by Cat Hellisen
* * *
ON EITHER SIDE OF ME, the bridge buildings drop away, and Spindle Way diverges and dips toward the mudflats. If I keep along the raised stone promenade, I will reach the tip of the Claw. There are only squatters and Hobs living in that area, and no one will think to look for me there.
Or I could go straight on through Old Town and lose myself in the Hob-infested marshes of Stilt City. Ugh. I’m safer on the Claw, among the fish-gangs. At least the houses there are built on solid land. Solid mud, anyway.
A wind rises in the east, winding around the jut of the cliffs and blowing across the harbor. The masts wail eerily and the smells of kelp and tarred wood compete with the stench of dye whelks rotting in barrels. It’s strong enough to make me gag.
Certainly, I won’t be getting a job on the wharf.
A job.
I’ll think about that later. For now, all I want is a place where I can hole up and wait for the sharif to find my “remains.” I ask a Hob leaning against a wall for directions to Whelk Street. He stares at me strangely, then tells me. His directions lead me to a place that seems horribly familiar.
It’s only mid-morning and the weather is already changing. The easterly brings clouds scudding in from the ocean, gathering thick and low. Soon it will be raining again, and with the promise of rain comes the smothering kiss of the fog. I need to find some kind of shelter. The end of the promenade with its rows of dilapidated buildings—that’s where I need to go. Back to where the selkie-girl threw a piece of windowsill at me. The place is a tangle of squats.
My feet won’t move.
No one will recognize me, I tell myself as I pat my hair reassuringly. There’s no chance that I look like a House Lammer now. And I stink. The rough cotton of my housedress and coat smells of sweat and dirt and dye. Still, I’m nervous as I trudge forward.
The sun slips behind the cloud blanket, and the day goes dark, the shadows lengthen. It feels like late afternoon even though I know full well that it isn’t.
Pelimburg has always been a city confused by time, running on rhythms set not by clocks and minute hands but by the internal lollop of its sea-heart. Tidal beat. I match pace with the waves that crash into the promenade wall and keep my eyes open for a likely shelter.
I’m so busy peering through the shuttered, glassless windows, and dubiously eyeing the damp-rotted walls, that I don’t notice the gang until they have already circled me.
The leader of the pack grins, doglike. They’re Hobs. Dirty and ragged, with a feral look, like the marsh-jackals that hunt rats in the long salt grass and steal food from the rubbish dumps on the edges of the city. They close in tight.
I’m frozen.
“Lost are you, kitty-girl?” says the leader, drifting close enough to me that I can see the dirt in the pores of his brown face. “You won’t find paying customers down the Claw.”
The next person to assume that I’m a streetwalker is going to get punched. I ball my fist and try to keep my breathing calm. It’s hard—my heartbeat is skipping and stammering, and I’m cold. My breaths are beginning to sound more like gasps than anything else. I wonder if the Hobs can smell fear the way dogs can.
Perhaps I should ask them if they know who Dash is, but the air has become claustrophobic and tight.
The pack crowds closer and I hug my bag to my chest. I want to cry, there is a prickling at the corners of my eyes. I should have stayed at home and accepted my planned-out future. I wonder if it’s safe to go back, if by some turn of luck no one will have noticed that I’m gone and there will be no punishment waiting for me. The longer I’m gone, the harder it will be to go back, the greater the dishonor.
I think of what Owen will do to me.
“Sphynx got your tongue?”
I try not to let my lip tremble, but it’s useless. “I’m not looking for customers.” The words sound like brass bits falling one by one onto a glass table. Precise, clipped, and too loud in the otherwise empty street.
“That’s good,” he says. “’Cause I weren’t looking to pay.”
I close my eyes and hug my bag tighter. I can’t run, there’s too many of them, and my boots are too tight and my legs ache from walking and right now all I want is to be back home. His breath smells of fish and vinegary cockles. It’s on my face—hot and sweet-sour and overwhelming.
They’re so close now that the heat radiates from them. One touches my hair, and I snap.
I go from frozen statue to spitting fury. Even if what’s going to happen is inevitable, I’m going to do my best to scratch their Gris-damned eyes out or deprive a few of them of any future Hoblings. I grab the leader’s genitals and twist, just as one of his lackeys throws a punch at my cheek.
He yelps and I screech. My terror is still there, let loose on them. What I wouldn’t do for a pinch of scriv now.
The noise erupts as the Hobs lay into me. Someone knocks me to the ground and I curl up on my side, trying to protect my belly and breasts and also to get in a few well-aimed kicks. At least these ugly boots are good for slamming into soft flesh. Tears are streaming down my face because even though I keep fighting, I know it’s futile. I’m outnumbered. I’m soft and I know nothing about fisticuffs. Owen used to taunt me when our mother wasn’t looking, and I feel the same defeated fear now that I felt then.
“Oi. What the fuck are you lot doing down our way?” a girl asks over the noise of the scuffling, her voice a fish-market drawl.
The Hobs still. The leader stands, pats nonchalantly at his trousers, and grins. “Weren’t doing nothing,” he says, and aims a sly kick at my back. Pain bruises down my spine.
I can’t see the girl who’s talking, just a forest of bare feet, hobnailed boots, and dirty patched trousers. Already my right eye is swelling up. It feels hot and watery and sticky all at the same time.
“If you’ve touched one of ours, boyo, and Dash hears about it, then I wouldn’t want to be in your skin.”
Dash. A flicker of relief. I don’t even know why—I’ve nothing more to go on than the word of a Hob hairdresser and a feeling that, somehow, this Dash will help me. The girl is one of his, a friend or partner, I suppose, and she’s stepped up to protect me. It’s something to cling to.
My attacker speaks again. “We were just leaving, Lilya, darling. No need to get all stormed up,” he says. He walks past, grins, and cocks his hat at me. The pack follows him, and I’m left in the middle of the street. A faint drizzle is misting around me, covering my hair with a veil of tiny droplets.
“And who the fuck might you be?” the girl says as she drops to a crouch to get a better look. “Not one of ours, Gris knows. You’re a long way from Kitty Lane.”
“I am not,” I say through my split lip, “a Gris-damned prostitute.”
“Says you.” Lilya is short and dark, with sizable hips that soften her otherwise hard figure. Her waxed hair is pulled back in a tight bun, pinned close to her scalp with an assortment of glinting pins, revealing wide cheeks and slanted eyes. She has a fish-worker’s blood-and-scale-spattered apron slung over her shoulder. She holds out one calloused hand. “Come on then, up ya get, kitty-girl.” She smirks as she says this, and there is the faintest trace of bitter humor.
Lilya’s hand is warm and rough, and she hauls me up with ease. Her arms might be skinny under rolled-up sleeves, but it’s all wiry muscle.
“They really did you over,” she says, after peering at my bruised face. “This way, we’ll get you sorted out.” She’s not friendly, just abrupt and sharp, like she’s dealing with another problem in her long day.
“Thank you,” I say, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to talk. My lip is swelling up and going oddly numb, and my right eye is tingling, hot from the bruising. I can barely see through the puffed-up lids, and the whole side of my face aches. Not to mention the sharp pains shooting along my ribs. I keep one arm clutched across my side, like that’s going to help. I’m about to ask her about Dash when she sighs loudly.
“Gris.” She s
weeps up my bag, casually flinging it over her shoulder. “Dash is gonna love this like a punch to the face. Like we need another mucking stray hanging around.”
Best to keep my mouth shut until I know exactly where I stand. Silently, I hobble after her, barely keeping up as she strides down the street toward a house that I recognize. It’s green and faded. Lilya pushes open a door that just barely qualifies and leads me into a musty narrow entrance. Someone has tied an old sheet over the next doorway, and Lilya holds it aside and beckons me through.
The whole place smells of rotting wood—a curiously loamy and pleasant smell—and of smoked fish. The latter is decidedly less pleasant. A layer of sucking gray mud coats the floor.
“We don’t use the downstairs much,” Lilya says, and nods at a flight of rickety stairs. “Head on up.” She shoos me with her hands, and, clutching the rail for safety, I edge up the staircase. The boards creak ominously underfoot, but as I reach the second and then the third floor, I realize why the squatters prefer to use the upstairs part of the house.
The gloom falls away. Faint streaks of sunlight poke through the cloud cover and stream in the windows and dapple the walls and floors, and the wind blows through the empty windows, bringing the clean sharp ocean scent with it.
I stop. The upper floor is wide open, with only fragments of the dividing walls remaining. A few sheets and blankets here and there cordon off private areas, but most of the space seems to be taken up by a common area demarcated by a filthy piece of wool carpet.
There’s another girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen lounging against a collection of stuffed sacks, her hands busy with needle and thread. Like me, her hair is red, but hers isn’t dyed. It’s a carroty mass of flyaway tangles, and she has the pale porcelain skin of a Mata. No House child ever looked so pinched and underfed though. My immediate guess is that she’s one of the bastards that House Mata seems to set out like spores, though we’re a long sight from MallenIve and the Mata High Lord.
She lowers her embroidery and tucks her bare feet under her thin skirt. “Lils,” she says, “I thought I was supposed to bring home strays, not you.”
Lilya drops my bag. “Jaxon’s lads had got a hold of her down near the bend. What was I supposed to do—leave her there for their sport?” She thumps down next to the redhead, then looks at me. “Sit. Nala’s good with fixing people up.”
“Am I now?” Nala laughs and gets to her feet. She’s tall and thin. A strong breeze could probably send her sailing off over the sea. “You best do what my Lils says.”
So I sit. I’m relieved. My head is swimming with pain, and the dizziness keeps threatening to send me careening to the floor. I have to keep my movements slow so as not to make the pain in my ribs flare. With my free hand, I wipe at the itchy dried-up tears on my face.
Nala winces. “Lils, put some water on for us, dear.” She walks over to me with an armful of the burlap cushions and plumps them under my back. “Oh,” she says. “That’s a nasty cut.” With careful fingers, she brushes the loose dirt from my face. “Jaxon’s a little rat turd, coming all the way down to our side. Wonder who he damn well thinks he is.”
She’s not really talking to me, I don’t think, just nattering on in a way that is rather soothing. I relax a little into the rough cushions.
“Here.” Lilya is back with a bowl of warm water. Nala grins at her friend’s scowl and wets a small scrap of cleanish cloth in the steaming bowl.
The water stings my cuts, but I keep quiet as she dabs at the open wounds. “Bit of meat on that eye would work wonders,” she tells me, “but there’s no chance of that. You just keep this wet cloth on it and hope for the best.” Nala wrings out the rag, wads it up, and puts it over my swollen eye. The warmth helps a little. I close my other eye and let the grayness swirl around me. All I want to do is sleep, but the pain keeps me lingering on the edge of consciousness. Voices drift over me, distant and meaningless.
“Soon as it wakes, you’re gonna have to walk it back up to New Town,” says Lilya. “It can’t stay here. Dash doesn’t need another charity case.”
Nala laughs. “Me? I didn’t drag it in here. And why take it back anyway? Are you scared of Dash?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
Nala laughs again. It’s a carefree sound, full of fluttering leaves and white wisps of cloud. I decide that I like it—it’s a laugh that makes fires grow brighter. “You’ve known him for years, he’ll say nothing if you make like it was your idea. Besides, she has well-kept hands, soft like a House Lammer’s. Dash won’t mind a kitty-girl of his very own. He’ll let her stay.”
Lilya snorts. “Little frail-bit says she’s not one.”
“Only kitty-girls dye their hair.” Nala shifts, and I realize she’s stretched out alongside me, warm as a blanket. “Anyway, he let Kirren stay.”
“Kirren’s a dog. At least he’s useful.”
“So?” Nala touches my matted hair. “Maybe he’ll find a kitty-girl useful too. Especially a kitty-girl with a manner so polished.”
Gris. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
5
METAL CLANGS AGAINST METAL, and when that sound fades, the shrieks of the seabirds rise. The melancholy cry of a look-far’s horn drifts in with the faint breeze: a storm warning. The day will bring wind-lashed misery down on Pelimburg.
I’m awake.
My right eye is sealed tight, gummed together with hardened pus. The left is fine, and I open it to stare at a ceiling dusty with cobwebs and the carcasses of brittle-winged sand-dragons. The thought of those bugs flying in and out of the room makes my skin crawl. Carefully, I tease the gunk from my eyelashes, crumbling it between my fingers until I can force my eyelids apart. The skin still feels tight and tender, and a touch assures me that my right eye is swollen and the whole side of my face disfigured. It feels bruised. Huge.
There are people talking in low voices, just murmured conversation. Someone says kitty-girl and I focus.
“I’m not wasting good tea and water on her,” says Lilya. “We’ve barely enough for us, and Esta will be back from the docks soon.”
“She’s awake.”
I turn my head and take a good look at Nala, sitting on the carpet with her legs stretched out, wiggling her long pale toes at me. “Would you like a spot of tea?” A wide urn of tea sits on a crate next to her, steam rising and making the air seem clean and comforting.
“Oh go on. Next you’ll be offering her cake and berries and real cream and calling her miss.”
Nala answers by stretching her foot over to poke Lilya in the thigh. The Hob girl scowls and pushes Nala’s foot away. The scowl doesn’t last long though—Lilya is fighting to not smile. The smile changes her face, makes her look younger.
A creak whispers up from the stairs, the old wood sighing.
“Esta!” Nala yells. “Come see what strange manner of fish Lils brought us yesterday.”
Yesterday. Can I really have slept all through the afternoon and night? The light falling through the window is pale, and a pink-lined mass of cloud hangs low in the sky. It’s early morning.
I struggle into a sitting position, and my bones scream at me. I’m bruised all over.
As I rise, a young girl of perhaps eleven or twelve, with silvery-black hair sheared close to her skull, ascends the staircase. She’s darker than most Hobs, her skin like heartwood. Gray eyes and her strange, sleek hair give her away as a half-breed. It’s amazing that she doesn’t stink like a selkie too. She looks at me flatly, says nothing, then turns her attention to the tea urn.
“Storm warning,” she says, glaring at me.
Oh damn, it’s the girl who threw the wood. Please, please, don’t recognize me. I look down at my hands, hoping that the hair falling across my face is a good enough disguise.
“Wonderful,” Lilya says. “I thought I heard the bloody thing. Another day with no wages. And Verrel says the whalers have seen witch-sign.”
“Pelim ship didn’t come in last night.” The sel
kie-cross helps herself to a small bowl of tea and slumps down on a pile of burlap bags.
It’s as if a cold wind has blown through the room, darkening and chilling the squat. Everyone is silent for a moment, then Nala rises and pours a bowl of tea for me. I take it gratefully—my stomach is tight with hunger and even a little tea would go a long way toward easing that.
Esta finishes her tea in three swallows, then balances the bowl on her knees. “Be the third ship Pelim’s lost this year, counting them two little ketches last month,” she says to the teabowl. She looks up. “Not all they lost last night neither, rumor says.”
The black tea is bitter and strong.
“What d’ya mean?” Lilya pours more tea for Esta.
“Jaxon’s runner heard from the sharif that the Pelim wretch took the Leap.”
I swallow hard, bow my head lower so as not to look at their faces.
“Second girl this month. What are those nilly-mucking Houses doing to them?” Lilya snorts in derision. “Besides clapping the daft things in iron and wasting their talents. What Dash could do with one of them in his palm, I don’t know…”
“It’s bad luck, these girls,” Nala says. “They’ll bring things out of the deep. And Pelim’s the worst of the lot for bringing bad fortune down on the city. It won’t be the first time they’ve brought a sea-witch to the shores.”
Witch-sign, they said. Little eddies, like miniature storms breaking the surface of the ocean. Witch-signs rise up in great numbers, last a few minutes, and then disappear. When the whirlpools are gone, all that’s left is floating petals. Black sea roses.
Anomalies.
I’m not afraid. A queer chill settles into my bones, and I huddle, pulling my knees closer to my chest. What if Ilven’s death really did raise something up out of the waters? But those stories Nala is talking about—they’re just … fancies. There’s no real truth to them, they’re Hob tales. That’s what our House crake taught me. Of course, Ilven always did find the old stories fascinating and told me how she secretly wished that they were still real, that there was more to magic than just the scriv-forced power of the Houses.