by Cat Hellisen
Oh Ilven. Bound now below the sea, caught in the kelp forests, nibbled at, her hair full of crabs and little ghost shrimp, a ghost herself. I choke on a sadness so sharp that it has sliced me in two.
“Hush.” Lilya waves her hand. “There’ll be no talk of bad-luck girls and boggerts and sacrifices and all that rubbish. That’s the sort of shite only idiots gab about. And it’s all just rumor. Till there’s a body washed up, we don’t know nothing about the Pelim wretch.” She narrows her eyes and turns her attention back to Esta. “Have House Pelim gone and made an official announcement about the ship?”
Esta shakes her head. “They’re still hoping the ship comes in. And that’s all they damn well care about—their precious Silver Dancer.”
The name makes me shiver. There are paintings of our ships all over the house, and my brother would often point to this one with pride. To me the ships meant nothing, merely a means to an end, but Owen loved those monstrosities. The Silver Dancer, bright with harpoons, the huge lamp-whales cresting the sea around her.
Nala cocks her head. “But Rin’s on board…”
“I bloody know he is!” Esta stands, throwing the bowl to the ground. She disappears behind a curtained partition and the drape flaps, then drops still behind her.
“Shite,” says Lilya. She picks up the bowl. “I best go have a word before we all go up in flames.”
Nala turns her own empty bowl around in her hands as if she has never seen it before. Then she looks up, smiling at me. Her voice gives her away though, all falsely brittle bright. “Rise and shine, kitty-girl. I’ll walk you back up to New Town, make sure you get to your lane nice and safe.”
“No!” My hands claw at the thin blanket, pulling it up to my face. The thought of being set out on the streets again, with no idea of where I’m going or what I’m doing—that Hob boy from yesterday, he will just be the first. And in New Town there’s still the chance that someone will see past the mess of my hair and somehow recognize me. And if they do, Owen will hunt me down.
Fear lances through me. He will make me suffer. I remember the last time I saw him, the black in his eyes. I don’t think I would fare well in another such meeting.
Heat flares in the corners of my eyes, sharp as needles, but I won’t let myself cry. “I—can’t I stay here?” Even as the words slip out I realize how feeble and desperate I sound.
Nala sighs and sets down her empty teabowl. “And bring your clients here?” She shakes her head. “Come on, sweet. You’ll be better off with your own, anyway.”
“Please. You don’t understand. I’m not a kitty-girl. I r—” I can still tell the truth, in my own way. “I ran away from home, dyed my hair so that my mo—mam wouldn’t find me. If I go back to New Town, she’ll spot me. Or someone will.”
The red-haired girl is frowning. “I won’t ask you what your business is, ’cause it’s none of mine,” she says. “And I know what it’s like to run, for sure.” She leans her head back and stares at the ceiling, like she’s looking for answers trapped there in the webs with the insect husks. Finally, she faces me. “I’m not in charge of Whelk Street though, and I’ve no say in the matter.”
“Who is?” I crawl out from under the thin blankets and stand, careful and slow. “Is there someone I can speak to?” Beg, in other words. Or bribe, if I still have my trinkets and the Hobs haven’t robbed me while I slept. I keep my knowledge of Dash to myself. I want to see him before I decide to trust him. And I certainly don’t know if I trust Anja.
“Well, it’s Dash who has the say-so here.” Her face brightens. “And he comes and goes as he pleases, so I’ve no idea when he’ll be back.”
“Can’t I stay until he gets in? I can ask him then. There must be something I can do?” Panic makes my words rush. I can’t go back home, not now—in disgrace. If the sharif are already saying that I must have jumped, then there is no future for me in the Houses.
The wind picks up, threading through the glassless windows and ruffling Nala’s hair. She doesn’t answer me, but she’s deep in thought again, her brow furrowed with the effort. I wrap my arms around my bruised ribs and wait. In the silence, the faint sound of sobbing and the soft slow soothing of Lilya’s voice come from the curtained-off area.
Someone here died, I realize. Someone these people loved and cared for. I’m not the only person in the world tangled up in grief.
Maybe the Silver Dancer will limp into harbor later today, and no one will be dead. There’s still a chance.
I snap out of my morbid thoughts when Nala stands and holds out her hand. “C’mon then,” she says, and winks at me. “We’d best go find you a job if you’re to have any chance of Dash letting you stay.”
Every bone and muscle in my body might ache, but I want to be out of this death-house. At the back of my tongue is a strange bitter taste that I can’t swallow away. It feels like metal in my mouth.
Scriv-withdrawal.
Not possible. I’ve never taken much at a time.
On the other hand, the stuff has poisoned me for sixteen years, and hardly a day goes by when I don’t take at least a tiny pinch. My face goes cold and numb, and I fumble at my cheeks with fingers that feel wrapped in layers of wool. Then the panic passes, and I make myself still. It will be fine. I can get through this.
Nala shows me where they catch the rainwater on a rickety balcony and brings me a small pail so I can wash myself as best I can and tidy my hair and dress. In the broken shard of an age-spotted mirror, I look like a whore after a bad night. My hair is a tangle of knots that I can barely comb out with my fingers, and my eye remains a sticky mess.
The cold water is soothing, washing some of the heated ache away from my skin.
Passable, with my hair braided back and the gunk washed from my face, I try my best to shake the creases from my dress. No one is ever going to give me a job, I think, as I stare at the mess in the mirror. The new red of my hair is cheap and ugly, and against it, my skin is sallow, leaving me looking ill. The bruises don’t help. I wouldn’t hire me.
“Come along, kitty,” Nala says. “We can’t sit here all day waiting for the weather to change and good fortune to fly in through the windows.”
I cover the worst of the skirt’s wrinkles with my coat. It will have to do.
Already the wind has turned, and the ships will have to tack against strong westerlies to be able to make it in to port safely. And there’s no guarantee that they will. The Tooth and Claw have claimed many a ship in Pelimburg’s eight-hundred-year history.
Even so, I hold out hope that the Silver Dancer will limp home.
6
NALA, STILL BAREFOOT, walks ahead of me, her feet slapping against the paving stones. The storm clouds are here now, black and heavy with lightning.
The wind whips her carrot tangles about her face, but she seems to barely notice. She’s skipped a few lengths ahead while I try my best to keep up, cursing my toe-pinching boots and my stubbornness and Jaxon all the way.
“So what’s your name, little kitty-kitty?” she calls back at me, hollering through her funneled hands.
I wait till I’ve caught up before I answer. “Firell,” I pant. It’s a common name and close enough to my own that I hopefully won’t stumble over it too often.
“So you say you don’t work the street corners?”
I nod.
“Quiet type?”
Nod.
“There anything you good at?”
A shrug this time. I’m good with oil paints and I have an excellent reading voice, but somehow, I don’t think these are appropriate skills for a low-Lammer. I can also make the air do what I want, mostly. If I have scriv. Definitely not appropriate for a low-Lammer. Low-Lammers are weak points in our lineage. They are the non-magical masses, the families of all the mundane and useless progeny that we forced from the Houses. We can’t have their blood tainting ours, thinning our magic.
“Well if you’re able to stand ten hours and scrub teabowls, there’s an opening
at the Crake.”
Whatever—I don’t even know what or where she’s talking about, so I nod.
“The Crake it is then.” She twirls on her toes, hair spinning about her. The layers of thin skirts and thinner petticoats are a whirling flurry about her skinny thighs. I wonder if she’s insane, boggert-touched. Boggerts are ghosts who don’t know they’re dead. They come into your house in the night, feed off the living, try to be part of our world again. Of course, it’s just a story. Doesn’t stop one from wondering though—especially when someone is flighty and fey and barely there—if the boggerts have been feeding off her. Boggerts are like the look-fars’ horns: warnings of worse to come. Things follow them out of the deep.
That’s what the Hobs say, that boggerts draw out the things that should stay lost in the ocean trenches. First comes the witch-sign, then the ghosts who want to live, and finally, awake and hungry, the sea-witch. It’s the same thing Lilya was talking about back in the squat. I suppose out here in the city I’ll be forced to hear more of the Hobs’ superstitious prattle. I sigh and trot as fast as my aching feet will allow me, following Nala down the narrow lanes that serpentine through Old Town.
The Crake turns out to be a tea shop. It’s a corner building full of awkward angles, mismatched windows, and little stone gargoyles. The unifying theme of architectural style appears to be Ugly. Someone, in an attempt to disguise this, has painted the walls yellow and put yellow-and-white-striped awnings over the wide pavement. It doesn’t help.
A wooden sign bangs in the rising wind: THE TWICE-DROWNED CRAKE. Under the faded gold lettering is a picture of a little speckled bird paddling in a teabowl.
Funny thing, to name a tea shop after the poet whom the infamous Mallen Gris tried to have drowned on several occasions. Gris only finally managed to kill Esker Davyt when he forced him to drink a bowl of poisoned tea. The story goes that the poet wrote a scathing epic prose poem that exposed all the secret histories of House Mallen and that in revenge Mallen Gris had him silenced.
The truth is that Gris murdered him because he was a dreadfully bad poet and an embarrassment to all of Pelimburg. It’s said that Mallen Gris had the unfortunate poet’s body ground into patties and fed to a party of Davyt’s fellow crakes. Gris apparently held up a forkful of meat before the stunned guests and called it “the finest contribution Esker Davyt made to the world of verse.” Sounds like something the madman would do.
A motley collection of tables and chairs covers the sidewalk outside the Crake’s entrance, and every available space is filled with morose men: some young, some old, some hard to tell. They mutter into their tea or scribble furiously on parchments spread out and pinned down with elbows and upturned bowls.
All of them have the same disheveled look, hair awry and clothes wrinkled, skin pale and waxy, eyes fever bright. So familiar—every House in Pelimburg has one in its employ, to write their praises, or to double as history and language tutors.
Crakes.
Dear Gris, if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a bad poet. And the crakes, the poets of Pelimburg, are seldom anything but. Our own House crake taught me to read and write, read to me the basics of magical control from an ancient textbook, and instilled in me a healthy dislike of anything remotely resembling verse.
Thank Gris the old goat wouldn’t be caught dead in an Old Town teahouse like this. These must be the truly awful poets if they’re gathering here. I take a moment to contemplate the enormousness of that thought.
Nala hears my little moan of distress. “I know,” she says. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” She pulls me up to the door. “Still, even the talentless must have tea, and where better to come for it than here. Besides,” she says as she shoves me ahead of her into the shop, “we like to think it’s the only place where you can have your crake and eat it too.”
Mad. Obviously mad. I eye her for some sign that a boggert has been feeding off her. She’s pale … Do they drink blood like the bats do? I’ve never stopped to wonder what the stories meant by “draining the living.”
Nala leads me through the cramped interior to where a woman is tending a huge copper urn above a fire. The woman twists the spout and measures loose-leaf tea into an assortment of mismatched pots, muttering under her breath as she fills the orders written on a chalkboard behind her.
She holds up one finger as Nala and I approach. “Not now,” she says, and carries on muttering. “Redbush, a pinch of sweet aloe; blackbark nut, honeybush, plain; honeybush, pinch poisonink—oh Gris, as if that’s going to help stir the imagination…” When she’s caught up with the round of orders, and a quick-fingered low-Lammer youth has rushed off carrying the tray of pots and bowls above his head, she turns to us. “What’s this, then, Nala, love?”
“Dash had word you needed a bowl-girl in the kitchens.” Nala presses one hand gently against my spine, forcing me forward. “And so I’ve brought you one.”
The woman stares at me for a moment and frowns. Before she can turn us away, Nala says, “She’s not a kitty-girl, just has the bad taste to look like one.”
“Bad taste, maybe. Don’t think I’ll take her just on your say-so, Nala. It’s been a long time since you worked here,” says the woman, and grabs my hands suddenly in hers. “You’re a soft sort of thing under all those scratches. Think you can wash bowls till your hands turn raw?” Her own hands are thin, papery, the joints rounded with arthritis.
“I—yes.” I nod. It’s got to be a better option than working at the fish markets or, indeed, going on the game.
She lets go of my hands. “I’ll start you off on a trial day. You work hard, no complaints, and you’re hired.”
The boy shouts an order across the counter to her, and she writes it down in a seamless scribble as he does. “Nala, you show her the scullery and get her started,” she says, and with that, I am dismissed, and her attention is once again engulfed in tea making.
I wash dishes for seven hours. Never in my life have I even rinsed out a cup and here I am, elbow deep in sudsy lukewarm water, scrubbing out teabowl after teabowl.
My eyes sting. My hands smart. I wipe away burning tears with my sleeve. My gut wrenches, and I’m pale and shaky. Sweat films my body.
Would it have been so bad to stay home and marry whoever my brother told me to? There would be books to read, and tea and fresh-baked sugar biscuits, still warm from the oven. My clothes would be laundered and soft.
There would be scriv. A crashing dizziness threatens to send me to my knees, and I cling to the edge of the sink with both hands, waiting for it to pass.
My stomach is a burning hole, but after a few long gasping sobs, I manage to push the pain down.
Here I am in dirt-stiff tat, desperate to go pee in an outside latrine that seems to consist of nothing more than a wooden box-seat over a shallow drop and a handy bucket of ash. There is dirt worked into my skin, and my hands are wrinkled and white. My stomach growls at me all through the day. If I don’t eat something soon, I’m going to drop down right here and most likely drown in filthy dishwater. That’ll teach me to run away.
I grab another bowl and plunge it into the water and scrub the tea stains with salt. If I go back now, I will be a disgrace, bringing shame and dishonor down on the Pelim name. The best I could hope for is that my brother would take revenge by marrying me off to some disreputable House, a name with nothing more than shallow rowboats in their fleets, or weak magic-lines. He’d make sure I looked back on Canroth Piers as a lost prize. Owen would see me disgraced, thrown down.
When the old woman finally comes into the cramped little scullery and leans on the stone sink, I wonder if it would be better if she decided not to hire me. My hands are now red and stinging; deep cuts in my fingers bleed a pale watery red. I fold them over my stomach as if that will somehow settle it, stop the incessant twisting inside. My eyes feel peeled raw, and my cheeks burn.
“Mrs. Danningbread,” she says, introducing herself. Obviously I’ve passed some secret test. “You�
��re to be here tomorrow morning at six sharp to help set up. Wages is five bits a day and all the tea you can drink.” She hands me a hunk of yellow cake. “It’s a mite stale,” Mrs. Danningbread says. “But I’m afraid the others got to the sweetbrown first. This is all that’s left.”
I don’t care. I manage to thank her before I shove the wedge of gritty cake into my mouth. I don’t think anything has ever tasted this good. It’s sweet and dry, and it fills the hole in my belly.
Outside the tea shop, Nala is sitting on a low flower-bed wall. There are no flowers growing there, just weeds and a few dead sea roses, their red-black leaves shriveled and dusty. Nala’s feet are splattered with mud, and the front of her dress has great muddy paw prints and streaks on it. She looks like she’s been attacked by half-grown sphynxes, but she seems happy enough and grins when she sees me.
“Come,” she says. “We’ll have to run if we’re to get back before the storm breaks.”
I groan. All day the skies have been black faced, the winds buffeting Pelimburg, so much so that Mrs. Danningbread had all the outside chairs and tables brought in to the already cramped shop and rolled up her awnings. Finally, the much-awaited storm has roared in, hours after the warnings were first sounded. The last thing I want to do now is run across town in my hated boots, with the wind—and more than likely the rain—slamming me around the whole way. Not to mention that just the thought of running makes me turn green. My ribs and cheeks are still aching. And I ate that Gris-damned cake a bit too fast.
As it is, we don’t make it back before the rain starts. I limp into the squat and up the stairs, dripping all the way. I’m cold, I’m aching, I’m still hungry despite the thin slice of cake, and all I want to do is curl up tight and cry until I am dried and empty, an old eggshell.