Lark, encouraging me away from History of Magic to Classical Literature. Lark, kissing me until I felt as high on love (and purpose, and connection) as if I had spent a year and a half smoking the wireweed directly. Lark, the glory of the university—
Lark, the liar, user, and cheat.
Lark, who made sure I was utterly hers, while she played with anyone she pleased.
Violet, who was her closest and best friend. Violet, who wore a grey cloak the night of a cult full of grey-cloaked figures. Violet, who had attacked me—and whom I trusted without reason, without sense, because of a friendship founded on Lark’s—
“Jemis,” said Violet, her voice breaking, as I stared in horror at her. “Jemis, please—”
“No,” I said, backing up, trying to think through the crashing of my thoughts, feeling as if my heart was breaking all over again. “No.”
“Jemis,” said Mr. Dart, standing up with his left hand raised as if to grab Violet, who wasn’t moving.
“No,” I said violently, shaking my head, hand on the doorknob, needing to go, needing to run—
“Jemis,” Violet whispered, but her voice was drowned out by a sudden clamour as the market bell pealed forth the fire alarm.
I jumped, jerked at the door, prepared at last to act, but my hands were sweaty and slipped while I fought with the handle. Mrs. Etaris grabbed my collar and halted me roughly before I could exit. “No, Mr. Greenwing,” she said firmly. “You don’t know where to go.”
Someone in the square cried out: “It’s Mr. Shipston’s! Form a bucket chain from the fountain!”
“There,” I said, trying to twist out of her grip.
“Mr. Greenwing, you must not be over-hasty.”
I stopped, staring in astonishment, to see that she was serious. Behind her Violet was frowning, pinching her hat so the feather crushed, so incongruously I thought: no, wait, that’s not what Lark’s Violet would do—that’s what my Violet is like—
“I—” I began, faltering on everything.
“No,” Mrs. Etaris said again. “Think about where his house is. We shall help better via the river. This way.”
“I can’t help with a bucket,” Mr. Dart said in agony, “I can barely move my arm.”
The first impulse ran out of me; now I followed dumbly behind Mrs. Etaris. She led us quickly through the back streets, including a couple narrow alleys I hadn’t realized were there. Violet stayed close behind her, with Mr. Dart and me following at the rear. As we wound past the backs, I suddenly had a face full of smoke and ash. The others all started to cough; I, naturally, sneezed.
“Jemis,” Mr. Dart said hoarsely, “do you have any extra handkerchiefs?”
“I always have extra handkerchiefs,” I said with faint indignation, and pulled three out. Mr. Dart took one and clapped it to his mouth with a muttered thanks. Mrs. Etaris dipped hers into a puddle at her feet, then bound hers about her nose with quick knots. I emulated her, having rather more trouble with the knots.
“This is the problem with being a man,” Violet said in a low voice, having tied hers as easily as Mrs. Etaris, and helped Mr. Dart. We went down another side alley. “You don’t learn anything useful to do with needlework.”
“I’m sure your sailor uncle knows his knots,” I retorted automatically, and at her baffled look realized—started to realize—was trying to realize something when Mrs. Etaris stopped, and I saw what lay before us.
Several people had come out to gawk from the nearest houses to Mr. Shipston’s. The physicker’s house was gouting black smoke from its street side. Mrs. Etaris glanced sharply around the scene. From here we could see that there was indeed a water-wheel on the river side of the house, groaning as it spun in the quick stream of the Raggle.
“It looks like they should have been able to get out,” Mr. Dart began in relief, but just then a second-floor window exploded into fire with a sound that was eerily human.
“That sounds—You there!” Mrs. Etaris shouted at the nearest bystander. “Fetch buckets from inside and form a bucket chain from the river. Mr. Dart, you go to the front and see if everyone has come out. There are at least three people in the household, Mr. Shipston, his man, and a maid.”
“There’s a cook, too,” a woman said. She was grinning, and seemed to be enjoying herself. Mr. Dart nodded and pushed through the crowd, using his petrified arm as a kind of club to knock people out of the way.
“It could spread,” Mrs. Etaris said frigidly, and half the crowd scattered under the force of her frown. They reappeared quickly with pots and buckets and quickly formed a bucket chain under the bookseller’s direction. Violet and I were pushed out of the way, closer towards the house.
Violet said, suddenly, “Is that a person in there?” She pointed up at a window on the first floor, at the opposite end to the one spouting fire, where a human shape was hammering fists against the glass.
I don’t know what madness seized me, except that perhaps I was fed up with being considered the foolish son of a disgraced war hero, or drugged by the woman I’d loved, or bewitched by what I’d thought a good friend, or being the risibly sneezing young Mr. Greenwing, or what—without thinking further I threw myself shoulder-first through the glass of the ground-floor conservatory, and into the house.
Chapter Seventeen
The fire must have started on the other side of the house, for there was little smoke or sense of danger on this end. With the wet cloth over my nose and mouth I found myself breathing almost easily. I had no inclination to sneeze. I felt no fear, only a clear sense of purpose. I moved quickly but without haste, knowing from some deep place that carelessness would kill me faster than anything else.
I’d only been into the house the once. What had I seen from the entry-way? A hallway leading straight to a flight of stairs; rooms on either side; another pair of rooms on each side of the flight on the upper floors. A typical pre-Fall Fiellanese townhouse, in short, though as this was the old mill there were extra rooms on the river side.
If this was the conservatory, and I’d come in the back side of the house, then the kitchen would be to the right, and the servant stairs between them and the front, running up next to the shrines where Astandalan rituals used to be performed.
I opened doors as I went to be sure not to miss anyone. The last before the stairs contained a shrine in obvious use; and I recalled that Mr. Shipston claimed to be a magician.
I held my breath but felt no need to sneeze. Of course; everyone knew the rituals were empty, and had been empty since the Interim (when they had been anything but empty of power, but not the power anyone wanted or expected). The next door over should be the stairs—and it was.
Now I heard the fire, roaring down the stairwell like a monster. And over it a wailing sob that sounded so like the woman keening over the drums of the Dark Kings that I hesitated.
Violet said in my ear, “You’re making a chimney. The fire will grow—”
I jumped and leaped up the stairs. She was right, the roaring above was changing tone, growing hungrier, furious. Violet behind me leaped up with the door slamming behind her, no skirts to trip her, even as the stairs spiralled up in the smallest possible space. I panted through my thick nose and the handkerchief. On the last turn to the first floor I skidded to a halt, Violet thumping into me. The fire was above us; the cracks between the floorboards were glowing scarlet. To our left ash was sifting down.
The wailing had come from the river side. I’d gotten turned around on the spiral, and hoped the right was still the right direction. I launched myself through door after door, Violet slamming them shut behind us.
A sitting room full of pieces of clockwork; a bedroom all in green; a room of blue drapery with nothing in it but a single standing harp taller than me and an incongruous claw-foot bathtub set beside it.
That was the end of the house. I stopped at the window and flailed around. Violet was standing on the other side of the harp, staring at me, her eyes wide over the handkerchief.
“The sound came from here,” she said. The air seemed to be getting thin. I couldn’t hear much beside the thundering fire over us. The plaster in the room was crumbling. “We must—”
The harp shuddered in a deafening jangle of notes, and toppled over on its side. I jumped towards the window as a piece of the ceiling fell in. Violet crashed over beside me, and reached to open a door I hadn’t seen, half-hidden in the wainscoting.
Inside a narrow closet was a long grey hooded cloak, with dark stains about its hem.
“Violet,” I said uncertainly, and then something broke above us and in the cracking of the house my own reserve snapped, and I turned to her in fury.
“Did you know the whole time? About Lark giving me wireweed?”
She said, “Jemis, the house is on fire.”
“Violet.” I glared at her, the closet door trembling in my hand, my eyes stinging. “Tell me.”
She met my gaze, eyes wide and kohl-smudged over the white handkerchief. I could hear the fire roaring above us, but I didn’t move, the need to know far more urgent than the physical danger.
(A thought came distantly: that I had believed, last night, that physical danger would always outweigh other concerns.)
I could see her give in.
“Yes. I knew. I knew from the start. It wasn’t the first time.”
I couldn’t even formulate words to reply. Violet reached out and grabbed my hand from the closet door. “Jemis, please believe me. I am only telling you this because we are in a burning house. She was punishing me for liking you. I did my best to stop you from being ruined,” she added, a touch more softly.
I thought of the spring, and laughed bitterly, but the laughter turned to choking as something fell with a crash from the ceiling behind us.
Violet grabbed my arm. “Three rooms—but there were four windows on this floor—”
She was right. “Four—there must be a bathroom—” I thumped along the wainscoting, looking for another hidden door, and a foot or two from the closet found a hollow noise.
“There’s no handle,” I said urgently.
“Jemis—” Violet pushed me aside. I felt light-headed from lack of air. She was scrabbling at the wood with her dirk. There was a howling noise coming from inside the wall. How horrible, I thought, how horrible how horrible how
“Push, Jemis—shoulder it—it’s stuck.”
Violet’s voice was calm, rational, focused. I took a few steps back into the room. The house seemed to be tilting. I didn’t like to think what that meant. I took as deep a breath as I could manage, then held my breath against coughing and sneezing and all that. I can run, I thought; I had run, and run, and run, all this year. Run away from my illness and my failure at Morrowlea and the strange twisted relationship with Lark, whom I had thought I loved.
Violet cried, “Run!”
I launched myself straight at the wall with all my speed, and the door to the old bathroom splintered under my weight.
The pre-Fall fixture bath, the size of a bed, was full of water, full of light from the fire on one side and the light streaming in the window on the other, and full also of a howling naked woman with a fish’s tail who had fallen half out of it in a desperate attempt to get to the window.
Violet and I didn’t wait to blink twice—or not thrice, anyway. As if we’d planned it, I went to the window and used the ewer from the washstand to break open the window. Violet went to the mermaid and gave her a very sympathetic smile.
“We’re on the river side,” I said, my voice weirdly insouciant.
“True.”
We looked at each other and then at the mermaid. “Ma’am,” I said, “the river is below. The house is on fire. We shall have to jump holding you.”
The mermaid closed her mouth on the horrible screaming. Looked startled. Then, in an accented voice, said, “Yes.”
So Violet and I each took one of her arms. Violet used her dagger to push out the rest of the broken glass, I clambered out onto the sill, and we hauled the mermaid up between us. And then, since one glance behind me to see that Violet had made it to a teetering balance on the windowsill also served to demonstrate that the bucket chain had not succeeded in putting out the fire at all, without more than the briefest, “Ready?” we jumped into the Raggle.
***
I don’t even want to think about that period in the river.
The Raggle is smaller than the Rag—either of the Rags—but in spate it’s still quite large enough. I bumped my knee against the old bridge pilings hard enough for it to register through my panic.
There seemed to be a lot of shouting, and muddy brown water, and tugs this way and that, and then I was sneezing and retching and sneezing some more on the bank a bit downstream of the Ragglebridge while someone pounded me between my shoulder blades.
“Violet?” I gasped, and then thought: I’m so confused.
“Here,” she replied weakly. I rubbed my face to get the water out of my eyes and my hair out of my face. I’d lost all my handkerchiefs except one, which was sopping wet. Someone helped me get to my feet and struggle out of my coat.
There went my second-best coat after the first, I thought inconsequentially.
“Oh,” I said, and, “thank you.”
It was the bearded fisherman from the morning. His companion was down further at the bank, looking earnestly and worriedly downstream. With the first’s assistance I tottered down to him.
“Thank you,” I managed, before coughing again. “Is there—”
“There’s someone else in the water, but I can’t see where she got to,” he said. He was wet to his chest and had a rope tied to his waist. I looked at it dumbly.
The bearded fisherman said, “We heard the cries from upstream that people were in the river. We got ourselves tied to the mooring post and waded in to rescue you and the lady. But the other lady—”
“The other lady is a mermaid.”
They looked at me in astonished disbelief. I blushed. “I think she’ll want to stay in the river.”
From under a cascade of brambles and vines that swayed in a tangle of leaves in the water, a voice spoke petulantly. “There is nothing I want more than to get out of the river.”
The fishermen looked very doubtful. The second one said, “There aren’t any mermaids on Alinor.”
“I am an abomination.”
“Surely not!” said Violet, splashing over to us.
“Are you—are you Miranda?” I asked, trying to grasp at some straw of sense.
“Who told you my name?”
“We want to help you,” I said, trying to be as soothing and reasonable as Mr. Dart or Mrs. Etaris, though rather spoiled in the effect by another emphatic fit of sneezing. “Please. Are you—are you—” my brief glimpse of her had not made it clear how old she was. Older than me, I thought. “Are you Mrs. Shipston?”
“Miss,” spat the voice. “I returned to my maiden name after my husband abandoned me, the traitor. My brother took me in.”
“He wasn’t keeping you prisoner in that tub?” Violet asked, looking about as fascinated and horrified as I felt.
“My defilement kept me there.”
“Oh. Right,” she said, and started to sneeze.
I, of course, immediately followed suit. The bearded fisherman had undone the rope, and was coiling it back around the mooring post. “Um,” I said to him, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name? I’ve seen you of a morning.”
“Clegger,” he said gruffly, with a twinkle; “he’s Ned.”
“Thank you kindly, Mr. Clegger, Mr. Ned. I’m Jemis Greenwing.”
Mr. Ned was a thinner man than his friend, the one who usually touched his cap with one finger and said nothing. He touched his cap with one finger, grinning. “Me first name’s Jemis, after your granther’s horse, too, belike. Me father lost a bet.”
I sighed, but I couldn’t help but smile. “Mine, too.”
Violet giggled through her sneezes, and a woman who’d
been hovering behind us took the opportunity to bustle forward and throw a blanket over her. “Now, miss,” she said firmly. I recognized her belatedly as the innwife. “You just come in and dry yourself off. My Julie’s much of a size of you, and you won’t mind a dress, will you, if it’s dry? As for you, Mr. Greenwing, whatever were you thinking to take a woman into the river after a mermaid? Wanting to be in a folk tale, you boys are, half the time.”
“We jumped out of a burning house,” I said lamely.
“And what were you doing in there? Something foolish, no doubt. Come away and have a nice hot pot of wine, my dear.” She bent a worried face towards the vines. “And—Miss Shipston, was it? Would you like some hot wine?”
There was a pause, and then the vines parted, and a woman peered out. She might have been pretty at one point, but lines of grief and woe had etched her face hard and angular. Her hair was a grey-streaked dark brown, braided up in a kind of coronet much as I’d seen in Ghilousette, where the women wore lace caps. Her voice wavered as she said, “Thank you kindly, goodwife. I … I haven’t been so well used in many a day.”
The innwife nodded and bundled Violet away, with a call over her shoulder to me: “When you’re ready, Mr. Greenwing, come in and dry off.”
I sneezed again. “She makes it sound as if I did this every week.”
Mr. Clegger said, “Perhaps ’un should let people know you didn’t burn yourselves in the fire.”
“I’ll go,” said a youth, who’d been watching all this agog (and with an utter fascination for Miss Shipston the mermaid). “Whose house was it?”
I coughed. “Mr. Shipston the physicker’s. Tell Mrs. Etaris the bookmistress.”
“Ooer!” he said, and dashed off through the crowd that was peering at the tangle where Miss Shipston had once again retreated.
“Perhaps,” I suggested to Clegger and Ned, “we could give Miss Shipston her privacy?”
Clegger nodded. Ned glanced around, with a slow movement, and then cried out in a voice that startled me considerably. “Away with ye! The lady’s had her troubles, and don’t need you gawping at her like a bear in a zoo! Go to, the news’ll be round the town soon enow.”
Stargazy Pie Page 16
