Once a year the tide draws further out than it has any business going, and for a few hours the harbour gives back its lower stones. At the Penny Shrine, three courses of masonry that spend the other three hundred and sixty-four nights underwater come up streaming and cold, packed solid with nine centuries of folded paper. This is Low Water, and Venturians do not call it a holiday. They call it going down to ask.

What People Do

You write a question on a slip of paper. You wrap a penny in it — your penny, not a borrowed one. You wedge it into the old stones while they are dry, and then you go back up the stairs and drink wine with everyone else, and the tide comes in behind you and takes it.

Sometimes an answer comes back.

Not often. Perhaps one in a hundred, and the city argues about whether even that is generous. It arrives as your own slip returned — dry, unfolded, with something written beneath your question in a hand that is not yours. It might turn up in your pocket that same night. It might turn up nine years later in a coat you have not worn since. It might turn up in the hands of a stranger who feels obliged to find you.

There is no ceremony, no priest, and no god named. The shrine's plaque has been worn illegible for two centuries. Everyone agrees it was dedicated to something. Nobody agrees to what.

Where It Came From

Four stories, all of them insisted upon:

• A drowned Ferrier who owed the city an answer and pays it back one at a time.
• A shipwright's widow who threw her wedding penny in and asked where he had gone, and was told.
• A Tidekeeper thing, older than the Lodge, which the Lodge has never confirmed and has also never denied.
• Nothing at all. It is a nice night. People like a lantern and a story.

The Tidekeepers attend every year, in numbers, in silence, and go home without saying why.

The Rules Everyone's Grandmother Taught Them

1. Write a question. A wish is not a question. A statement is not a question. The stones take those too and nothing comes back.
2. Ask plainly. The water has no ear for a clever man.
3. Ask once. Never the same question twice, not in one life.
4. Ask for yourself. A question asked on someone else's behalf answers the asker, not the one it is for, and that has gone badly enough times to be a proverb.
5. Don't thank it. Gratitude closes an account.
6. Your answer is yours. Read it aloud to a friend and half the city says the friend catches the debt. Half the city does it anyway.

A penny that washes back up onto the steps was refused. Some families keep them.

The Night Itself

Lantern boats, fried things, bad wine sold at good prices, children daring each other onto the wet stones. It is warm and it is genuinely lovely. Half the people there wrote nothing and came for the food.

Connections

• The Penny Shrine — Where it happens.
• The Harbor District — The district that hosts it.
• The Tidekeepers — Attend annually and will not say why.