Three Tides
Pip & Dawn, Book 5
by A.J.Sharpe
© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. No licence is granted for any use beyond the terms. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms

She came at first light now, and again at dusk, as if mornings had been running at half strength for years.
She came up on the deep side, which had stopped being not her side.
Pip adjusted to abundance. It took him about a day.

She asked what everything was called, and then what he called it, and said each one back until she had it, like marks copied onto a leaf.
The stone, the steps, the nine hulls, the second reed.
*The ninth boat has a name,* she said. *One day you will say it.*
He would not, and she looked pleased about that.

One morning she brought him a round clear stone that held the light all afternoon.
She carried it the last leaf-length more carefully than the distance needed.
*For the garden,* she said. He did not have a garden. He started one.

She talked about the sea for once: where the currents folded, and what the cold was like when it was safe.
There were rests in her talking now, the length of a wave, where no rests had been. Once her eyes closed in the middle of one.
He wrote it on a leaf, delighted, and did not ask why now.

*Be ready in three tides,* said Dawn.
*Ready for what?*
*Ready enough,* she said, which was an answer from the old days, and he grinned at it like a boy.

He swept the stone. He straightened the white pebbles. He aired the scarf, in case the surprise was formal.
He practised looking surprised, to nobody, laughing at himself between attempts.

On the last evening she came up so close that the water she lifted ran warm off her and around his feet.
She touched her mouth to him, once, above the eyes, quick as weather.

*Nothing is lost that is paid for,* she said later, of the summer being over.
It sounded like the sort of thing that is true about summers.
He filed it with her other weather.

Two tides. She spent one of them looking at ordinary things: the doorway, the boatyard, the reed with his mornings on it.
At the end she looked a while at the pool itself, at the face the water gave her back, as if to learn that too.

One tide.
*At first light,* she said, *be on the stone.*
He was there an hour early with his speech ready, and for once in his life he did not rehearse it.

In the night he went down the forty-one steps four times, to be sure of them.
They held still, all four times.
The dark smelled of a spring that was still a season away.

The third tide came in at first light with Dawn ahead of it, and behind her the sea stood up taller than he had ever seen it stand.
It did not frighten him.
Nothing that came with her ever had.

© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms