by Cat Hellisen
“Look on the bright side,” Dash says. “After I’m dead, the boggert will be gone too. Malker Ilven will be just a memory.”
“I hate you.”
“Save it for later,” he says. “You’ve got bigger things to deal with now. Quick, girl, or there’ll be more deaths than you want weighing you down.”
And I hate him even more for being right.
Nala is holding Lils tight, and there’s a physical wind around them now. They are caught in a private storm that tears at their hair, at their clothes, and Nala buries her face against Lils’s neck and her cloud of carroty frizz tangles up in Lils’s dark serpentine mass and the dreams spill faster. The first drops of water rise from the Casabi as I coax them up.
“Whenever you’re ready.” Dash picks at his teeth with a splinter of wood. He’s trying for nonchalant, but I can see faint beads of sweat popping up on his forehead.
And it comes to me in a flash: crime and punishment. Maybe he’s already dead, but I can make him suffer. Because Dash has severely underestimated me.
I raise a solid wall of water around myself, around the crowd, like a curtain across Pelimburg, separating Old Town from New, curving it up and over our heads in a protective bubble. The probing dreams cease, like dead moths falling to the ground. Behind me comes a collective sigh as the crowd is freed from the nightmare visions.
And then I very carefully twine that curtain of magic-controlled water so that Dash is on the wrong side of it.
18
IT TAKES ONLY A SPLIT SECOND for Dash to realize exactly what I’ve done. He reaches his partially translucent palm toward me and touches the shimmering wall that I’ve brought down between us.
He stares at me. Then he drops his hand and smiles. His teeth are so white in his brown face, so startling. His mouth moves, but I have no idea what he’s saying.
My heart feels like it’s trying to crawl out of place. I strengthen the wall. More water boils up from the river, thickening the barrier. At least this way I can concentrate on something that isn’t the sour taste of betrayal. I swing my gaze away from Dash, determined not to look at him. I’m a coward. A high-Lammer. Just what Dash thinks all high-Lammers are like. My stomach clenches and I swallow convulsively.
Lils and Nala are wrapped in a cocoon of hair, protected from the dreams. They are caught up in a little bubble of safety, and they neither notice nor heed Dash’s presence. In New Town, it won’t take long for the War-Singers to get to their scriv and shore up their defenses, but until then, the city is going to be a chaos of flames and nightmare visions. People will die—throw themselves from buildings, drown themselves in the silt-brown Casabi. How long before my brother comes down to the source of the nightmares, trying to control his losses? How long will Lils’s magic last before the dreams fade?
Dash has to mark my brother—mark someone—before the sea-witch rises. How is he going to do that after he’s been weakened by the insanity of the nightmare visions? I didn’t think, and now more people are going to suffer. For the first time since running away I am almost eager to see my brother. I scan the crowd hoping to spot him among the screaming faces. Dash should have been on this side, ready to give whatever signal he devised to stop Lils’s nightmares. He must have had some plan in mind for after he’d lured Owen into the open. It was not one he shared with me. I’m a traitor, and I am a fool.
Verrel and Esta are also out there. I can’t do this—even Dash doesn’t deserve my disloyalty.
Unless there’s some way I can find the others, bring Dash back to this side, and keep them safe. I press forward tentatively, but the fragile magic can’t take the strain of my losing focus, and I feel it tear, spilling water across my hand. It drips down my arm. An insect-legged flicker of a memory I had thought was buried worms toward me:
my brother’s face as he locks me in a wardrobe to stop me from following him I’m four he left me there for the afternoon it was only when dinner was served that he remembered to free me smell of feces and urine and the snot-stickiness of my skin the burn of thirst and hunger and over it all the black terror the fear that I would be there forever
Shaking, I step back and take another pinch of scriv even though my fingers are trembling so hard that I almost lose the precious dust. My magic bounds up again, and I knit the dream-wall closed. Finally, I force myself to really look at Dash, trapped there in the nightmares. Through the veil of water everything seems distant and unreal, and I can almost persuade myself that it is truly not happening.
How long before the sea-witch comes? I want to scream.
Dash is sitting on the bridge with his knees drawn up to his face. His eyes are blank, and he doesn’t see me at all. Gris knows what horrors live inside his head. The taste of bile is so thick in my mouth that I have to lean over, clutching at a post, so that I can spit on the ground. My skin is ice-cold. Sweat soaks my clothes. If I really needed to punish Dash, I could have waited for a better time.
And now there’s no way for me to open the wall and drag him back—I’ll be overwhelmed.
And if the wall falls … I glance behind me at the crowd, at their pale, strained faces. I wonder if any of them realize that I’ve purposefully cut Dash off, that this was not part of the deal.
The crowd has been almost eerily silent up until now. From New Town there is nothing—the wall has killed all sound. Even if Dash could pull himself together long enough to speak, he wouldn’t be able to tell them what happened or beg me to bring him back across.
“Oi!” someone yells, and then they begin. Someone’s pointed out that Dash is caught on the wrong side of the wall. They jostle, they shout, and through gritted teeth I say over and over, “It was a mistake.”
But no matter how many times I repeat it I will never make myself believe it. Bodies crush around me, and the air is forced out of my lungs. I send the scriv-magic harder outward and upward, siphoning even more water from the river and strengthening the bubble arching over us. I may be able to do nothing for those I have betrayed, but I can still protect the ones I haven’t.
On the other side of the wall, the smoke is turning thick and black, pouring down the alleyways, winding around the houses. The first wave of people run up against the wall, beating their hands against it, bloodying their faces as they smash their heads over and over, as if this time they will get free. They scratch their fingers raw. They turn on one another like animals. I catch a glimpse of Dash, still curled in on himself, before he is lost, trampled under the maelstrom of flesh and fear. Then the area clears, and he is gone. There is no body there, and I cannot see his face in the crowd. Another mass of people rush up to the wall.
The only two people who remain untouched are Nala and Lils, caught up in their own world. They are pale skin and brown, dark hair and red. A tangled geometry of flesh. Is that love? Is that what love can do? Save you from all the horror the world has to give?
The girls spin, a slow intricate dance between the hordes.
The bridge is soon clotted with gore, the cobblestones gleaming with blood. The sky is no longer blue, but orange and black from the fires, and I see people fall from buildings, their bodies nothing more than flaming cinders.
I realize I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek when I taste blood in my mouth. How long before the Houses rally themselves, rise against this attack? How long before the nightmares caught in Lils’s hair are all gone?
Still no sign of Owen. What made Dash think that my brother would come down to the docks and waste magic on protecting the warehouse servants? He should have known better.
My face stings, and I take more scriv.
When the sea-witch finally rises from the Casabi—woken by boggert-deaths and drawn to the shore by the concentration of terror and blood—I stand still. Hold the wall. Her hair is Red Death, her skin and flesh spume and spray.
I witness.
It is the very least I can do.
She walks out of the mingled waters of the river and the ocean tracking black kelp
behind her.
Then she is gone, into the nightmares.
* * *
MY SCRIV-MAGIC IS FADING. I haven’t moved. I’m as parched and as dry as if I had just crawled across the red desert outside of MallenIve. The wind, finally able to penetrate the fragile bubble of magic, begins to tug at my hair.
I can feel, just faintly, other walls that have sprung up all over Pelimburg as the House War-Singers have protected their own as best they can. I wonder if it will be enough to protect them from Dash’s vengeance. Perhaps. But what little I saw of the violence unleashed by the nightmares does not fill me with much hope for my fellow high-Lammers.
My brother, my mother. Are they safe or is Owen already dead?
The water drops with a sudden crash as the last of my scriv runs out. Brine sloshes across the Levelling Bridge, soaking the people, the bodies, rinsing blood from the wounded and the dead.
I can’t bring myself to care. Inside me is a pit of blackness and it sucks at every emotion that tries to flutter upward.
Nala and Lils break apart, blinking. Nala drops the barest brush of a kiss against Lils’s forehead before gently turning her around and braiding up the mass of dark hair. Moans carry faintly on the breeze coming down the mountain, and the smell of burned flesh, wood, and something sickeningly sweet is carried with it.
My hand is on my mouth. I don’t remember moving it there. The skin is dry, flaked with the ash that is falling faint as a fine rain.
The sound is back. I’m going to be drowned by the screams and panic. I’m free though, I tell myself, I’m free to go look for the others among the bodies. I need to find Dash and see what damage the sea-witch has done.
My legs ache but I don’t let that stop me. I walk straight past the two girls, stepping over the bodies nearest me, and then pick my way through the worst of the slick filth on the ground. No matter where I look, there is no sign of a familiar face. Black kelp ribbons about the bodies, and here and there the eyes of the dead are plucked out, filled with sand and broken shells. This is the way she came. These are her dead. I follow the trail of sea-witch-tainted bodies, hoping that they will become fewer, that the trail will end. Even if that means finding my brother’s corpse.
It does not. All around me people gibber, moan. They’ve seen her walking, spreading the Red Death inland, although the Hobs and Lammers who were caught on this side of the bridge have yet to realize that she is not merely another nightmare.
I walk until I can’t take a single step more and then sit down on a low stone curb and cradle my head in my hands. My tongue feels thick and huge.
So I don’t see him, don’t hear him until his boots are right next to mine and he says “Felicita” in a tone that is heavy with exhaustion and guilt.
I raise my head, dragging my gaze away from those polished black boots, gray now with ash and muck, and up to Jannik’s drawn face. His cheeks are thinner. He looks older. His pale skin is marred by red streaks.
He crouches. Balances his hands on his knees. “What are you doing here?”
“And I should ask you the same thing.” My words have no bite to them, even though I clearly remember Dash telling Jannik to stay in Old Town.
“I’m doing what I can.” He rocks a little, exhaustion almost overwhelming him. “Everyone is. Even my mother stepped out of our house to do what she was able.”
Around us, people are passing, some carrying the injured, the dead. Others already with wood and stone in their hands to shore up the worst of the crumbling buildings.
“The bridge and the docks were hardest hit,” he says. “Seems the dream-fever didn’t reach all the way to the Tooth.” His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them. “So certain Houses suffered hardly at all.”
He doesn’t know that my brother is a marked man.
“Good for them,” I say dully. “Wait.” I stare into those indigo-dark eyes and he flicks the membrane down, hiding his thoughts. “How do you know it was dream-fever? You were on our side of the river. There was no way for you to feel that.”
“People are talking about it.” But there’s something there in his face that even his slicked-over eyes can’t hide. Pain and suffering.
I stand. He doesn’t. We stare at each other, and I know what he’s keeping from me. “I need to find Dash.”
“And you think I know where he is.” Jannik looks at his hands instead of my face.
I remember something he told me last night, and the pieces click, fall into place. Jannik and Dash, and the things Jannik has been carefully not telling me. Why his mother was so determined he stop feeding off one particular Hob. “I know that you do.” I bend down to touch his face so that he cannot lie to me by looking away.
His third lids are still down, and the day’s sunlight has left a fine blistered rash over his skin. Jannik draws a deep shuddering breath. “Follow me.”
Together we make our way back toward the riverside warehouses, and this time I cannot pretend that there are fewer bodies. The sea-witch is taking them indiscriminately—old and young, Hob and Lammer. Dash has failed. All around us, Hobs are working to help who they can. The Lammers too, and among them the pale bats. We head down to one of the oldest warehouses, and I pull my shawl closer about my head and keep my neck bent. There are servants here who might recognize me. Quickly, Jannik and I thread through the maze of buildings till we find a long-abandoned storage facility, a relic of better years.
Under the fading red light of the last sun, the leaping dolphins of my House crest glint feebly from beneath decades of black grime. It’s been many years since anyone used this place. The door is old wood, heavy and splintered and tacky. Someone has been here. There are footprints in the dirt.
I don’t want to go in.
“Come on,” Jannik says, and tugs at my hand. I’m glad of his presence, of the comforting familiarity of my poet mathematician. No. It’s the magic that’s comforting, the subtle play of his bat-nature through my palm, tingling my arms, and making the hairs on my body prickle.
I shake my head. Truth can wait for another day.
We go farther into the darkness, all the way to the back, where I see a familiar figure shining in the gloom. My heart leaps.
I let go of Jannik’s hand and run forward.
Ilven turns to me, looking over her shoulder through a fringe of hair so pale it gleams like surf. I pause in my headlong flight.
“Ilven?”
Her eyes are silvered coins, blank and expressionless. Although she’s ghost faint, there is color in her cheeks. She’s fed. And I know that Dash is gone. I stand, waiting for the boggert to come closer. She drifts toward me, her feet leaving the sandy floor untroubled. One eyebrow is arched in a question. It is a familiar look, and it’s this, more than anything else, that makes me bite at my lip in an effort to stop the tears that are stinging the corners of my eyes.
“It’s me,” I say. “I know why you did it.” Her leap from the cliff has plagued me, left me feeling guilty every night. “I used to think I should never have left without you, that I should have waited.” My voice trembles. “And then I’d—I’d have seen you, stopped you.”
The boggert is a breath away from me, and she pauses, hovering.
“But that’s not true, is it?”
“Felicita.” Jannik’s voice is soft, warning. “Step away from her.”
“Maybe I could have saved you once. Twice, even.” I want to reach up and brush back a lock of pale hair that has fallen over her face, but I hold my arms still. “In the end, we make our choices on our own. And no matter how stupid they are, we have to live—or die—with what we’ve done. Sometimes choosing our moment of death is the only freedom we have left.”
The boggert blinks, and for an instant I see Ilven’s blue eyes, a flash of summer.
“And I’ve no right to try to save you from that.”
She’s barely there, her body misted and irregular. She’s dissipating, dissolving into nothingness. “No,” she says, and I know that
she has remembered. “Goodbye, Felicita,” the boggert says in Ilven’s cotton-soft voice. She has remembered that she’s dead, and I can feel the change that ripples through her and then she’s gone and all that is left is the remains of her last victim.
Sitting with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up against his chest is Dash.
Like Rin, like the other two corpses that were found, he is ghostly, barely there. He manages a weak smile at my approach.
We must have interrupted Ilven—no, the boggert—before she finished feeding.
“Hello,” he says.
It’s so incongruous that I stare at him. “Hello?” I say after a few moments. “Hello?” After everything that happened and what we did to each other, he greets me like he’s just stepped out for a few hours and now he’s back.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” he says, and coughs. “Although you can believe I’ve a choice few words stored up.”
“I had to stop you,” I say. “I had to make you see.”
“And what good did it do?”
I say nothing. Dash opens one clenched hand and drops Ilven’s hairpin on the ground between us. The scream is trying to come out. It can’t. My fingers shake as I scoop the Gris-damned thing up and hold it tight. I want it to prick me, to mark me, and make this whole thing over. Only I’m too much of a coward.
“It’s always easier when someone else makes the hard choices. Right, love?”
“I can’t.” I choke the words out.
“Well it ain’t going to be me. You saw to that, you silly flick.”
“Dash,” says Jannik from behind me, “I shouldn’t be feeling this death.”
“Oh, but you are.” He grins. A sickly thing, with no real humor to it. “Sit down,” he says. The vampire walks past me and obeys. “You can sit on the other side,” Dash says to me, and pats the empty space next to him.