Molly and Nicholas disembarked the Cleaver on a cold November afternoon, having traveled from the warm Bruntish summer to the first light snow of Florian autumn.
Grayport, the oldest city on the continent, stood against the harbor like a miniature Umber, with the Arrowhead River flowing along the west and the wooded frontier encircling its borders. The city drew its name from a rare form of salt—a mineral in the bay that evaporated with the water and effloresced, like fuzzy crystal mold, anywhere the rain or mist carried it from the harbor. Drifts and pillars of the salt could be seen around the docks, trees stood gray and yet surprisingly survived, and the buildings looked far more aged than they were. Grime and patchwork were everywhere and gave the houses and the port a workmanlike appeal, as of structures roughly used and practically repaired. It was a lived-in city, now to be their home.
Despite Molly’s affection for Captain Veer and the crew, she said her goodbyes quickly—though tearfully with kind Mr. Knacker—and the siblings hurried off, eager to leave the ship’s stinking confines, the sailors’ questions about their prospects, and the pall of Mr. Fen’s unexplained death.
Nicholas’s health had largely rebounded but his strength, such as it was, had not entirely returned. Molly dragged their trunk, all they owned in the world, and scraped a trail in the clean inch of snow upon the wharf. She marveled at the firm, still planks beneath her feet, the unfamiliar gravity of ground that didn’t tip. The weather made the city beyond the docks as blurry as the ships in the white-gray harbor. The air was clean and cold, the smell of people, cod, rotten wood, and even her own unwashed body given freshness by the sea. There were tables of vegetables and fish; barrels, crates, and carts; cats and dogs and fearless gulls; drunks and raggedy children. Hawkers sized them up, some with offers of goods or greetings of dubious intent, but by and large they were no more regarded than anyone else around the dockyard.
Nicholas strode ahead and almost lost her in the crowd. Twice she said, “Nicholas,” and twice he didn’t turn. Molly dragged on, frazzled and alert, and saw her brother more than thirty paces off and never slowing. Wind razored through her cloak. The snow chilled her toes. She stamped her feet to warm them up and dropped the trunk, becoming an obstacle in the walkway and refusing to move another step, ignoring the grumbling passersby and balling up her fists.
“Jacob Smith!” she yelled.
Her brother stopped and turned. He made his way back with quick deliberate steps, a thin dark figure in the crosswind of flurries, as cool as she was hot, and maddeningly blank. Each was all the other had, and he had very nearly left her, merely to reinforce the lesson of their names.
“No one’s listening!” she said. “No one cares who we are!”
“We talked about this,” Nicholas replied.
“We’re here without a friend or anyplace to go, and you’re prepared to walk away because I called you by your name!” Her shout drew the hesitant attention of a constable, a portly man with fat silver buttons on his greatcoat. “Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas!” Molly yelled to prove her point. No one listened. No one cared. In fact, her overcooked dramatics turned the constable away, as she appeared to be a wife giving fire to her husband, something far too common to arouse the law’s suspicions.
Nicholas slumped and bowed his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her shoes.
The frailty of his will—an inner slump to match the outer, which she couldn’t remember seeing in her brother all his life—frostbit her hopes. They were equals now, tiny and encumbered by their freedom, as reliant on her wits as on Nicholas’s.
He tried to hide a cough. Molly’s stomach swooped and growled. She had caught a whiff of bread that made her ravenously hungry, and rather than console her brother in his doubt, she picked up the trunk and followed the aroma, keeping Nicholas behind her as she wove through the crowd.
The smell disappeared. She had possibly imagined it, but now that she was leading she was warmer, more determined, and she came upon a cart of plump frozen apples. The vendor was a man with pink protruding eyes, very like the snow-packed fruits he was selling. He stared with terrible acuity at everyone who passed, assessing whether they were customers or thieves, giving the same sharp look to well-dressed matrons as he did to wily children and a lean mongrel dog.
Molly hadn’t tasted apples since they’d sailed from Umber—only hardtack and salted meat and vegetables the likes of which she wouldn’t have fed to hogs. Nicholas stood beside her, out of breath and shivering hard. The apple seller glared.
Molly smiled and said, “Good day.”
“Good day,” the seller answered. “Rosy apple for you, miss?”
“I haven’t any money,” Molly said.
The seller blinked, or rather puckered at the eyes without closing up the lids. Molly opened the trunk and found a beaver cap mashed among the clothes.
“What are you doing?” Nicholas asked.
“I’m going to sing for coins.”
Her brother cocked a brow and said, “Molly. You cannot.”
It was true. She couldn’t sing. Even Frances had discouraged her—Frances, who encouraged her to dance, which Molly excelled at, and to practice speaking Rouge, which Molly learned with much complaint, and to swim and ride her horse and play the harpsichord with Nicholas: anything to keep her out of trouble with her father. Anything but sing. She could read a sheet, name a pitch, and memorize a tune, but though her speaking voice was sweet and bright, her singing voice was not.
“Torturous,” her father had called it. “Discordant,” said her brother. “It is a gift God withheld,” Frances gingerly suggested.
Molly would sooner win a coin juggling cats or eating fire. She set the cap upside down in the snow, ushered Nicholas behind her, and stood on the trunk. Then she swelled her chest and sang:
’Twas on the deep Eccentric
Midst extraordinary gales
A sailor tumbled overboard
Among the sharks and whales!
He vanished in a blink
So headlong down went he
And went out of sight
Like a wrinkle of light
In the darkness of the sea!
“God’s blood!” a passing trader said, covering his ears. The fishmongers stared, openmouthed as mackerel. A rope beater paused in the beating of his rope.
We lowered a boat to find his corpse
And mourn whate’er we could
When up he bobbed and split the waves
Like a buoyant piece of wood!
The apple seller tried to speak but choked and started hacking. Two women carrying baskets, who’d been coming toward the cart, frowned at Molly haughtily and walked the opposite way. Others shuffled off and kept their distance on the dock until the apple man and half the neighboring merchants were abandoned.
“Cut that out!”
“You’re killing business!”
“And me ears!”
“Scat, be off!”
My fellows, said the sailor,
Do not grieve for me
I’m married to a mermaid
In the sweet Eccentric Sea!
The apple seller grasped at her with cold, bony hands. His eyes were wider now, and raw, and threatening to pop. A burly man, slimy-aproned with a foul stink of fish, took her other arm and forced her off the trunk, saying, “Tha’s enough now. You’s injuring me finer sensibilities.”
Molly kept singing over all their protestations. A bearded sailor with a sad, flat face produced a copper, dropped it into the cap, and said, “Buy yourself a muzzle.”
Molly stopped and took the cap and looked for Nicholas, who’d vanished. In the sudden lack of song, she heard the hiss of falling snow. She curtsied to the vendors and left the dock, dragging the trunk.
Nicholas met her beside a dray at the start of the city proper, holding four grand apples he had stolen undetected. Molly laughed and flashed the coin. Nicholas grinned and bowed.
They put the apples in the tru
nk, all but one that Molly ate as they walked the narrow, mazy streets of center Grayport. The closeness of the buildings lent both snugness and constraint to the city, a sense that everyone was safe but too close packed, like people on a ship with overstuffed cabins. Opportunity was everywhere but so was competition, and although it seemed a perfect place for runaways to hide, it also seemed a place where someone vulnerable could vanish.
Molly and Nicholas were jostled by people who seemed fresher and more cavalier than the citizens of Umber. It was freedom, Molly thought, from the governance of Bruntland, a mother country too far away to fully parent. Everyone they saw showed vitality and purpose. Even the drunks and beggars seemed to know where they were going.
The siblings spent their copper on a hearty loaf of bread. They tore it into chunks and chewed it as they walked, but their hours of discovery were terribly fatiguing, and they could linger only so long in shops or public houses without a show of money. The snow eventually stopped but the temperature plummeted in the late-day sun. Dragging the trunk had worn Molly out and Nicholas was wan. They came to a tavern at the outskirts of the city, where the streets petered out to show the wilderness beyond. The sky was bloody wool. A lamplighter passed, igniting salt-encrusted lanterns, and the streets looked cozy in the hard-biting cold. They heard a fiddle and a hornpipe playing in the tavern, smelled the meat and pies and biscuits, watched the patrons come and go.
Nicholas took Molly’s hand and led her to a church. It was tiny, gray and black with a tall sharp steeple. They went inside and huddled in a corner in the dark. Molly wiped her eyes, looking up beyond the rafters. Nicholas thought and thought, staring at the floor.
* * *
They lived by hook or crook for the first few days, stealing what they could and begging for the rest, until they each found employment and rented a small, drafty flat in the rougher section of Grayport’s central district. By midwinter, Molly had worked as a scullery maid, a seamstress, and a serving girl in three separate taverns. She had been fired from every position for cheek and ungovernability, and had been forced to start again each time without references.
One evening after a long, futile search for new employment, Molly walked to the Customs House, a noble brick building, four stories high, with a newly added portico and a clock tower overlooking the waterfront. Nicholas had found clerical work there, thanks to his aptitude with figures and his fluency in several languages: qualities of worth in a city with so many foreign sailors, so many ledgers and restrictions. It was a position Nicholas loathed but one he had to keep; even when Molly held a job, they could barely pay the rent.
The sun had set on all but the face of the Customs House clock, and Molly paced the shadowy docks and gazed across the sea. She had a vision of her father, well-attired, in his study.
News of the Bread Riot Massacre had arrived from Umber in early winter. Seventeen dead, dozens more wounded. Inquests were held and protests were staged, but ultimately the rioters were demonized, having instigated the bloodshed with countless acts of violence, theft, and vandalism. To stabilize the peace, fixed prices were enforced once more throughout the markets and Umber carried on, bruised but not destroyed. General Bell, so recently the nation’s savior in war, was generally portrayed as a hero and a victim. Molly didn’t know whether he had remained in Worthington Square. For all she knew, the home she’d come to miss was nonexistent.
She left the wharf at nightfall and met Nicholas at the Customs House door. Her appearance there surprised him for only a moment. Then he said with leaden certainty, “Another fruitless day. Perhaps it’s you, and not employers, who are being too selective.”
“I can always be a laundress. How I’d love to be a governess,” she said, feigning hope.
Nicholas wounded her with laughter. “Who would trust you with their linens, let alone their children? The streets would soon be full of underboiled urchins.”
They began walking home through the tight-knit crowd in a city still foreign, still coldly unfamiliar. Little coin and many worries were the whole of their existence. Molly glowered at a coffeehouse stuffed with rosy people. Salty gray slush leaked through her shoes.
A fellow with a long crooked nose bumped her shoulder.
“Excuse me, miss!” he said. “I wasn’t looking, thousand pardons.”
When she turned around to answer, he had blended with the crowd.
“Open your cloak,” Nicholas said, reaching for her collar.
“What are you doing? Nicholas, stop.”
He pried apart her hands, saw her throat, and narrowed his eyes.
“Wait for me at home,” he said.
Before she understood or could summon a reply, Nicholas had walked away and she was suddenly alone.
She called his name and followed him, but no—he’d turned a corner. Then a horse was in her way and she was forced to move aside, and it was only upon refastening her cloak that she discovered her locket was gone. The only valuable thing she owned, with Nicholas’s tooth! She hurried through the streets, unsure of where to go, less concerned about the locket than she was about her brother as he chased a practiced thief to God knew where. What if there were others? Didn’t thieves have dens? What if Nicholas were cornered in an unlit yard, bludgeoned in a house, and never seen again?
For almost two hours she checked the side roads, marketplace, and docks, all the time with billowing dread that she had lost him altogether. How would she survive without a job or ready money, having no place to live and no means of sailing back?
“Rotten spoiled girl!” she said, upbraiding herself for selfishness and drawing wary looks.
When the cold shrank her down and the search was clearly useless, she returned to their icy flat, shivering and despondent. Watchmen rarely patrolled their part of the city and the streets were barely lit. She braved a shortcut between a pair of derelict houses, where the weeds were frozen dead and snagged her skirt, and climbed the creaking outdoor stairs to their door, relieved she had a key but jealous of the landlady’s late mutton supper. Molly paused a moment, savoring the wonderful aroma. She considered going down and begging for a plate, but how could she indulge herself with Nicholas in danger? So she turned the frozen key to face the dark, spartan flat.
She opened the door to heat and light. A lantern burned, the iron stove was full of burning coals, and Nicholas sat at the table with a roasted chicken, a golden loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine he had opened but not yet poured.
She rushed to hug him in his chair and he was warm, very warm. He backed her off and rubbed her hands to foster circulation. Molly cried in her relief, and laughed, and said in anger, “I’ve been searching half the city, thinking you were dead, and here you are with dinner! O, you hardhearted fiend!”
“I said to wait at home,” he answered, unperturbed.
She called him many things and cursed him many ways. Nicholas took her cloak and stood her at the stove. He poured her a cup of wine—they had tin instead of glass—and Molly gulped it down with no awareness of its flavor.
Nicholas held her locket up. It dangled by its ribbon, delicate and twisting, glinting in the light.
“Oh!” Molly said. “But how—”
“I used persuasion.”
Molly stood with jellied legs, recalling Mr. Fen.
“Is he jailed? Is he—”
“Free. Not to trouble us again.”
He handed her the locket, poured his own cup of wine, and sipped it with attention, savoring the vintage.
* * *
Two days later, Molly sat alone in the flat mending a tear in Nicholas’s only spare shirt. She daydreamed of Frances, who had taught her how to sew and had been doing so herself, in the little green room of the country manor, on the evening Lord Bell had announced her dismissal. Molly longed to write her letters but Nicholas wouldn’t allow it. What if Frances’s employers intercepted such a letter? What if Lord Bell had asked for their assistance, hoping to discover the location of his children? Molly underst
ood but would have risked it anyway, and she had spent a quarter hour recalling the sound of Frances’s voice, and how she used to dab her nose with a monogrammed handkerchief, when someone ascended the outdoor stairs and knocked upon the door of the flat.
No one ever knocked. No one visited at all. Nicholas wasn’t due for at least another hour, having planned to finish his day at the Customs House and inquire after a printmaking job across the city. In Molly’s reverie, the daylight had fallen to the dark, and now the person at the door was playing with the lock. She stood and grabbed the shovel used for cleaning out the stove. It was iron, square-headed with a reassuring heft. She raised it when the lock and then the door gently opened.
In walked a stranger, magisterial and tall, and she might have cracked his skull if not for his ebony skin.
Rich, Molly thought. From the bright Aquatic Islands.
Aquarians were a prominent minority in Grayport, hailing from a small, wealthy country in the Solar Ocean. Molly had seen them often in the city that winter, riding carriages or walking from the harbor to the Customs House. Not every Aquarian was affluent, but they were foreign and imposing and possessed of native pride. One assumed a higher pedigree and generally the assumption was correct; Molly—poor and plain—was outside their sphere.
“Good evening, Mrs. Smith,” the stranger said, doffing his hat with a bow and exposing his head to the shovel. “My apologies for entering so. I knocked and no one answered.”
He addressed her with the slow, melodic accent of his country. It was a voice that took its time without being dull, rather like a cello at a comfortable andante. He was sensibly dressed for winter in a bearskin hat, knee-high boots, and a fur-shouldered coat that added to his broadness. Molly backed away, speechlessly confused, until the stove felt near enough to scald her derrière.
“My name is Kofi Baa,” he said. “I am a shipowner residing here in Grayport. Your husband suffered injuries in aid of me tonight. A hired man is carrying him up even now.”
Molly dropped the shovel. Kofi Baa stepped aside, untroubled by the clang, and she had nearly reached the stairs when a short, swarthy man carried Nicholas inside.
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