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your gear, report back. We’ll have today’s hires by noon, and we’ll see where we can fit you. Next?”
    “Wait! Don’t you want to know where I’d like to go?”
    The fellow’s long face creased with not-very-pleasant laughter. “Next!”
    Wren turned away, making a sour face over her shoulder.
    “Aw, don’t give him a second thought. Them clerks is all like that,” came a high voice at her shoulder.
    The girl was a little shorter than Wren, with curly black hair and a pair of wide set brown eyes. Her grin was merry as she asked something in a quick tongue with one or two vaguely familiar words. When Wren shook her head, she said, “They all tell you t’ hire your own yacht, or wait until someone wants you, but my sister says you can always find your way to your favorite ports. Especially cooks,” she added, smacking her chest. “Good cooks is almost as wanted as good top-hands.”
    “What’s a top-hand?” Wren asked.
    The girl looked surprised, then nodded. “You don’t know Dock Talk, an’ y’don’t know the work, so you must be a landrat. Well, top-hands is the ones’t go for the topsails. Anyone can learn to hand, reef, steer, on the deck, but them topsails is tricksy bizness,” she said. “I’m Patka. You? What I hear, Robin?”
    “Wren.”
    “Knew it was a land bird,” Patka said cheerily.
    “What is this gear he was talking about?”
    “Your hammock,” Patka said. “Rain gear, mess kid, spoon, winter and summer wear. Sewing kit. Tools, if ye need ‘em. Like that.”
    “Ships don’t have dishes and tools?”
    “Only the big war ships, or maybe a royal yacht or a big, rich merch,” Patka said, laughing. “But you won’t get no first hire on them . You hire on with your own. Outside waitin’ is the skimmers,” she added. “Ones’t’ll stop the newbies and promise everything at an easy price. Easy.” She snorted. “Four times the going rate, but newbies don’t know that, and gumpy stuff—hammock breaks first storm, knife that shatters. Like that. Steer alongside me and me brothers. We show you where to get gear.”
    Patka pointed at the boys Wren had seen earlier, now standing at the doorway, still nudging one another and chortling with laughter. They had the same dark curly hair as did Patka. With them stood a tall, skinny redhead with a worn tiranthe slung at his back, and a pale-haired boy whose dusty embroidered velvet looked quite out of place here.
    “Let’s go,” Patka said.
    Sure enough, outside the door several people addressed the emerging newbies with big, friendly smiles and exhortations of, “Want the fastest way to get equipped? Over here—across the way!” “Norta’s Shop—all gear, good prices!”
    The boy in velvet pulled out a hefty coin purse and followed one of the sellers, who clapped him on the back, acting friendly and confiding as they walked away.
    It occurred to Wren that Patka, for all her friendliness, might be another one of these, but that feeling faded as the morning wore on; Patka and her brothers and the red-haired boy with the tiranthe roamed up the streets and down, poking into small shops here and there, sometimes comparing prices. Patka and her family didn’t have gear either, but they knew what to get, and had been given coins by their family in order to get it.
    By lunch they were all friends, and Wren realized that Patka, who had just turned fourteen, had hoped to begin her career on the sea with another friendly girl to ship out with. Patka insisted that Wren had to learn Dock Talk as soon as possible, or she’d never get along in the world’s harbors.
    “Dock Talk is Charas, see? Empire lingo, only easy,” Patka explained.
    Wren soon figured that meant regularizing verbs, getting rid of plurals and articles and other bits of grammar not needed, and borrowing colorful terms from a lot of other languages.
    Switching back and forth between languages, Patka told Wren they came from a family of sailors, their home base