When the Sea is Rising Red (19 page)

“I’ve no idea.” Jannik’s tone warns me to ask nothing more. He knows who is hiding in the shadows and watching these rooms. Sweat dampens my brow. Could there be sharif watching here? Has Jannik sold me out despite his word?

“Stay here,” he says. “I won’t be but a moment.” He strides from the room.

After a few seconds, I sidle back to the windowsill and peep slyly through the curtains. It isn’t long before I see Jannik trot down the wide steps and across the deserted road to where the stranger hides in the long black shadows.

A slender shape moves. The grayness blankets him, making it impossible to see his features, and in the darkness all color is leached from his clothes, his hair, his face. I squint. Jannik is talking, moving his hands. The stranger just stands, slouched against the opposite wall, his hands shoved into his jacket pockets.

Jannik takes a step closer, and then I can see nothing at all of the stranger, hidden now behind Jannik’s long coat.

What secrets are they sharing, that they must talk so close?

Finally, their two shadows peel apart, and the stranger walks off. Jannik stands for a while, perfectly still, watching him leave, a slim package clutched in his hands.

I pray that the stranger was no sharif spy.

Before Jannik can return I slip down from the window and tuck my feet under the bedcovers, reveling in the smooth feel of the material against my legs.

Outside, I hear Jannik coming down the hall.

I pull the covers up around my shoulders. The material is soft, and the blanket is stuffed with goose feathers. I feel like I’m being wrapped in safety. This is nothing like my nest of ragged blankets and sacking in Whelk Street. “And?” I say when he enters.

“Nothing.”

“Truly?” I can’t hide the trembling of my voice.

He looks at me queerly, then shakes his head. “A business deal gone sour,” he says, but his face twists, and I don’t need to be a Reader high on scriv to catch the lie in his voice. “It’s really nothing to worry about.” The thin package turns out to be a book, and he slips it casually into the bookshelf.

I watch while he unrolls some winter-weight blankets onto the floor. He leaves the room to change and comes back wearing a nightshirt almost as white as he is. I smile because it looks so normal, so utterly mundane. And then I remember the boggert-soft caress of his strange magic. Jannik is not a Lammer, and he is nothing like me.

I lean forward and pull out the book he returned, as if this will somehow distract me. Or perhaps I just want to see if he will stop me. “You like Prines?” I’m not familiar with it beyond the most superficial level even though it’s his most famous work. Indeed, I mostly ignored it because the only people I met who ever liked this particular slim volume seemed to be about one hundred years old. The cover has long since faded from its original red. I flick through the pages.
Mapping the Dream
. I shake my head. Dash has a copy of this. A copy so very similar I could almost mistake it for the same book. I flick through it, looking for a telltale letter.

Jannik winces. “If you’d just be a little more careful,” he says softly. “That’s a first edition.”

I pause with my finger against a page browning with age. The script is ornate, and I realize that this must have been printed on the original House Mallen press. “Oh.” I suck in a deep breath. “I’m so sorry.” Carefully, I shut it and run my palm ever so gently across the fraying material of the cover.

“I shouldn’t have it anyway,” he says. “It belongs to my mother.”

“So why did you loan it to someone else?”

“I needed to show him something.” He laughs at himself.

“You could have used a copy.”

“I could have, at that.” His face goes calm, and he smiles ruefully. “There’s a dedication on the first page.”

I open the book, and there, in an elegant sloping hand, is a dedication, a date. It’s in a strange language, although as I trace the words, I note a slight similarity to High Old Lammic.

“My father gave that to my mother as a wedding gift.”

There’s some significance here that I’m not getting.

Jannik sighs and holds out his hand. I pass the book back. “It’s priceless,” he says. “My father bought it himself.”

I shake my head. “I don’t get it.”

“He was the first wray in his family to buy something with money he’d earned for himself,” he says. “It’s symbolic.”

“So why give it to her?”

He cocks his head. “You don’t understand much about people. You just think you do.”

“And if you’re just going to be insulting, then I’m going to sleep.” I huff and drop down, pulling the covers tighter about me.

There’s a lengthy pause while I wait for him to say something back, to draw me out, but instead all I hear is the rustling of the leaves outside.

“Good night,” he says as I’m about to apologize, and he blows the fatcandles out. The room plunges into an inky blackness.

After a while, when I’m safe under the blankets and the room is filled only with the very faint sound of his breathing, I ask him: “That couple that we saw…?” I hope he knows who I mean, I’ve no wish to spell out the details. “Is that common? Does that always happen?”

“Are you asking me if I fuck my food?” The words sound overly harsh in the darkness.

“I suppose I am.”

The night feels blacker and emptier and he says nothing. The bat is not going to answer me. I turn on my side and pull the pillows into a more comfortable position. The nightshirt and the linens smell like him—it’s not unpleasant.

“If I do,” Jannik says, “it’s only when he asks.”

“How reassuring.” I’m tired and I speak without thinking. “I hope you pay him extra for it.”

There is only silence.

14

T
HE HARSH
CAWS
of a passing flock of ibis break the morning stillness. I kneel on the bed to get a better look out of Jannik’s wide window. In the dawn light I can see over the slate roofs of the houses, all the way to the Levelling Bridge and the wide brown smear of the Casabi. The sky is gray and cool, and there are no clouds. Last night would have been a good night on the boats, and Lils will already be dockside, unloading the day’s catch and taking it to market.

“It’s early still,” Jannik says from the floor. “If you want I can have a servant draw you a bath and find you some suitable clothing.”

I can hardly arrive at the Crake to wash dishes in Nala’s borrowed dress. “That would be kind of you.” The awkwardness from last night is gone. I feel like Jannik is an extension of me, the part of me that stayed home and just dreamed about running away. I peer over the edge of the bed and smile down at him. Amazing what sleeping in a decent bed does for my mood.

“You’re entirely too happy in the morning,” he says. “I’m afraid it would never work between us. I’m just going to have to deny you your dream.”

He’s joking, of course, and I lean on my elbows and stare at him. “Heartbreaker.”

Jannik closes his eyes. “I know. I’m terrible for it. I do hope you can find it in yourself to one day forgive me.”

“Forgive you! Please, I’ve already moved on. I’m seeing someone.”

At that he blinks and sits up. In the early light his eyes are a gray violet, the color of the sea under the moon. “Are you really? Callous little flick.”

*   *   *

I
GET HIM TO STOP HIS CARRIAGE
a few blocks from the Crake. It’s not that I’m embarrassed to be seen with him, more that I don’t need people asking me uncomfortable questions. Despite that, I get more than a few raised eyebrows when I walk into work.

“Bats, eh?” Charl shakes his head, laughing.

I draw up and begin to answer him stiffly. “It’s not what you think—”

But he waves my protests down. “Leave it,” he says. “You’re not the first to need extra coin, and you won’t be the last neither.”

None of them will believe me. I drop any attempt to explain myself and just gracefully accept that people are going to make assumptions and that the more I argue, the more it’ll look like I’m trying to hide something. It’s annoying, but I picture myself in their places—seeing me leave last night in a bat’s carriage—and think about what conclusions they would have drawn. It makes me want to laugh at how stupid I am. Instead, I grit my teeth and head through to the scullery, my joints already aching at the thought of spending all day with my hands in sudsy water.

Gris, this dress.
It’s stiff against my skin and scratches at the seams. Nala’s gown is folded up and stashed away in my bag. There’s no way I would have worn it here.

I’m itchy and it takes me a while to realize that it’s probably from the starch. This dress must belong to some maid who has long since outworn it. The red dye has faded to brown, and the hem has been let down till it’s nothing more than the narrowest seam of material. The bodice is tight and uncomfortable but I’d rather be wearing this than one of Jannik’s original offers. Better to wear a maid’s tat than to be squeezed into one of Roisin’s castoffs and not only look out of place but be reminded of everything I have thrown away.

After lunch, Charl heads through the scullery to stand at the back door and smoke a ’grit in peace, away from the eyes of customers. “You hear about the tide?”

The heel of my hand is rough against my eyebrow as I rub at an annoying itch. There’s always tide talk in Old Town, where fortunes and lives depend on the sea. Mostly I barely listen. It was Owen who paid attention to tide talk, who lived his life by the rise and fall of the ocean. “What’s it this time?” I ask, only half interested.

“Red Death.”

The teabowl shatters against the edge of the stone sink as I jerk back. It’s the Red Death that almost wiped out my family’s fortunes not that many decades ago. Red Death could bring Pelimburg to its knees. Fish will die, seabirds will die, the tiny creatures that fill the rock pools will die. Everywhere there will be the stink of rot unless the tide moves quickly past. “How bad does it look?”

Charl puffs on his hand-rolled ’grit and frowns. “Not good. It’s a big one, and it’s set to be a sitter.”

Gris damn it all. What use are our few Saints if their Visions can’t warn people long before the Red Death comes?

“It’s because of those idiot House girls,” Charl says. “Suicides and boggerts sucking bodies dry. Red Death means a sea-witch is coming, and all the magic in Pelimburg’s not gonna stop that.”

“Rubbish,” I snap. “Magic is what keeps Pelimburg running.”

He laughs. “No one but a high-Lammer would say that. It’s fish and copper and tea. Magic just makes things easier.”

Carefully, I run my fingers across the bottom of the sink, searching for the broken shards in the gray water. “Without magic, Pelimburg would be nothing but a beach where seals come to pup.”

“And mayhap it would have been better that way.”

And maybe he’s right.

“Do you really think that this means a sea-witch is rising?” I hate believing Hob superstition, but I find myself infected anyway.

“’Course,” he says.

“And if magic can’t stop a sea-witch, then what can?”

Charl stares at me queerly. “Ah, everyone knows that, girl.”

Everyone except me, apparently. “Humor me,” I say as I carefully wrap the shattered pieces of bowl in some old
Courant
s I find stuffed behind a crate.

“Well, they go as soon as they get what was promised to them. And to do that, you need to speak to the boggert and get it to give you a sign.”

I pause, my fingers pressed on the sharp edge of a piece of pottery. “What do you mean?” My breath whistles.

“Sea-witches need sacrifices. That’s why they follow boggerts around. They feed on the bodies the boggerts leave behind. But you can get a sea-witch to do what you want provided you give it something in return. Whatever it is you offer has to be marked by a boggert-sign.”

“Something—what kind of something?” The words are hard to get out. In the old days, before the Hobs were brought to heel, they used to give the sea a girl and a boy every decade. Maybe they knew something we didn’t.

A corpse for a corpse.

Charl stubs out the last little twist of his ’grit. “Tell Dash we’re ready,” he says. “And all of the Fourth, and Jaxon’s pack too. He just has to give the word.” He stands and heads past me, back to work.

“I’m not a bloody messenger service,” I mumble as he leaves.

Ready for what? I push aside the slow creep of nervous sickness in my stomach. It’s probably another episode like the ’ink—sorting and bottling the herb to sell it.

His plan to destroy Pelimburg, of course.

Something’s far from right, and it has to do with my House, with Dash, and with magic the high-Lammers cannot control. Fear crackles through me. I shake my head. I’m grabbing at shadows and fancies. Dash is no destroyer of cities. He’s a street Hob who sells himself to bats.

*   *   *

I
LEAVE WORK LONGING
to somehow find an excuse to go back to Jannik’s bed. Of all the things I miss, why is a warm, soft mattress so high on the list? After everything that’s changed in me, am I still so selfish and so utterly
House Lammer
that I would sell my honor for a chance to return home to my pampered little cage? Guilt floods me, and I try to sublimate the shadowed vision of my mother’s face gone gaunt with worry. It stays, so I force myself to think of Dash instead. A thrill of excitement twines itself with suspicions and guilt. My face flushes and sweat dampens my palms. I no longer know what I’m feeling. His Hob smirk fades, is replaced by Jannik’s smile, Dash’s sallow skin painted over with boggert-white, his gray-green eyes turned indigo and darker than ink.

I laugh bitterly at myself and kick the dry circles of sand on the promenade so that dust puffs up around me.

Go home, Felicita. Stop playing this stupid childish game where you pretend to be something you’re not.
My family needs me. Surely they will forgive me, erase my disgrace? Things have changed now. If the Red Death is coming, it will cripple House Pelim again, and what will my little blot of dishonor be against that dark mark? They will need me, to sell me off for whatever they can to recoup their losses. The turning of the tide brings a change in all our fortunes, and it’s too big a thought for me to face.