by Cat Hellisen
“Verrel said that he brought her and Rin to you.”
“About three years back now. Lils was less than impressed at the time.”
“Shut up,” says Lils. “You didn’t give me no warning. It was you I was pissed at, not the mites.” She looks at me. “You never saw children so angry and scared. Gris knows what their da did to them, and there was no way they could follow their mam into the sea.” She shakes her head. “Half-breeds, always getting the worst of both. Took months for the bruises and burns to fade.”
“And the sharif were looking for them,” Nala says softly, drawing shapes in the sand with her finger. “That was a bad year. I don’t think they left Whelk Street for that whole time. Dash was always bringing them back treats, and Verrel would try to cheer them up with his stupid songs.”
“And half our money went to paying off the bloody sharif,” Lils says. “And hiring chirurgeons. And then paying them off so they wouldn’t talk none.”
Dash shrugs. “It was worth it.”
“For Esta and Rin?” Lils says. “Or for you?”
“Oh, always for me, of course.” Dash grins. “All my love for my fellow man is long since used up.”
Lils snorts and drinks deeply. “Wasted it, did you?”
“You bled me dry.”
“Shut up, you.”
“Tossing me aside for some skinny redhead…” He’s still grinning, and I take this to be some kind of long-running joke between them.
Nala punches him in the arm. “Skinny redhead? I’ll show you skinny redhead,” she says, then collapses against him in a fit of giggles. She looks up, squinting against the sun. “Weather’s going to change soon,” she says. “Best get this over with.” Nala clambers to her feet and waits.
Lils says nothing. Instead, she traces the edges of the picture Nala has drawn in the damp sand. With her dark expression gone tight and a little frightened, she allows Nala to pull her up.
“We’re going to go swim,” Nala says, tugging on her lover’s hand.
There’s no need to talk. I sit next to Dash, drinking with him while we watch the two girls pull off their dresses and wade out into the shallows wearing nothing but their bloomers and shifts.
“How far are they going?”
Dash moves closer to me to take the bottle. “Until it’s safe.” Heat radiates from him, and he smells like salt and dune sage.
I frown. The two girls are far out now so that just their heads are bobbing at the surface. Lils’s is dark and small, with the bun pinned tightly at the base of her skull, and Nala’s wild cloud of hair is slicked back with seawater into bloodred tendrils. For a moment, she reminds me of the pale girl in the water—they have the same fine bone structure, the cheeks and jawline of House daughters. She reaches out with her pale hands and undoes Lils’s bun.
The wind changes and I feel a shiver of terror, remembering:
the bat feeding at the Hob’s thigh Jannik’s mother pulsing with stomach-churning power the long giddy drop down Pelim’s Leap as I tossed my shawl and shoes into the surf Ilven’s face white and pinched the last time I saw her after her mother had announced her betrothal the taste of her breath in my mouth, sweet with sugar and scriv and fear
Then the visions fade as Lils leans back and lets the water cover her hair.
“What—?”
Dash grimaces. “That’s our Lils. It’s only safe for her to let down her hair where there’s no people, and where there’s salt water to wash all the nightmares out.”
“What are you talking about?”
He looks at me sidelong. “Lils is a throwback, a Hob with magic. She can trace her family line back to MallenIve, and to the opening of the Well.”
The Well: root of all the magical disasters that befell our country. The magic unleashed by House Mallen that day warped the living things around it. There were patches of fallout that made Hobs and Lammers and animals of all kinds turn strange, some bodily, others magically. Most of the tainted survivors were killed, although some escaped—like the unicorns and the sphynxes who took to the red sands of the deep desert. Even the nixes and selkies fled for the safety of the sea and the treacherous Casabi. Few magical Hobs managed to evade the later purges led by the Great Houses.
Dash carries on talking with a kind of fierce wistfulness. “As long as her hair is coiled up tight the nightmares stay where they are. Her family was able to hide the children who were born with the nightmares by catching them young and keeping their braids tight. No one ever caught one of the dream-children.”
I stare at Lils with faint horror. “If the sharif find out about her, they’ll have her destroyed.”
Hob magic—like all things from the Well—is too unpredictable. Dangerous.
We do not allow it.
I take another gulp of vai from the almost-empty bottle.
“The sharif won’t find out,” he says.
“You’re going to make sure it never happens, I take it?”
Dash nods, then throws a handful of sand at me. Without thinking, I let the scriv boil up through my center, turning the air solid and thick, leaving the sand hanging in a shimmering curtain between us.
“Shit.” I let the sand drop and it hisses as the grains land. Cold rushes over my skin.
“Got you,” he says. “There’s no denying that little game.” Dash grabs my upper arm and tugs me closer to him. “What House, Lammer? And the truth this time.”
I swallow hard. “Pelim.”
He lets go of me. “So you’re the other dead girl.”
There is nothing I can say. He’s going to send me away, send me back to my family. I can’t face that, and my throat goes thick with tears. What will they do when I arrive on the doorstep, stinking of Hob and sweat and tea eggs? I should have stayed, should have taken the bit like a well-trained uni and let them marry me off to whomever they liked. At least I’d still have a home and a future, even if I had no dignity.
The last thing Dash will want in his life is someone like me. Or worse—now that I know about Lils and her illegal magic, he could kill me and bury my body here where no one will ever find it. It’s not like anyone will be looking for me.
Fear makes it impossible for me to face Dash. All I can think of is the ways he could destroy me.
So I’m not expecting it when he leans in, tilts my chin up, and presses his mouth against mine. It’s a very gentle kiss, soft and sweet. He pulls away. “You can trust me, Firell,” he says. “I keep all the secrets for everyone.”
“It’s Felicita.”
“Not anymore.”
The cold leaves my skin, the fear dissipates. I’m his, part of the Whelk Streeters, and nothing will ever break that. My past slips from me like a shawl in a strong wind.
A shout from the water makes us both turn. Circling Nala and Lils is a group of bobbing heads. Esta shrieks, drops the stick she’s using to prod at her fire, and runs fully clothed into the ocean.
“Selkies,” I whisper. They tend to keep to the deeper waters or to only come ashore as seals. It’s too risky for them to show their true selves. The selkies come up out of the waves, slender and dark and beautiful.
“Sweet Gris.” I’ve never seen a selkie up close before, but the legends are true. A man could lose his heart and head over them. Then one bows down to hug Esta close. Even from where I sit I can see the way the selkie’s grief twists her face. Esta is crying too, great sobs that rack her slight body. It’s as if all her sorrow for Rin is finally being unleashed. When she’s done, I think she will be left as light as a rag.
“You knew they’d be here. We didn’t come here for mussels or—” The girl in the water.
Dash shrugs again. “I knew there’d be a chance,” he says. “The look-fars told me that they’d spotted selkies out past the island.”
The selkies crowd around Esta, enveloping her, touching her short hair and stroking her face. I may not have known Rin, but the sight of their sorrow punches me, and I choke down my sadness. If all I can f
eel is the very fraying edge of their grief, then I do not want to think how dark the center must be. It makes me think of how my own mother must be mourning me.
Nala and Lils skirt the selkies and come to join us, Lils busy pinning her dripping hair back up in a tight coil. Before she does, I can see that it hangs almost to her hips and I wonder what would happen if she had to cut it off:
Would the dreams inside her be free to touch all of Pelimburg and drive the city mad?
15
WE RETURN FROM LAMBS’ ISLAND, sacks heavy, sand in our hair, vai on our breath. Esta is dancing along the causeway rocks with no care for the slippery seaweed or the crunch of periwinkles under her bare feet.
I’ve never seen her so happy. For the first time, she looks her age and not like a dour little midget. Dash holds my hand the whole way back, and Lils and Nala help each other over the rocks, laughing as the wind whips their wet shifts around their legs and snags at the finest tendrils of hair worked loose from their buns. The tickle of dream-miasma from Lils’s few loose coils is barely a feather brush against my thoughts, lending the day a hallucinatory feeling, like I’ve been drinking ’ink-laced vai by the gallon.
“You’d best watch that hair, Lils, darling,” Dash yells at the two girls. “It’s drying.”
Lils pauses to twist the stray wisps into thin braids, and Nala helps her pin them tightly into her bun. They look like ghost girls on the rocks, with the sun low on the horizon and the Red Death staining the far waters behind them.
I turn my body closer to Dash and let his warmth soak against me. He makes a very comfortable windbreak, and I smile as he hugs me tighter against him. He’s keeping his wounded hand tucked close against his side, and I keep pushing down the questions I want to ask him. Something’s not sitting right, but the thought in my head is too crazy, too huge and ugly for me to face.
She looked like Ilven. Just for a moment. For one stupid terrible moment, I thought Ilven was alive.
But she’s not, and the only way I would see her now is if she were some shade from nightmare memory. Ghosts are lonely creatures, sometimes merely echoes, but other times they are more willfully destructive—stupid things clinging to life, filled with refusal to accept death. Ilven would never be so gauche.
By the time we reach home, the vai and the dreams and the exertion have taken their toll, and it’s all I can do to get undressed and curl up in my bed before I fall over.
As I battle to keep my heavy eyelids open, Dash kisses my shoulders and tells me to trust him.
* * *
IT’S EARLY MORNING, and the others are still sleeping off their hangovers. We’re standing on the little balcony among the buckets of cold rainwater, just the two of us.
“Morning,” he whispers to me, as if we had just met on the street. Then he grins. It’s very awkward and shy—so very un-Dash-like. “There’s something I want to see,” Dash says.
In answer I pull my blanket around my shoulders and hop from one painfully icy bare foot to the other. “I’m freezing to death,” I point out through chattering teeth.
“Unlikely weather this time of year. Cold winds coming off Lambs’ Island.” He frowns.
A shudder runs down my spine. “You dragged me out here at dawn to chat about the weather?”
“Not at all.” Dash squats down by a bucket of water and stirs it thoughtfully with one finger. Then he reaches into his jacket pocket and draws out a folded paper packet. “Take it,” he says. “But be careful.”
The paper is tightly twisted at both ends and smaller than a package of headache powder. With shaking fingers I unscrew one end. A fine smear of grayish powder is gathered in the crease. Longing courses through me in a wave of heat, unexpected and strangely welcome. “Where did you get this?”
“I have contacts. Take it.”
“Now?” I can’t believe that it’s actually there. It must have cost Dash a fortune. Just the bribes alone he would have had to pay the dealers to convince them to sell to him … I take a deep shuddering breath.
“That’s what we’re here for.” He sits down cross-legged, his back against the house, and watches me.
I take the pinch of scriv and breathe it deep. Instantly, I feel whole, Lammer, myself. Magic snaps around me, the call of power. This is more scriv than I’ve taken since I left home. A glass—even a bottle—of vai pales in comparison.
For this, I would go back. I swallow and close my eyes, letting my body remember the balance, finding the scriv-tripped center within me. No more thoughts of going home. I concentrate instead on feeling the scriv activate my magic.
There. I open my eyes and the whole world is clearer, sharper. Dash is somehow more real, and around us the air is a living thing, a veil for me to manipulate.
“Working?”
“Yes.” I breathe the word out.
“Good.” He folds his hands and says nothing for a while, just watches me, crake-curious. “You control the air, you can harden or soften it at will. Heat it? Cool it?”
It’s a rather Hob way of looking at the process. War-Singers control the molecules. We can manipulate the energy: increase density here, and the air becomes hard; push the molecules someplace else, and you can suffocate a person in a little private vacuum. “Essentially,” I say.
“And you can move things about using that control over air?”
“You know I can.”
“Good.” He stands, shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, and leans back against the balcony rail, as casual as can be. The sky is pinking. The look-fars on the cliffs are calling the alarm for the Red Death. It’s still there, tainting the ocean. “I want you to pull water up out of this bucket”—his chin jerks—“and make a wall of water between us.”
One deep breath to focus, and then I am doing as he asks, pulling the water, using the air to bring it toward me. Then I press it flat between two hardened layers of air, almost like holding the water between plates of glass.
“Pretty,” says Dash.
It is. The water ripples and shimmers between us like an antique glass windowpane, distorting his features.
“You can let it go now,” he says softly, and the water falls to the ground, soaking the hem of my shift, splashing across Dash’s boots. The scriv fades from my system, and a pang of loss rocks me so hard I almost drop to my knees.
“Very good,” he says. “You’ll do.” He steps closer to me and kisses me once, then pulls away. “Looks like all my bargains are going to pay off.”
My heart goes tight, warmth flares all down my back, then leaves me cold again. I’m feverish.
“As it is,” he says as he steps away, heading back into the house, “I’m just Gris-damned lucky.”
16
“AND WHAT MAKES YOU THINK you still work here, eh?” Danningbread glares from behind the counter. The door snicks closed behind me, and I can feel how the other staff stop to watch. I swallow, about to make my excuses for not being at work yesterday, when Mrs. Danningbread waves her hands at me. “Into the back with you,” she says. “I’ve no time to listen to whatever lies Dash has told you I’ll swallow.”
Relieved, I rush through to the scullery. As it stands, Dash hadn’t even thought to give me a lie. Perhaps he’d just assumed it wouldn’t matter.
Everyone seems nervous, on edge, and even the poets are quieter than normal. In fact, they are bizarrely so, their quills flying over their paper. The only noise comes from the scritching of nibs and the scratching of paper against wood.
It’s eerie. I wash almost no bowls—their tea stands cold and forgotten at their elbows.
Finally, bored, I go to stand in the doorway of the scullery and stare at the bowed heads of the crakes. Mrs. Danningbread eyes me narrowly but doesn’t scold me for coming out. The vast copper kettle steams, but no orders are being placed, and she flexes her arthritic fingers on the counter, watching over the crakes in their crow-black coats.
The door is closed against the wind, and I can just make out the faint rat
tling of the Crake’s sign banging against a wooden beam. In the silence, the tearoom feels oppressive, too hot, and smelling of sweet aloe and poisonink and damp wool.
The quills fly faster.
“What’s going on?” I whisper as I sidle up to Mrs. Danningbread. She shakes her head, her mouth firmly pressed into a bitter little line. Charl is leaning against the front doorframe, and he looks for all the world like a guard, barring the way.
A thin figure appears, hazy through the thick glass, and Charl straightens to open the door for this guest. A sharp wind shrieks through the tearoom, sending the crunched-up wads of paper on the floor scuttling into the far corners and under the tables and counter.
The stench of sea-rot replaces the smell of teas and herbs. There is a girl in the doorway, a familiar girl with fine braided hair and almond eyes and red-stained hands. She sees me and her eyes widen, her mouth twitches, as if she’s trying not to give herself away. The door slams closed behind her as she steps into the room and the wind falls.
At the banging of the door, half a dozen crakes look up and gather their papers. One by one they stand, bringing their work to Charl. He flicks through the quire of paper, barely glancing at whatever is written there, then nods and hands the papers to Anja. She stares at me for a moment longer, her handful of poetry trembling, before she runs back out into the street.
The waiting poets gather about Charl, and brass clinks against brass.
“Excuse me,” I say as I edge past the crakes who are now returning to their seats. Charl’s face goes pale as I approach. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head and leans back against the doorframe, his arms folded across his chest.
“Really?” I turn and snatch a sheet out from under the fingers of a surprised crake. My gaze darts across the rhyme, down to the long smear of blotched ink at the end. It’s a simple thing. I might see no point to poetry and I might consider all of it a waste of time and awful to boot, but I can still recognize that even the worst crake would never be caught dead penning his name to such trite verse. My House name glares out at me. My fingers tighten, crinkling the paper.
