He once crewed with Malik aboard the Sovereign, and old sea-smells of tar and powder still rise unbidden when the past knocks, often in the shape of Sir Adder and castle boots on his threshold. Quiet by choice rather than nature, Rowan’s loyalties run deep. He and Malik speak the old Brethren’s language even as they try to live clean of it.

In the present, Rowan moves like a careful blade through Brennin’s under ways, slipping from his shop into hidden passages that climb to a rooftop rookery where he looses black-banded messages by crow, and down the other way into the Vein when work turns to darker errands with Dock Master Greywater. He’s the man who keeps his hands calm when tempers flare: the one steadying a friend, or palming a weapon only when there’s no other choice, as more than one feast night proved. Guilds have courted him, guards have threatened him, and still he returns to the block and steel, a butcher by trade and by discipline, with the sea forever just behind his eyes.