by Cat Hellisen
Exhausted, too tired to argue with him, I fold my skirt over my legs and sit down. My skin crawls at the strange texture of his body against my arm.
“Why?” asks Jannik. “Why am I feeling you die?”
“You should know, better’n me anyway.”
The bat shakes his head. “I fed off you, that’s it—it means nothing.”
Dash tilts his head back and takes a rough breath. “So why did your dear mother insist that you stop feeding off me? There are reasons for your stupid laws.”
“Shut up,” Jannik says, but there’s no strength to it.
“You’re not going to die,” Dash says. His voice is getting weaker. “I don’t think we’re that far gone.”
“Well I’m so relieved now I could vomit. Thank you for clearing up that little worry.” Jannik’s voice is thick. I glance past Dash. The vampire’s white eyelids are down, and he stares ahead, not moving his face to look at either of us.
“What do you want us to do?” I whisper.
Dash sighs. “There’s nothing to be done. I just didn’t want to die alone.” He takes a sharp breath, almost as if he is in pain.
He reaches out suddenly and takes both our hands in his. The touch of his icy flesh makes me start, makes me try to jerk my hand away, but I still myself and accept that this is my apology. And his. Silently, I squeeze his hand once in reassurance.
“You changed things,” I tell him softly.
“Did I now? So it was worth it, was it?”
I think of the dead, of the wounded, of Dash’s own death waiting for him. The thing that I still have to do. I am filled with an ache so vast that it strangles me. “No.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Then he falls into silence.
We sit together, the three of us, and pass vigil in the dusk.
The sun has just set when I hear Dash’s breathing change. I swing my head up from where I’ve rested it against the wall, and I can just make out the dark gray shadow through Dash: Jannik.
The bat is sitting with his head bowed and his knees drawn up in a mirror of Dash’s pose. We are all still holding hands: me on Dash’s right, Jannik on his left.
I squeeze again, harder this time, and Dash laughs a soft moth-laugh that flutters against my cheeks and makes me too scared to cry in case I wash it away.
After that, he doesn’t breathe again.
Jannik pulls his hand free and folds his arms over his head. After a moment, I realize his shoulders are shaking, and he’s making a choked noise.
Do bats cry? Do they feel like we do? I brush the back of one hand across my eyes and stand, careful not to touch the jellied corpse next to me. “We have to go.”
Jannik doesn’t look up or take his arms from over his head. “Go where?’ His words are muffled. “Are you planning on flying us home?”
“We can walk—”
A hysterical laugh escapes him. “I am not fucking walking anywhere,” he says.
“Have you suddenly gone lame?” Grief makes me hard and angry, hating myself and him for feeling anything, especially when I still have Dash’s sentence hanging over me, his final gift to my House.
Jannik lowers his arms and looks up. There is blood smeared across his face. “No,” he says. “But his death has near killed me.” He makes a hiccuping sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
“What are you talking about?”
The bat leans his head back and stares at the shadowed ceiling. “I’m talking about my own stupidity. I fed too much from one donor, and ended up becoming too … attached.”
There’s something he’s not telling me. I wait.
“I’m not going anywhere unless I feed again,” he says, still carefully not looking at me.
Anger flares sharply. “You’re—no.” I cross my arms over my chest. “You’re lying,” I say. “I’m not fooled.”
Jannik twists his head and stares at me with his awful blood-covered face, his eyes white blanks in dark sockets. His cheeks look pinched, thin. “Why would I choose now to lie to you?” he says, and I see the tips of his fangs. “Not everything in this world revolves around you, high-Lammer.”
He’s right. I sink to my knees. “Feed? Like you did with—” I glance nervously at the corpse. There is nothing of Dash left in it. “What happens if you don’t?”
“For all that Dash was so certain that his death wouldn’t kill me, it may just do so in the end.” He’s matter-of-fact, bitter. I reach out and touch his hand.
“I—I can’t do it.”
“Then go away,” he says dully.
I stay where I am, still crouched before him, still touching his wrist with my fingertips. I could go now, leave Jannik here, find Owen, and mark him. Dash couldn’t destroy us on his own. And now it’s up to me. I can’t leave the sea-witch to run through Pelimburg unchecked, not when I know how to stop her. If I could lecture a boggert about choice and death, then I can damn well face up to it myself. I will wear my guilt, and I will make my choices.
Me or Owen. It should be easy. Except that it isn’t.
I don’t want to do it alone.
“No.” My voice is a bell shiver, a high tone. “Do what you have to.” Even as I say it, fear and revulsion twine in my stomach: two snakes, twisting and coiling over each other.
“You’re certain?”
“No,” I say. “Quickly, before I change my mind.” It comes out of me in a rushing breath, too fast and frightened. I shove my hand out, my wrist toward his face, and look away.
One breath. Two. My arm is shaking. Is he never going to do it?
Then I feel warmth on my skin as he takes my wrist, pulls it closer. The tingle of magic is almost overwhelmed by the hammer of my heart, the strange bellow wheeze of my lungs. “Shh,” he says, and sinks needle-fangs into the raised blue vein. My arm throbs.
We stay like this—a tableau vivant—for more breaths than I can count. To keep myself calm I imagine that the air filling my lungs is red, then orange and yellow. I work through the rainbow and each breath is filled with clean vibrant color, and I send that brightness curling through my body, stretching out to the very limits of every limb, and then I breathe it out again, fouled, faded, and grayed, taking away with it all my fear. My thighs begin to ache, the strained muscles cramping, and I breathe through that too.
He lets me go, and I tumble backward, dizzy and emptied.
The sand bites into my palms, scraping them raw.
“Here,” says Jannik. His voice is back to normal again. He’s untying his olive necktie. “Hold out your hand.”
I obey, and he carefully binds the wounds on my wrist. I don’t really want to look, though I do anyway. There are two neat punctures, and the blood wells up in thick dark rivulets, running in ticklish streams down my arm to drip and puddle in the sand and dust.
The pale skin of his hands is marred with a fine red rash. The tiny blisters spread even as I watch.
“Thank you,” he says very softly as he pulls the binding tight.
I swallow and nod.
“What about this?” I raise one hand almost to his cheek, where more of the blisters are spreading fast.
He shakes his head. “Scriv in your blood.” He stares down at his fingers, flexing them and watching the raised blisters burst. “It will pass.” His voice is tight, controlled, and I wonder if they burn. Jannik helps me to my feet. All I want to do is get out of here. I’m shaky and weak.
“Wait.”
He crouches and slips his arms under Dash’s body, easily lifting him. The boggert drained her final victim well, and it seems to me that he is nothing, an empty husk that she has left behind.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking him to Whelk Street.”
“We’ll come back for him,” I say. “Jannik, please, there’s something I have to do. Something—I can’t do it alone. Please.”
And he seems to understand. He sets the corpse back on the ground and crouches there for a moment to straighten Dash�
�s collar.
I want to point out that Dash will never care now, but I bite the words down and wait.
He stands, offers me his arm. “Where do we need to go?”
And because I know my brother far better than Dash ever did, I know that we will not find Owen by the docks, looking over the remains of his burning wherries and warehouses. He will be with his wife, with the little unborn Pelim heir.
* * *
I DON’T THINK OF OWEN as we walk through the twilight to the Pelim residences in New Town. I think of the dead, I think of the sea-witch walking through Pelimburg and claiming our people. I picture the faces of Hoblings I have never met. Esta’s brother, Rin, a gelatinous mess of a body, sacrificed to Dash’s cause. I picture the Whelk Streeters. I even manage a little pity for Dash.
Owen opens the door himself, something I did not expect, and the act throws me off course. I stand on his doorstep, one hand in Jannik’s, and I can think of nothing to say or do.
“What is it?” he snaps. “I’ve no time for this. Go find some other House to beg from.”
“Wait,” I say, before Owen can close the door. “I—”
He frowns, recognition warring with disbelief. I don’t give him time to say anything, just thrust out my hand, the little hairpin held tight, and stab it into his cheek.
It clatters onto the stones between us, and all that shows of my ill-timed attack is a meager kitten-scratch below his right eye.
It’s enough.
The air booms, and I feel the magic take. It’s as if all the winds have changed direction at once, drawing the sea-witch here. My skin crawls and sweat prickles up my spine between my shoulder blades. She’s coming.
“What have you done?” Owen whispers. It’s a pointless question—any War-Singer worth his scriv can taste what’s happened here, and Hob fancy or not, Owen knows as well as I do that there is a sea-witch walking through Pelimburg and that she is no longer aimless.
The drag of her tidal magic claws against us both. Perhaps she senses that I am bound to Owen by blood, perhaps she is too wild and blind and uncontrolled an entity to understand who her true target is.
She could take me instead.
This realization comes to Owen at the same time. I see the knowledge light up in his eyes, and he lunges forward to grab at my collar. “Oh no you don’t,” he says.
I try to jerk out of his grasp and the fabric tears, but he catches at my arm and pulls me closer to him. The blood on his face is running thicker now, dripping down his chin. I did not think I had struck him so deep.
Jannik grabs at Owen’s wrist and tries to pry the two of us apart, but Owen has always been strong, even without scriv, and Jannik is weary from a day of sun and the poison of the scriv in my blood. Neither of us makes a good warrior.
And perhaps it’s only fair, after all. What made me think I was more worthy of life? I’m just a runaway girl. Owen has a family, he carries our name forward. Who did I think I was?
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, and stop struggling.
He looks at me in disbelief, then releases his hold. I drop to the stone steps, bruising my knees. The hairpin lies at my fingers, glinting like a green eye. Accusing. I’m no better than Dash, it says. I’m no better than Owen, than all the men who have tried to manipulate me into doing their dirty work or my so-called duty. And I am so tired of men always deciding my path.
Fingers shaking, I pull the hairpin toward my knee. It scrapes along the stone. Somehow, I make myself pick it up. It feels heavier than it should, weighed down with all the things that have been laid upon it—such burdens of death it has carried. So what’s one more?
I jab the pin down into my thigh and it bites deep. The pain is less than I expected. When I can make my fingers move again, I let the hairpin go and look up at my brother. His face is white, almost as pale as Jannik’s. They’re both staring at me.
“I’ll wait here,” I say, and the words seem to drift out of my mouth, puffing up. The world is spinning around me, and I place my hands against the ground and try to keep myself from flying off into the skies. “You should go.”
The magic of the sea-witch is drawing closer, smothering the air. It’s like a huge wet blanket has dropped over the city. There are no stars above us, no clouds, just the implacable weight of her approach. “She’ll take me.” I’m sure of it, and it feels good and right. Guilt I barely knew I had lifts from me, and I am released.
Owen doesn’t move.
The street goes black.
She’s here.
“Run,” I say, my voice breaking. I don’t understand why he won’t leave. I’ve given him a chance. No matter how small it is, he should take it. After all, I’m already dead.
“No.”
“Felicita, this is madness.” Jannik kneels down to try to force me to rise. “You marked him first, it’s not going to matter what you do now.”
I pull my wrist out of his hand, shaking myself free. “You’re wrong, and if Owen would just listen to me for once in his life—”
The witch is upon us. The air is thick with the smell of iodine, of rotten fish, of the peculiar stink of seals and seaweed. I turn my head, determined to face her.
She’s a swirling black mass, vaguely Lammic in shape, and colors slide under her liquid skin—sea colors: greens and reds and grays. There is a shimmer to her, and her eyes are fish scales. She’s wreathed in dark brown and orange kelp, and strands of fine red weed hang from the arm she reaches out to me.
Yes.
I’ve tricked her. I’m closer to her than Owen, and my blood is enough to make her think I’m the sacrifice.
Then she reaches past me and Owen is consumed.
There is no breath in me to scream. The winds that have been tugging me go still, and the veil drops from the sky, revealing again the stars and the grinning moon.
The weight that was pressing down on Pelimburg—all that wild magic—vanishes. I look to where my brother was standing just seconds ago, and there is nothing there to indicate that he ever existed. They are both gone. She has returned to the sea with her sacrifice.
In a daze, I allow Jannik to help me to my feet. The hairpin is still sticking from my thigh like a tiny dagger, and I pull it out viciously, wanting it to hurt me more.
“She’s gone,” Jannik says. “There will be no more deaths.”
And that, at least, is true.
I sob once, then with Jannik’s hand still in mine, I turn and run away from what I have done this day. A strange excitement is burning through me, and it seems all my earlier tiredness is gone, replaced now by this madness. We run through Pelimburg breathlessly. I’ve saved them, all of them. I pretend that I did not really kill my brother in order to do it.
When we stop, panting, I do not even know where we are.
“We—” Jannik huffs, tries to catch his breath. “What do we do now?”
“Jannik?”
He raises an eyebrow.
“What would you do to change your future?”
“We’ve discussed it. There’s nothing I can do. My mother is free to do with me as she wants.”
“Like mine was with me?”
He stays silent.
Owen’s death has made me realize one thing. No matter what the results, it is my choices that define me. And I will fight for them, even when it seems that failure is inevitable. Perhaps most especially then. Jannik is staring at me, waiting for me to talk, and so I make my first choice as Felicita, returned. “Then what if I could give you a huntsman’s gambit?”
“Explain.”
I take a deep breath and plunge into a strange new world, one where I awkwardly knit together the holes I’ve ripped. I talk fast, hoping to make him see the sense of this partnership I propose, despite how bizarre it must sound. At least he listens, saying nothing, although his face gets more and more serious as I speak.
Afterward he says, “It’s not much of an offer.”
“It’s better than what you have here!”
“Freedom.”
“A strange sort of freedom.”
“Better than none at all.”
That makes him smile, just a quick flash of fangs.
“Well,” he says, “I believe that our bargain is settled.”
19
JANNIK’S CARRIAGE RATTLES along the broken seashells that cover the last stretch of the road up to House Pelim. The mansion rises before us, a myriad-eyed giant waking from sleep. I hold my breath, flex my fingers, and remind myself that I am not a child.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Jannik and I have already faced his mother down. She was condescending, laughed in our faces, and told Jannik to do whatever suits him.
So that settled that.
I shake my head. “You stay in here. It’ll be enough of a shock when I turn up on the doorstep. Arm in arm with a bat might just kill her.”
He looks out the window at the cliff edge, at our famous Leap.
The driver pulls the unis up in the circle and comes to open the carriage door and help me out. I press my damp palms on my borrowed dress—pale rose, something I would never wear normally—and walk toward the front stairs, my head held high.
Firell opens the door and claps one hand over her mouth. She makes a muffled moaning sound, her eyes growing wider and wider.
“Just fetch my mother,” I say with a sigh, when her show of histrionics is over. “Please.” It is time, after all, to give Firell back her name and reclaim my own.
She runs off, skidding on the polished floor.
While I wait I try to summon up all my reserves of courage. The well is rather empty.
The wind yowls in the forests that edge our land, the sea mews add their plaintive cry, and the unis stamp in their traces.
And then a sound so familiar that my heart freezes. The click click click of my mother’s shoes on the slate tiles of the entrance. My palms are wet again, but I don’t want to wipe them in case I stain this borrowed dress. Suddenly I worry about the most mundane things—the color of my hair, the thinness of my face, the way my hands are rough now and the nails broken.