by Cat Hellisen
The Crake is filling up quickly, and Nala stands on her chair to wave Verrel, Lils, and Esta over. Esta is still expressionless, but she allows Verrel to order her tea while the others get ale.
Night falls, and the flickering glow from the outside lamps and the fatcandles on the tables casts everything in oily yellow light. Faces are in shadow, and as I drink the last cold drops of my ’ink-laced tea, I find myself staring at the door, watching for a familiar head of tousled dark hair to appear. The places where he kissed my throat feel branded.
Stop it. Stop looking.
Lils scowls at me and shakes her head. I look down at my empty teabowl instead and let the thrum of noise and voices lull me. I won’t look up again, I tell myself.
But, of course, I do.
I can’t help myself.
“Another round?” says Verrel as he stands, and I murmur assent along with the others. He flags Charl down, and the sweating low-Lammer nods, tallying the order in his head. When he leaves, Verrel pulls a half-jack of vai from his pocket and grins at us. “Drop of the blood?”
Dash arrives after a long, uncomfortable hour with us squashed together at the table. Esta is still drinking straight tea, but Verrel is happily tipping cheap vai into our empty bowls and bottles when I spot Dash talking to one of his compatriots at the door.
He sees me and raises a hand in greeting, then saunters over to our table. The crowd parts easily before him, and he never has to ask anyone to step out of his way. Sometimes I have to wonder if perhaps Hobs really do have magic of their own.
Nala stands, sending her chair tipping backward. “Look.” She points at the knot of people by the makeshift stage. “They’re here.”
The band sets up, tapping drums and tuning fiddles. A tall, nervous boy is crouched on a stool, bent over his kitaar and strumming it while he fiddles with the ivory tuning nuts. A short girl with dirty-blond hair is sitting on a tall barstool on the stage and drumming her heels against the struts, her right hand shimmering a tambourine against her thigh.
“Have you heard them before?” Dash asks as he squeezes into the tiny gap between me and Lils.
I shake my head.
“They’re very good, but I don’t think they’ll be to your taste.”
“What does that mean?”
He leans closer so that his breath is tickling my ear. “Just that it’s not the sort of thing you’ll find in the ballrooms of House Malker.”
“So?” I shrug. “I’m always open to new experiences.”
At that he laughs and puts his arm loosely behind me.
I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do, but no one seems to notice his actions, or they put it down to the room being crowded and not to some strange idea of courtship that Dash—uncultured clot that he is—feels is appropriate. So I settle back with my heavily laced tea and wait as the crowd slowly quiets. His arm is a strange weight, uncomfortable and pleasant at the same time. I round my shoulders and try to concentrate on the band.
The girl on the stage is still gently rattling her tambourine and it fills the suddenly silent tearoom with an expectant hiss. The fiddler raises his fiddle and draws his bow across the strings. The music is slow, sad.
Then the drums come in and the tempo picks up, and the melody becomes a rousing, stomping whirl.
It slows again, and the girl begins to sing. Her voice is soft and the tearoom is quiet quiet quiet. Her voice wavers, then strengthens.
She’s singing a song about goodbyes and sunlight. The drummer joins his voice to hers, and they sing the chorus louder, the words strong and no longer sad.
Faster and faster the song goes, and I realize it’s about more than what it first appeared. It’s about wealth and poverty and injustice, and the tearoom crowd knows the chorus and with each verse more and more of the crowd begins to sing, until everyone is hollering around me and thundering their boots against the wooden floors, making the tables shiver, the teabowls dance.
The words seem familiar, as if I’ve heard them in a dream and then forgotten them.
Inside me, the scriv from the vai dances too, and the whisper of magic runs through my veins. I shiver. Gris, I need this. Even this pale imitation of a scriv-high is enough to make me weep with frustration. The little relief it gives is not a salve, it’s a lure.
Dash is pouring straight shots of vai, no longer even pretending to hide the illicit drinking. No one cares or notices. The vai calls to me, pregnant with scriv, promising me power.
I down my shot and Dash pours me another, and another. I lose myself in the swirl of sound, in the headiness of the music and the crowd’s reaction. The only thing I wish is that I could hear the singing girl clearly—half her vocals are drowned in the hubbub.
There is a way, of course, and the more I think about it, the better the idea sounds. It’s only the smallest of magics, using no heat, and I’ve enough scriv in my system to do it. I can be subtle—they’ll never know it was anything more than the art of the musicians, the strength of the music itself. I look quickly around me, at the rapt faces, everyone singing and cheering. They are focused on the stage.
Satisfied that I’ll attract no attention, I reach out with invisible hands and shape the air, making the particles vibrate against one another, and gradually the music grows louder and louder, until the chatter of the crowd is lost under the surge.
The band members exchange confused looks but carry on playing, and the crowd just cheers more, singing until they are breathless. Dash hugs me closer to him with one hand and I hear the whisper in my head like an echo.
“Oh, you are an interesting one, little House Lammer,” he says, and I smile dreamily.
Magic.
12
GIDDY WITH VAI AND MAGIC AND MUSIC we spill out into the streets. The night is starry but the streets are wet. A squall must have blown over while we danced and sang inside the Crake. The moon grins down on us, and the stars flash and glitter. Silver light makes the windows gleam, and the shadows are strange and shifting.
Music booms and echoes in my head, although it’s been a while since the band played their final encore and bowed to rapturous applause. The buzz of conversation seems stuck in my ears, and the ground feels too rubbery to walk on.
Someone catches my hand as I stumble.
“You all right there?” Dash says, and the laughter bubbles through his voice like sugar melting on a stove.
“I am perfectly,” I tell him as I summon deep reserves of dignity, “perfectly all right, thank you very much.” The words seem to take forever to draw out of my mouth, and I find myself getting bored with the sounds I’m making. With a supreme effort, I concentrate on stopping the buildings from spinning about me and focus on the other Whelk Streeters instead. At least they’re supposed to be moving.
Lils and Nala are skipping ahead of us. Well, Nala is skipping and tugging Lils along with her. Finally Lils takes a few reluctant, experimental gallops, and the sound of their giggling echoes off the shuttered shops.
At the noise, Esta whoops, and the windows bounce her shout down the narrow alleys. She’s smiling and Verrel is hovering around her like a protective older brother. He’s nearly twice her height and they make an amusing spectacle.
Dash still has my hand, and he pulls me back to a slow amble so that we fall far behind the rest. “So just what was that in there, darling?”
“Don’t know what you mean.” The words trip and stumble all over each other, and this makes me laugh again. I imagine each word as a juggler or an acrobat, leapfrogging down my tongue. The rubbish in the gutter bounds, mimicking the thoughts in my head. A crumpled paper ball leaps over a mud-laced leaflet. The leaflet stands on one corner and after a few staggering steps pirouettes after it. Accidental magic. Just how much vai did I drink? The papers collapse back into the muck and I frown. Not enough obviously. I wonder if Dash has any more on him?
“No, I don’t. You drank at least half a bottle,” he says.
Oops. Possibly, just poss
ibly, I’m thinking out loud.
“Just possibly,” he confirms. Dash stops, and I jerk to a halt.
At first I can’t quite work out why I’ve also stopped moving until I notice my hand in his and put two and two together. Happy with my sudden flash of genius, I smile up at him. “I am very drunk,” I inform him, just in case he hasn’t noticed. “Therefore you must not take advantage of me, because that would be awfully ungentlemanly … and … and … stuff.” I wave one hand to indicate the importance of said stuff.
“Hmm,” he says, then leans forward and kisses me.
I have never been kissed like this by a boy before. It’s different and strange and rather enjoyable. Of course, my only comparison is Ilven and that was tentative and wet. I pull away. The memory of Ilven is salt against my raw skin, and I blink furiously, pushing the image of her white face and the soft brush of her mouth away. There is only Dash here.
“You’re not a gentleman,” I tell him as solemnly as I can. This is very serious.
“I never said I was, darling.”
Oh, right. He’s telling the truth. I decide that he can’t be all that dreadful if he’s honest, and I kiss him back.
I shouldn’t be doing this. The ghost of Ilven watches, her face drawn in sadness, her leaf hairpin glinting under the starlight. I pull back from Dash and turn to her. “Go away,” I say. She just stares. “Go on! Shoo!” I flap my hands at her memory, and the image dissolves into the faint mist that’s creeping in off the ocean. She wasn’t really there. I rub my hands over my face, scrubbing the vision away.
Dash is looking at me, head cocked. “And that?”
“Nothing,” I mumble, and hug myself against his chest. “Just stupid memories.”
“Ah. Those.” He nods. “Nothing quite like ghosts for making you feel guilty.”
I pull back from him to stare at his face. He is serious, not mocking me at all. Eternity passes. Dash might be fickle, deep and treacherous as the Casabi, but he’s also someone who takes care of his own.
This time it’s me who presses in for a kiss.
The mist roils up, thick and white, spreading through the streets like a low, clinging ocean of ghosts. It swirls around our legs, making us a little skerry in the street.
“Look,” I say as I pull away. The air is cold and smells of salt and fish, but it’s a clean smell.
Dash looks down. “There’s a tale,” he says, “that the whalers tell, about how sea-mist that comes in this far is all the spirits of the dead, looking for the ones they left behind.”
I shiver. “Old sea stories.” But it’s sucked the beauty out of the scene, and now all I feel is cold and wet. There are other stories about mists like this, about how they’re portents of the Red Death. “Let’s go home.”
“I ain’t arguing with that idea.” He’s grinning, the little lech.
We take a very long time to walk back to Whelk Street, kissing all the way, and the others are already asleep by the time we crawl up the stairs, laughing and shushing each other. Dash takes me through to his side of the house, and I realize that although his bed is narrow, you don’t need all that much space to do what we do. There are moments when I think I should worry more, or hurt more, but then I touch skin and taste sweat and forget.
I jerk out of my strange hallucinatory world when my fingers brush over a deep gash on Dash’s thigh. “What’s this?” I ask him. There is blood there, tacky still.
“Nothing.” He moves my hand away. “Accident at work.” Or at least whatever scheme currently passes for employment in Dash’s world. I wonder what tricks and deals he was organizing this time. And when exactly he’s going to fall foul of the sharif.
Not long after that, I’m curled up so close to him that we might as well be one person instead of two, and I fall asleep.
* * *
“YOU’RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR WORK,” Nala says, far too loudly.
My head aches and my mouth tastes like marsh-rat fur. I sit up and blink in the unexpected light. Belatedly, I realize two things: one, I am completely naked, and two, I am not in my own bed.
“Oh Gris!” I pull the blanket up to my shoulders and look around. Dash’s bed, Dash’s room. No sign of Dash. A feeling rather like nausea fills my belly, and my face heats. I am revolting.
Nala taps her foot, then her face softens. “You don’t take Rake’s parsley, do you?”
Gris. No. Another wave of something halfway between shame and terror swamps me, and I feel like crying, only my eyes are too dry and itchy to produce even the smallest teardrop. I huddle deeper into the blankets and wonder if you can fall pregnant your first time, if, on top of everything else I’ve managed to do, I’m going to end up like one of those Hob girls who stand on the side of the road with some scruffy woebegone brat in tow, begging for a meal. I close my eyes in horror. “No,” I whisper, and feel even stupider for it.
She lets out a long sigh. “And we don’t have none. Lils and I don’t hardly need it.” Nala holds out a bowl of tea, long since cooled by the look of it. “Dash left that for you. Drink up, and then you best run as fast as your legs’ll take you before Mrs. Danningbread gets it in her mind to let you go.”
A cold wave courses through my body, leaving my skin tingling.
The tea is lukewarm, and I swallow it as quickly as possible—anything to kill the taste in my mouth—and then dig through the debris of Dash’s bed for my clothes. I pull my shift over my head, then pause to survey his domain.
There’s still a single book lying near the bed. Curious, I pick it up. It’s an old copy of Prines’s Mapping the Dream, so old that the red cover has faded to a dull brownish pink. The Dream is famous, and Prines has the dubious honor of being a crake worth studying, especially because of his historical connection to Mallen Gris. But why a Hob would be reading verse detailing the poet’s obsessive and ultimately erotic encounters with his House Master’s son is beyond me. The language is archaic, couched in layers and layers of metaphor, as impenetrable as a snarl of fishing line.
I lift the book, and a small folded note drops from the pages. Dash’s name is written on the outside in a neat slanted hand. An educated hand. I pause, feeling the crinkled edge against my fingertips. Dare I?
Perhaps it’s some girlfriend; perhaps I am just one of many. I unfold the letter. It’s short, merely stating a time and date, and ending with the word yours. A jealous heat crawls through me, and the taste of bile fills my mouth.
Hastily, I shove the note back, hoping that Dash won’t notice. I need to leave his room.
I’ve never scrubbed and dressed and brushed powder over my teeth as fast as I do now.
I arrive at the Crake almost a quarter hour late, but Mrs. Danningbread does nothing more than raise one gray eyebrow at me in disapproval. “Get to work,” she says, and I slink into the scullery, feeling very achy and miserable and sorry for myself. I keep wanting to spin around and dance, and then five minutes later I want to hurl crockery across the little room. Or do both at the same time. My face is being pulled in two directions: mouth wanting to laugh, eyes burning because I need to cry and I can’t.
My head is a giant ball of pain and even though I drink cup after cup of water, I still feel like a sea-sponge left in the afternoon sun.
Who is she? Every Hob girl I’ve ever seen becomes my rival in his affections. Then again, it need not be a Hob. The writing was educated—perhaps I am not the first high-Lammer to sleep in that room.
The whole morning I try to quash these contradictory feelings. And I don’t know if I want to vomit because I’m hungover like a street-Hob or if it’s because I’ve fallen in some kind of love with one.
The dishes pile up, and I lean against the wall and press the wet cloth to my head. For a moment, my eyes are soothed, and the coolness masks my headache. Except then I’m able to think, and I really don’t want to do that.
I drop the cloth. Across from me the whitewashed wall is pitted where the plaster has fallen out in chunks. The brick un
derneath is cheap red clay. What am I doing here? I look down at the cloth, at my hands wringing it over and over. These are not my hands. This is not my life.
But it’s what you have, a resolute voice says, echoing in my apparently empty skull, and you’d best make the most of it.
* * *
IT’S JUST AFTER THE ELEVENSES CROWD and before the lunch rush, and I’m slowly cleaning the last of the morning’s dishes, when Mrs. Danningbread sticks her head into the back room. “Firell?”
I look up from my dishwater and wipe the hair from my face with raw fingers.
“There’s someone up front who wants a word with you.”
My heart does a giddy flip, and my skin goes icy. Jannik. Gris, I’d forgotten I was supposed to meet him tonight. The last five days have passed in a blur.
Then I shake my head. It can’t be that damn bat—he said eight in the evening, and by no stretch of the imagination could late morning qualify.
After drying my hands, I peer tentatively around the doorway. The Crake is fairly quiet at the moment—a welcome lull in the general routine of rushed panic—and my visitor is immediately apparent. Sitting at a table, surrounded by the dragon-dogs she’s paid to exercise, is Nala. Esta is with her.
In a way, Nala reminds me of a Lammic version of the dragon-dogs: they are both impossibly thin and long-legged, with long noses and a hunched look to their shoulders. Nala’s carroty hair is a bit more orange than the deep chestnut of the dragon-dogs’ silky ears, but it’s still uncanny. Next to these pale slender creatures, Esta looks dark and out of place. She’s lighting matches and watching me with a sullen air as she flicks one after the other onto the tabletop where they smolder out, trailing smoke to the ceiling.
Nala waves at me, as if it is somehow possible that I didn’t notice her, and Esta rolls her eyes in exasperation. A day spent in Nala’s permanently jubilant company must be rather trying, I imagine, and I give her a sympathetic smile.
Esta sucks her teeth in response and rolls her eyes again.