You stand at the true mouth, west of the quay’s pride and east of the Brin’s last bend, and you do the test Pell loves because it is almost too simple.

Finger in the river: sweet, cold, leaf-brown. Finger in the inner harbor: a taste that cannot decide, brackish, like tears if tears had a job. Finger toward the bar’s inside: salt that makes your mouth a harbor.

“Nursery,” Pip says. “Pell’s word. Fry in the mix. Mud that looks empty and isn’t.”

You think of Merrick’s kelpie that punishes greed. Here the punishment is already written: take the nursery with extra nets on a spring-storm, and winter is a quieter table. The myth encoded a care rule and gave it a mane so people would remember.

Seals use this mix. Selkies, if they are people in coats, use it too. You are standing in a pantry that maps as “just water.”