When the Sea is Rising Red (4 page)

“Firell,” I say, and she curtseys in greeting.

She sets the ornate copper tray down and begins fiddling with the pots and bowls. The thin liquid trill of tea poured into porcelain is soothing, and the faint sweet scent of the honeybush lingers in the air.

“Can I bring you anything else, miss?”

I shake my head. It’s too heavy for my neck. I’m going to snap, break in two. If I could cry, perhaps my head would be lighter. I am a rain cloud, heavy before the storm.

She curtseys again, ready to leave, but I stop her before she can go.

“Here,” I say, and fumble in my pocket for the little necklace that is weighing me down. She takes the gift, her eyes wide, nervous.

“Miss?”

“For you,” I say. And it might as well be. Firell has served me as a lady’s maid since she could carry a tray. I look at her again and really see her: her face olive complected, her dark hair drawn back into a neat pad low on her neck. Her starched uniform, marred by faint stains at the armpits, the burn on her arm, faded now, where she once caught at a falling teapot so that it wouldn’t scald me. I realize now that I know nothing about Firell—she could be a magicless unwanted baby from a High House, or some serving girl’s bastard. The latter’s more likely; along with the tan skin, she has the short stature that points at Hob parentage. The High Houses try to keep their bloodlines pure, clinging to their magic. Ilven used to say that soon we high-Lammers would be nothing more than inbred monstrosities, lording it over one another as we play king of the midden.

It could be a true future that Ilven saw—she’s a Saint after all.

Was
. Was a Saint.

“It’s a gift,” I say to Firell.

She takes the package with fluttering fingers and tucks it deep in her apron pocket without unwrapping it. “Thank you, miss. Thank you.”

When she’s gone, I feel empty. After a while, I take my teacup and blow, making tiny ripples across the reddish water.

There’s a distinct bitter aftertaste of Lady’s Gown in the tea, and I welcome it. Anything to sleep without dreaming.

*   *   *

I
AM STILL GROGGY
from a week spent in mourning, and my thoughts chase one another in ever-tightening spirals. This is not a good way to face my mother’s neat and quiet revenge. The early sunlight hurts my puffy eyes and I squint, wishing the ache away. The low tea table is a bridge between us, or perhaps a wall. Carefully, I arrange the teapot, the little white cup, and the sugar bowl before me like an army. Defense? Or attack?

My mother sits crisply, folding and unfolding the letter she holds. Her weapon. It bears my brother’s jagged script. How like him, to talk to us in a way that gives us no chance to argue or interrupt. My mother still deludes herself that the letters are written out of more than a desire to spend as little time in our company as possible. She likes to think he is still hers.

It seems we’re pretending that nothing happened. My brother is with his wife and her expanding belly. It will not be long now before her lying-in, and we shall see even less of him than usual. I hope. He will stay in his town house in New Town, near enough to the docks that he can keep his eye over our wealth. His wealth.

As for Ilven, there is only the kind of silence that comes heavily weighted with the whispers of servants. They stop talking when they hear me coming. They do not look at my face.

My hand darts up to brush the high collar of my dress. Glass beads and thick embroidery press against the bruises they are meant to hide.

My mother fires the first volley. “Your brother has had some interest from House Canroth.” She sets the letter down between us, then draws her cup closer to her but doesn’t drink.

“Interest about what?”

“It’s time you looked to a suitable match—”

“With House Canroth?” Anger makes my skin tight. “They’re—they’re not even a Great House.” As if that matters; all the eligible bachelors from the Great Houses are practically decrepit. Even the next highest ranked, like the Skellig twins, are still in swaddling clothes. I try to dredge up what little knowledge I have of Canroth, but my mind is blank. Something about glass, I think. Ah, that’s it, they make fine crystal, so they’re mostly War-Singers. At the very least I suppose I should be glad Owen is not trying to tie me to a House overrun with Readers and Saints, all lost in auras and Visions. I do not want to spend the rest of my life trying not to feel too much, in case some Reader turns my innermost desires against me. And if I think my life is measured and controlled now, how much worse would it be in a House ruled by Saints, constantly tracking futures and possibilities, their lives ruled by scriv-visions and the auguries of decks of cards? Perhaps Ilven not only foresaw her own death but also knew to an instant how long I would wait in the grove of trees before I left her to her chosen path.

I try to calm myself by sipping my tea, but it is too hot, and I burn the back of my throat, my tongue. Good. I focus on the pain, the tip of my tongue touching the shreds of burned skin on my palate. An image of a reedy little man drifts up through my memories. We met at my mother’s last garden party—he’s a nothing, a pale little nothing in his thirties. I don’t even remember his name.

My knees bump the table as I stand, and tea spills over its polished surface. “I will not marry a Canroth,” I tell her.

“You sit down,” my mother hisses. “See, this is exactly the sort of nonsense that drove Ilven to—” She stops, just on the knife edge of tact. “Your brother will make the arrangements with Canroth Piers.”

Piers. His face coalesces in my mind. His drab mustache is the only detail that made any impact on me. My innards knot and twist like live snakes. I understand why Ilven jumped. Even that damned bat on the promenade, even he—a hated vampire in a city that barely tolerates their existence—has more choice than I.

And there’s nothing I can do. Owen is a decade older than me, and with Father dead, I answer to him, to his whims and decisions. The Pelim line ends with Owen, and were he to die, I suppose I would then be in the charge of Mother’s family in MallenIve. A ghastly thought in itself.

The letter on the table flutters in a sudden gust that brings with it the distant reek of seaweed. I grab the letter, sweep it up to my chest.

“Where are you going with that?” my mother asks as I stomp up to the large bay window that overlooks the short expanse of front lawn before the garden drops off to the sea.

There’s no point in answering her, she’ll know soon enough. I throw the right window wider, then fling the letter out. The thin leaves dance across the lawn before another sea-gust takes them, sending them flickering through the air. The sea mews crowd about the papers, calling to each other in excitement, wings flapping as they fight. Another gust sends the papers over the cliff, fluttering in looping spirals. A last sheet twirls on the lawn in a giddy solo, then tips over and is gone.

Like Ilven, it’s taken Pelim’s Leap.

“I’m so glad you’ve managed to get that out of your system. Now, if we could go back to our tea. You know better than to go against your brother’s wishes.”

I don’t turn around. The wind pulls my hair loose and auburn curls slap at my face. “I hate you,” I say.

A sigh comes from behind me. “Hate me all you want,” she says. “It won’t change matters.” Her footsteps fade away, a measured
click
across the polished black slate. The sound is suddenly dampened, and I know that she’s in the carpeted passageway.

“I hate you,” I say again, softly, to the sea, to the cliff, to the fat-bellied clouds. To my brother’s cruelty. To Pelim’s Leap.

3

T
HIS TIME
,
I think as I fill my bag, this time, I won’t come back. I’ve been hiding in my room since Owen’s command that I marry into House Canroth, wondering what to do. My mother has given up knocking on my door.

Outside, the night is heavy and wet. There are no stars and the only sound is the sea breathing, the constant measured rasp of the surf. Dawn is not far off, and it won’t be long before the starlings and servants awake. I’ve only a handful of brass left after buying Ilven’s gift. I’ve never had to worry about money; if ever I needed something, the servants bought it for me, and transactions were handled discreetly, from accounts that I have never seen. Now I wish I’d asked for a coin here or there. A few brass bits won’t buy me more than a worker’s tea, but I take them anyway. Them and the contents of my jewelry box.

On second thought, I put most of the jewelry back. It will be too obvious. Instead, I take only a few of the older pieces—a necklace, a set of hideous earrings, and three old but still valuable hair clips. Small ones, ones that I last wore when I was five or six. No one will notice that these are missing. I shove them into my bag.

I pause at the tiny enameled scriv-box. It opens at the slightest pressure of my finger, revealing the meager amount of scriv inside. The dust is made of fine gray grains, like ashen sand, and smells like citrus and musk. The smell of magic. I should take this—without it I am nothing, powerless as a Hob.

Without it I have almost no magic. Like all high-Lammers, I am a lucky accident of birth, gifted with a talent that can be expanded by something as simple as a mineral. A mineral unfortunately rare and extremely addictive. This—this dust—rules our lives. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better had there been no magic at all.

There are tales of Hobs who had natural magic unfettered by a dependency on scriven, who were created after House Mallen opened the Well—the source of all the wild, uncontrolled magic in our land—but the sharif-councils and the Great Houses have killed any of those Hobs that might once have existed.

The only ones who are allowed to use magic are the high-Lammers. We’re bound to the scriv, so our magic is tempered. We can’t accidentally flatten cities or bring down a plague. And of the Lammic practitioners of magic, there are only three accepted types: War-Singers like myself, who can manipulate air; Saints, who can see the future; and Readers, who can tell people’s emotions from the flare of their auras.

The Well is sealed.

All the Hobs with magic have been destroyed. The animals twisted by the opening of the Well have been harnessed or hunted. The unicorns that were once goats are again our beasts of burden, the lions-turned-sphynxes are killed for their coats, even the little wyrms, tiny legless dragons, are no more than an occasional lucky find in a gardener’s compost heap. Now there is only us—the Houses. Scriv.

I snort softly. Am I ready to give this up—to become like the mundane Hobs? The grains are cool against my fingertips, stirring up the sharp smell, the musty illusion of power. I have never been allotted more than the barest amount at a time; my brother controls exactly how much scriv my mother and I are allowed.

It is the same in all Houses. My status as War-Singer is little more than a hollow title. I will never be allowed to be truly powerful. I accepted that I would see only two years of real training at university, nothing like my brother’s seven. Not unless there’s another war with the Mekekana and we need every Lammer to fight them off. Not that there’s any chance of that happening after their thorough trouncing.

I rub the scriv between my fingers and let it fall back. Of what use to me are illusions?

The scriv-box closes with a clean snap. The leaping silver dolphins on the lid, picked out against the blue enamel sea, grin up at me in gentle mockery. No one will believe my little fabrication if I take my scriven with me.

I ache to take it, to not leave it here to waste.

Instead, I force myself to turn away.

The shawl I’ve chosen for tonight is my favorite—golden-brown sea silk in a delicate scallop pattern, beaded with the smallest of amber glass seeds. I wrap it around a pair of embroidered shoes and tuck the bundle under my arm. I’m wearing my oldest, shabbiest dress, thick woolen stockings against the chill, a rough coat, and a pair of sturdy boots. They were meant for walking, but I’ve never had much chance to use them and the leather is stiff and uncomfortable.

They also squeak. I curse the Gris-damned boots under my breath. I’ll never get out of the house without using magic.

I turn back to the little box sitting expectantly on the mantelpiece and exhale a long breath I didn’t even know I was holding. Just one pinch, that’s all it’ll take. And this will be the last I have.

No one will notice if a few grains are missing. I step forward to press the catch.

The last time. You should make the most of it, I tell myself, as I take the smallest pinch of scriv possible. The dust fills my nose with the sharp smell of magic, and then, all around me, the air is real, solid. Carefully, I use my scriv-enhanced abilities to hold sound in place as I step over the collection of cold tea things outside my doorway and creep down the winding turret stairs, past the second-floor wing where my mother sleeps, past the ranks of servants’ rooms, farther and farther down, till I am in the long open tearoom.

The house is held still and silent with my magic, but already I can feel the edges of sound filtering back in. I barely took enough to last five minutes. There’s no going back.

The last of the scriv-high fades just as I turn the bone key in the front door. Outside, the night waits, clammy-handed.

The door shuts softly.

In the kennels, one of my brother’s dragon-dogs whines, perhaps hearing the faint click of the lock. My breath held, I wait, the seconds slipping past. The dog shuffles. The steady
thump thump thump
of its heavy tail against the wood is like a fist beating on a door. It makes me pant faster, just trying to suck some air down a too-tight throat. The throbbing bruises on my neck feel like they go all the way to the inside. The sound fades, and the air tastes like burning copper when I am finally able to breathe normally again. Damning myself for not taking more scriv, I inch along the path.