When the Sea is Rising Red (26 page)

“They deserve it,” Dash says to me. Or maybe he’s saying it to himself, still trying to convince this angry vengeful side of him that what he’s doing is right. Then louder, harsher. “They deserve it.”

“Do they really?” My voice is thick, barely sounding like my own at all.

His eyes are beautiful close up, threaded with gray and olive and gold and black. “This is a judgment.”

“Justice,” I whisper back, “and with you the judge.”

“The dead are the judges,” he says, and folds his boggert-marked hand tightly over mine, forcing me to feel the tiny grains of scriv moving under the leather of the pouch. “Not me. I’m just the person bringing in the executioner.”

I search his face for truth and find belief, find conviction. These are truths of their own, I suppose. I bow my neck and take a shuddering breath.

What choice do I really have?

Dash takes my elbow and steers me along with the crowd. Ahead of us, Lils is hand in hand with Nala, and the mass of people is eerily silent. The dockyards and the fisheries and the tanneries and the teahouses must be empty. Even the crakes walk with the crowd, their tongues stilled for perhaps the first time in their lives.

*   *   *

W
ITH
D
ASH’S HAND CLAMPED ON MY ARM
, we march through Old Town, gathering followers as we draw nearer and nearer to the Levelling Bridge. My arm begins to ache, and I’m certain that when this day is over I will see bruises on my skin. The scriv pouch is held tightly in my free hand, and I squeeze it harder, as if somehow I could magic it away and with it this whole dreadful farce.

The first turrets of smoke are rising in the air over the warehouses, and the distant clanging of the city’s tower bells fills the morning with a cold precise chant. In New Town, House heirs will be rushing to their burning warehouses, watching as their fortunes go up in flames. My brother will be there.

Those who can will waste their precious scriv containing the fires.

We reach the bridge, and the crowd stops.

“What now?” I pull my arm free.

“We wait.” Dash watches the bridge with a fierceness I’m unused to. He hugs himself, and I realize then that he’s shaking. His hands are trembling, and he held me so tightly to disguise his own weakness.

Next to us, Nala and Lils are standing with their arms around each other, watching the people panicking on the bridge: some are running for New Town, others have seen the crowd and come down to join us, their faces grim and bright at the same time. This is no ordinary riot. This is a jury, watching the execution. The sentence has long since been passed.

“What happens after all this?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice level. “The sharif will hunt Lils down, hunt Nala down.”

“No they won’t.”

“And how can you be so Gris-damned certain!”

Dash ignores me, his gaze sweeping the bridge. He lifts his head and looks up. The sky is a perfect cerulean dome, washed clean by last night’s rain. “Because I made sure,” he whispers.

We will none of us be safe after today, it doesn’t matter how many people he’s bribed this time. “Where’s Verrel?” I know I saw him with us earlier, but now I’ve lost him in the mass of people.

“I’m more worried about Esta,” Dash says. “She should be back with us by now.”

“She’s setting more fires,” a voice says behind us. I am startled and relieved at the same time: Verrel. He points to where more smoke is climbing into the pale blue sky. The wisps are faint and white, but even as we watch, the columns grow thicker. There are no warehouses on the hillside. Esta’s burning the family homes.

“Shit and bugger,” says Dash. “She was only supposed to burn the warehouses down by the docks, not the bloody mansions too.” He takes a step toward the bridge, then jerks still. The expression on his face is torn. “Idiot,” he says under his breath, and I’m not sure whether he means her or himself. “What’s she thinking?”

“We need to stop her,” Verrel says.

Dash whirls around to face him. “I bloody know that,” he says. “But it’s too late—I can’t leave this now.” He sweeps one hand out to encompass the crowd, their murmurs growing as they wait to see Dash destroy Pelimburg’s old order.

Verrel stares at him, then swallows, the lump in his throat bobbing. Fear radiates off him. “I’ll go fetch her,” he says softly.

“We don’t have time.” Dash nods to Lils. “We need to get started before the House Lammers reach the bridge.” Desperation has given his voice an edge. Things are not going according to his grand plan.

Verrel doesn’t seem to have noticed Dash’s rising panic. “So you were just going to leave her?”

“I wouldn’t have to if she’d bloody gone and done as I told her!”

“Fine.” Verrel strides past us and toward the bridge.

“You are not one of the heroes in your fucking street operas,” Dash shouts, his voice strangled. “You’re not.”

Verrel pauses and looks back. “And neither are you.”

“I never bloody claimed to be.”

“That’s not what your little mob is going to say after this day ends.”

“No.” Dash shakes his head. “I can’t let you go after her, it’s too dangerous.” He grabs at Verrel’s arm and catches the low-Lammer’s sleeve.

Calmly, Verrel pries Dash’s fingers off and pulls himself free. “It’s not really up to you.” His voice is as low and soft as morning surf. “You don’t own us, Dash.”

At that, Dash steps back. We watch Verrel cross onto the bridge. Dash stares, his mouth hard, then shouts after him, “I can’t push the timing back, Verrel!”

Verrel pauses and half turns to look at us. “Dash,” he says quietly, “whatever nightmares Lils calls up, none will be as bad as the ones I’ll have if I leave Esta to face that alone. Or did you forget what memories she carries? They’ll tear her apart.”

“Do you think I don’t care what happens to her?”

He shakes his head. “No. I just think that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a friend instead of an agenda.”

“Fuck off then,” Dash says. His anger is back, controlled, focused. “I hope you find her, but if you don’t, I won’t mourn either of you.”

“I never expected it.” Verrel’s mouth twists in an awful parody of a smile. “I hope your scheme works, Dash, and that you get whatever it is you want.”

“I’m not doing this for me,” Dash says. “I’m doing this for everyone who’s suffered under the high-Lammers.”

We watch Verrel walk across the bridge until the shadows of the Houses swallow him up. Black smoke is pouring from several locations around New Town, and the air is turning storm dark, thick with the smell of burning and ash.

“You’d best take your scriv now, darling,” Dash says. “If you’re to hold back Lils’s dreams.” He glances down at the wide brown Casabi, its water choked with weeds and silt.

He has to be joking. But one look at the set of his jaw and the iron in his eyes and I realize he isn’t. Every muscle in my body has gone tense. “I can’t hold it all back,” I whisper to him. “I can’t.” I’d need to pull a bubble of protection over the whole of Old Town. Perhaps if I’d been trained at university—Gris knows I have the natural talent.

“You can and you will.” He turns to face me. “If you don’t, all these people will suffer.” He spreads out one arm, showing me the massed crowd behind us, the silent witnesses.

“And the ones in New Town?”

Dash looks across the bridge. “Only our enemies wait there.”

“Our enemies? There’s no
our
in this.
Your
enemies. My brother is there, my mother, Esta and Verrel.” I look at the tall buildings that rise up the hillside. “Innocent people, Dash!”

“No one is ever innocent. All the Houses,” he says, “not just Pelim, the whole lot, and everyone who stands with them.” He raises his chin. “Lils!” He’s going to make the workers suffer too, the ones who haven’t heard the message to clear out of New Town, the unlucky ones who don’t pay any attention to skip-rope rhymes. And he doesn’t even care.

Lils and Nala turn at his call, stepping out onto the center of the bridge. Nala lifts her hands to her lover’s braid to undo the little black ribbons that keep Lils’s dream-hair knotted back, that keep the nightmares trapped. They must hate so very fiercely to be willing to unleash that on Pelimburg. How many others are so deeply indebted to Dash, or feel that they are, that they’re ready to do anything at his command?

Lils’s hair is a tangled coil of tight curls. Pin by pin, ribbon by ribbon, the waves come loose, and the first faint flurry of dream-images tickles along my vision, rustling through my memories like a playful wind through fallen leaves. Nala brushes her fingers through the sticky curls, and the wind picks up, stirring the nightmares lying under the drifts.

“We’re waiting,
Felicita
,” Dash says.

I’ll do this now, and afterward Dash better run, because I will string that little Hob bastard up by his fancy necktie.

He grins at me as if to say
I know, darling, and I don’t care
. I suppose he doesn’t. After today, he’s dead anyway, final victim to the boggert. But there’s something plaguing me, a niggling detail. I recall a conversation with Charl.

“Who are you giving to the sea-witch?” I say. “What did you promise her?”

He narrows his eyes. “A life for a life, of course.”

“Who?” I can barely whisper it, although I know the answer.

“It could have been a sister for a sister,” he says. “But I liked you too much for that.”

He’s going to kill my brother. All this suffering handed out to the Houses and their retainers just so he can feed Owen to a sea-witch. Dash might hate the high-Lammers with an indiscriminate passion, but when it comes to Pelim, his loathing takes on a personal tone. He wants them all to pay but it is my brother he will make an example of.

Dash pulls something small and silver bright from his pocket: a hairpin, picked out with the emerald leaves of House Malker’s crest. I have seen this particular trinket many times, holding back hair straight and pale. It’s Ilven’s. “I have the boggert-sign,” he says. “All I need to do is mark the right person, and the sea-witch will come for him.”

Ilven. A name hooked on kisses and secrets. The pin flashes, and I remember running my fingers through her hair and using this pin to hold the twist of her loose bun in place. The smell of her neck, like sea salt and citrus.

The boggert-sign. My heart curls small, a little animal, terrified at this realization.

“And if you don’t?” My hand jerks, wanting to knock the offending item from his fingers.

“Then the sea-witch will rise and kill, and keep killing. Without a marked sacrifice, she’ll not return to the water.” He closes his fist. “Someone has to die, Felicita, darling. Or are you going to step up in his place?”

Fear comes first, followed by guilt. I don’t deserve to die, I think, and I realize I am a coward. That he has made me into one. “You utter bastard,” I say. “You’re no better than my bloody brother.”

He laughs in a desperate way.

I open the pouch and take a healthy pinch of scriv. One deep breath, and I can taste oranges in the back of my throat. Magic boils in my veins. I will make him pay. Pay for using me, for using my friend’s death, and for twisting her ghost to his stupid, stupid cause.

“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

I
T 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?