Pell lets you wind nothing. You only watch.

“Neap,” she says, pointing at a quarter-moon she has drawn in charcoal on the clock’s margin. “Sun and Moon pulling at angles. Tides milder. You can make mistakes and get away with some of them.”

“Spring.” Full coin, or new. “Same team. High higher, low lower. The bar bares its back, then drowns it. Put a storm on a spring flood and you get the line on Grey Stack.”

Pip traces the marks. “So Wren’s hurry isn’t just hurry. It’s hurry on the wrong clock.”

“Clocks are promises,” Pell says. “The water keeps them whether we cut them into the Post or not.”

You practice reading: wind direction on the chandlery vane, moon on the window, stain-line in your memory. Dusk-bar skills are mostly don’t. Don’t crowd the Stack. Don’t step the foam. Don’t call salvage what is a door.

Pell sets a cup of water on the sill and tips it slowly until it runs. “Flood,” she says. She tips it back. “Ebb. Now imagine the Moon doing that to a whole ocean, and the Sun helping or hindering depending on the month. You do not have to be a sailor to refuse the bar at the greedy hour. You have to be a person who can stand being called slow.”