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The winter she was thirteen I watched my daughter settle the salvage feud, and I want to set the scene down exactly, because it was the most frightened I had been in years and nobody in that gallery felt anything but joy.
Two families — the Corrs and the Ovricks — had been at each other for a month over a wreck. A grain-barge had gone down in the ninth channel in a storm, and both families had pulled cargo from it, and both claimed the whole, and it had that particular ugliness of a thing that's about grief as much as grain, because an Ovrick boy had drowned in the salvage and the Corrs wouldn't say they were sorry and the Ovricks wouldn't say the boy had gone in greedy, and the free city's slow machinery had chewed on it for weeks and only made it worse. By the time it came to Wren it wasn't about the barge anymore. It was about a dead boy and two families who could not stand in the same tunnel.
They brought it to her in the old pump gallery, a crowd packed to the walls, because these were public now, the little Moon's settlings — people came to watch the way they'd once come to the remembrance. I stood at the back where I always stood. And I watched my thirteen-year-old daughter walk out in front of two grieving families and a hundred onlookers, and not perform, and not preen, and not do a single thing her grandfather's hands had tried to teach her — she just sat down on the wet stone across from the two family heads, closer to their level than a queen would ever sit, and she said, "Tell me about the boy first. Not the grain. The boy. What was his name."
