The boat was wrong.
That was the first thing Captain Drenn Saltmark noticed from the Pale Coast watch-tower — the vessel approaching from the southeast moved like nothing built by Dominion shipwrights. Too narrow. Too low in the water. Something about the hull's curvature suggested a design philosophy that prioritized speed over cargo capacity, which made it a warship, a smuggler, or something Drenn hadn't seen before.
He pressed the spyglass to his eye. The watch-tower at Port Seylith — the administrative center of the Pale Coast's naval garrison — sat forty meters above the waterline and provided a clear sightline across five kilometers of open sea. On a clear morning like this one, with the mist burned off by the seventh hour, Drenn could count barnacles.
