery. The same chin. The same steady look.

"Missed how?" she said.

"No one knows. But the legend in my family goes that Amélie Marchand was the only one who ever walked the line between the Marchand debt and the Le Goff oath and did not fall." He met her eyes. "My grandmother believed if there was a way to break the curse, Amélie had found it."

"Then the one who needs to tell me how is dead two hundred years." Isabelle closed the locket with a click. "Unless you know something else."

Yann was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the gulls cried over the rooftops, muted by the thick gray sky. "The night my grandfather vanished, he took something with him. A journal that had been passed down through my family for generations. It was said to contain the true terms of the covenant between the Marchands and the Le Goffs—the full accounting of what was owed and why."

"And it vanished with him."

"Not vanished." Yann's voice dropped. "Washed up in the box you found on the beach. The box is old, but it wasn't in the water long."

Isabelle stood, her heart moving quicker now. "The box. We didn't open the box."

"No," Yann said. "We only read the oilcloth message. The box itself, I left at the castle."

"With Corentin."

A different kind of worry crossed his face. "Corentin's mother was Le Goff. His loyalty is split between the houses."

"Then we shouldn't have left it with him." Isabelle was already moving, out of the shed and toward the road that led up to the castle. The wind was cold, raw from the sea, and the locket warmed again as if responding to her urgency. She didn't stop to wonder if that was fear or something else. "Whatever's in that box—my ledger says the debt is one life taken at the turning of the tide. But Seraphine's message said the debt is not paid and there was another way she was too afraid to take. If Amélie found a way, maybe she left it behind for her family. Maybe the box is what she left."

Yann caught up to her with long strides, his hand closing around her arm, turning her to face him. "If the box contains a way to break the covenant, it also contains a way to reveal that the debt was never fully enacted. That could mean the sea is out of patience. It could mean the next full moon comes for more than one woman."

Isabelle looked at the castle rising above them on the cliff. A figure stood at the window of the east tower. Corentin. Watching.

"Then we find out what's in the box before the full moon," she said. "And we find out what Amélie knew."

Yann's grip loosened but didn't release her. "The full moon is three nights from now."

The weight of it settled in her stomach like a stone. "Then we have three nights to end a three-hundred-year-old debt. That's enough."

"Or not enough," Yann said quietly.

"Either way," Isabelle said, and pulled her arm free, "I'm not going into the water without knowing what I'm walking into." She started up the road again, and this time he followed.