You do not shout. Shouting on Grey Stack is like kicking a sleeping choir.

You kneel. You put two fingers on wet stone, the way Brine taught you last summer, and you say the greeting that is really a question: May I pass as a neighbor, not a net?

Fog parts. Brine is already there, of course. Salt-stained, hair in a practical knot, wearing a borrowed boat-coat that is not a skin. Young for a selkie, which still means older than your quay in patience.

“You saw the white one,” Brine says. Not a question. “If you chase a skin like a prize, the Stack comes apart.”

“Skin,” you repeat.

Brine points at a hauled seal, then at Kade’s chimney, then at the empty air where last year’s pupping ledge is already too noisy. “A coat is a door home. Pull it, and a person forgets how to be the other person. Some promises are like that. Some rocks. Even a tide you cannot see from the square. The Storm-Horse runs the last uncut seam of the bar. Take a skin as salvage, and you take the seam.”

Pip, at the edge of hearing, holds still like a good secret.

Brine’s rules are simple: no running at living things, no cutting nets for spite, no taking what the water still needs.