What the Sea Keeps
The token leaves your hand and the water takes it without a splash. For one long second nothing happens, and then the clock overhead lets out a grinding shriek and its hands snap forward to the correct hour, forty years of backward drift closed in an instant.
The shape in the harbour is simply gone — not submerged, not retreated, just no longer there, the way a held breath is no longer held. Corwin sits down hard on the tower steps, an old man again, and says only, “Forty years” over and over, like he’s checking it’s true.
Blackwater Cove will have a real harbourmaster again by spring. Whether the debt is actually closed, or only due again in another forty years, nobody in the cove will say — and you suspect none of them really know.
The end.