When the Sea is Rising Red (16 page)

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.

*   *   *

“Y
OU’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 underneath 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.

*   *   *

I
T’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.

Fine.
I’m not here to make the little brat like me, anyway. “You’ve come for tea?”

“No, no.” Nala swings her dog-walking satchel onto her lap and digs through it. It’s stuffed with scraps of paper, nubs of chalk that cover everything with colored dust, various strange shells, a withered stick that looks like it came from a flowering irthe tree, and a large bone with meat scraps still attached. She rummages until she finds what she’s looking for, beams at me again, and pulls out a carefully folded fat paper envelope.

“Uh, yes?” I stare at it as she waves it between us.

“For you.”

I take it. “Thanks.”

Nala looks at me expectantly.

“What is it?”

“Rake’s parsley. You’ll need to take a double measure every day until you bleed and from then on a single teaspoon every morning. Mind you, it tastes like the back end of a dog.” She says this so cheerfully that I can’t help but stare at her. “Make a tea, hot as you can, and swallow it fast.”

I’ve heard of Rake’s parsley, of course, but have never actually seen it before—why would I have? I can feel my cheeks burning, the blood rushing to my face. Quick as I can, I shove the envelope into my apron pocket.

Nala seems oblivious. “It’s just enough for a week, and it’s fair brass so that’s all I bought. I got it from the apothecary down on Richmond. She’s the best for this sort of thing.”

I thank her again, the words sticking on my tongue. I am thoroughly embarrassed. Then I wonder—since Nala seems to be somewhat more in tune with all things feminine—if she could help me with one other problem.

“Do you know where I could borrow a good dress, something fashionable but not too expensive?” I blurt out.

“What would you want one of them for?” She squints at me. “Trying to impress His Flashness?”

“No.” I twist my hands. “I have to attend a, well, a party tonight, you see, and I need something to wear…”

“A party. What kind of party?” She draws her brows together.

How do I explain this one. “A b-bat party.” I say the words fast, swallowing them under, hoping Nala doesn’t really hear me.

She does. “Oh. You won’t need tat too fancy for one of them,” she says as she wrinkles her long narrow nose. “I might have something at home that you can use for the night.” She gives me a flat look. “Did Dash tell you to go to this?”

Why would Dash send me to a bat party? The question is so unexpected that for a moment I am thrown. The silence is dragging on too long, and anything I say will sound like a lie. “No, um, I was invited.”

She shrugs. “Your business then, but I daresay I wouldn’t have picked you for one of them.”

One of them who?
I want to ask her but she’s standing now, and the dogs whine and press their long heads against her hands, eager to be gone. Esta flings the last burned match down and follows the pack as the dogs flow out the door in a river of silky white and red fur.

*   *   *

E
VEN WITH THREE SPOONFULS OF SUGAR
, I can’t disguise the bitterness of the Rake’s parsley in my tea. Nala assured me that it’s best drunk fast and so hot that you burn your tongue. It leaves me feeling even more nauseated and shaky.

Wonderful.

Perhaps there’s a way for me to get out of Jannik’s party tonight. The last thing I feel like doing now is prancing off with a bat to some demented vampiric shindy.

The fear that he will go to my mother if I refuse overrides the pain. Above and beyond the shock, the humiliation would destroy her: House daughters do
not
run away, and they especially do not fake their own suicides and then go live with Hobs and half-breeds in filthy squats out on the Claw.

And they never bed Hobs.

Of course, it’s something of a lie. I know well enough that the men of the Houses take Hob women sometimes. There are enough of their bastard spawn littering Pelimburg.

I shove my aches and tiredness down into a ball at the pit of my stomach along with the ever-present craving for scriv, and when the second-shift scullery girl comes in, I head home at a slow angry trudge.

Nala’s still not back when I get there, but Lils is waiting.

Her face is set in a grim mask, angrier than her standard expression of general irritation at the world. “You’re a fool,” she says when she sees me. “And you’re not the first.”

“Explain.” I dump my bag down on the floor and go to pour myself a bowl of whatever blended tea is Lils’s special for the day. She’s got a pot on the boil, and there are tea eggs rolling at the bottom of the murky water. The thought of biting down into an egg just about has me running for the little balcony so that I can throw up. The taste of Rake’s parsley wars with the dregs of my hangover.
Never again
.

Lils sighs and shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she says. “Don’t be a fool when it comes to Dash.”

“I’ll thank you to keep your advice to yourself.” Anger burns, choking me, and I think about how if I just had the slightest bit of scriv in me, I’d pin her against the wall, let her feel the slow crush of what a War-Singer can do when riled.

“All I’m saying is, don’t lose your head or worse over him.” Lils pushes past me to check on her eggs. “You don’t have the foggiest when it comes to that lad and what he’ll use you for.”

I take a deep breath. “Your concern is noted.” I think of Dash’s letter, of how I am far from the first, but I won’t let Lils see my fears.

“Don’t you get all fancy-Lam on me.” She snorts. “It won’t stir me none. Don’t go thinking you’re his and he’s yours. There’s things you don’t know—” Footsteps sound on the stairs and she falls silent. She turns her attention back to her pots and prods the eggs with a wooden spoon.

Nala and Esta are chattering on the stairs. Or, at least, Nala is talking, and Esta is presumably listening. I back away from Lils to go scrub myself clean and await whatever dress Nala has tucked away.

I’m hiding in the washroom when Nala peers around the door. “Do you want to have a look at it?”

I nod. Whatever it is can’t be worse than the tat I’m wearing.

It turns out to be a high-waisted crimson gown. Very last season, and the hem is a little ragged. It’s been re-dyed at least once but the faint stains won’t be visible at night or by fatcandle-light. It’s obviously meant for someone a little more bosomy than me, but it’s a good enough fit, and at least I have a clean pair of cream-colored stockings to wear with it.