Posting this so the rest of the lane knows, and if you don’t believe me you will when your own night comes. Sometime between market day and the one after, while the lane slept, a quantity of goods went out of my back cellar: two wheels of the hard cheese, the better part of a barrel of aged cider, a string of dried river fowl, and my good copper pot, which is the part I am actually sore about. No door forced. No latch broken.

I know who did it, and so do most of you, though you will drop your voices to say it. It was the serpent-pirate woman they call Rain. She slinked her way to my door two days before, asking after the road north, polite as a Sunday. She drank a cup of my cider on the step, complimented it even, and I stood there flattered like a fool. I understand now she was not thirsty. She was taking inventory.

And before you tell me a creature with no eyes cannot rob a man blind in the dark, save your breath, because I have heard the dockmen tell it and now I have lived it. Rain has no eyes at all. Not a clouded pair, not a scar, not so much as a socket, only smooth scale where a face ought to keep them, and still she misses nothing. She found the cup on my step without a fumble. She named my cider by the smell alone. And the whole while she stood there, that forked tongue slid out and tasted the air, over and over, reading my house off the dark the way you read a page by candlelight. The night that blinds the rest of us is the hour she does her finest work.

I am not asking anyone to go after her, and I want to be clear about that. She is bigger than all of us, faster than she looks, and the dockmen swear she has worked this coast longer than any of them have been alive and never once been caught. There is no reward on this notice. A reward would only send some fool up to the Downs hunting her ship. So mind your stores, and if a polite stranger in a red coat stops to admire your preserves, save yourself the trouble and just give her the directions she asks for. They say she never takes from the same house twice, and that is the only mercy in her. And if she happens to read this, which I doubt, I would like the pot back, and I would happily pay for the trouble of its return.

A. Thresher