When the Sea is Rising Red (29 page)

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!”

“Is it really?” he says. “Just what does either of us gain in this scheme of yours?”

“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

J
ANNIK’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.

These same work-torn hands held Ilven’s hairpin and marked my own brother for death. I fold them behind my back.

When she sees me, her expression doesn’t change. She is thin-lipped, frowning, her hand on the edge of the door, anchoring herself in her house, while I wash up like flotsam on her doorstep.

“Mother. It’s me,” I say, as if she has somehow forgotten that I exist. Perhaps she thinks that I am just another boggert risen from the deep, dragging Owen up behind me.

Her fingers tremble against the door, and the wind blows fine wisps of her dark gray hair loose, but except for those two things, she might as well be a wooden carving.

“I’m not dead.” So obvious, but what else do I say? “I ran away, made you think I took the Leap.” I have never felt so childish and selfish as at this moment, hearing aloud my own cruelty. “I’m so sorry.”

Finally she speaks. “Why are you here?”

Not at all what I expected. Somehow I thought she’d pull me to her bosom like a lost child, fold me up in her arms, and tell me that everything was going to be all right.

“I wanted you to know,” I say. “May I come in?”

She steps a little to the side, giving me just enough room to slip into my childhood home. She looks past me at the black carriage waiting outside. “House Sandwalker?”

“Yes.” It is impossible to explain.

She closes the door and
click clicks
her way through to the pristine formal lounge. The one where she receives guests.

Firell brings us tea and little cakes. She has set salt licorice in a small bowl in the center of the cake tray. She has remembered that it is my favorite.

This makes me feel stronger, and I offer her an uncertain smile as she puts the trays down. In answer I get the barest of nods, and this small acceptance does more for me than I believed possible. Light-headed, I cling to my seat.

Mother and I sit perched on the edges of the uncomfortable but beautiful chairs and stare at each other across the tea table.

“Please.” My mother gestures at the silver tray of tiny cakes.

I take a piece of licorice and set it down on my plate.

“Explain,” she says, once Firell has poured our tea and withdrawn, leaving us alone in the gauzy-curtained room.

So I do. I leave out the worst, about how I had a hand in the attack on Pelimburg, about the thing I did to condemn Owen. Instead, I make his death my reason for returning.

Through it, she remains expressionless, not even touching her tea.

When I’m done, I take a hasty gulp of my own drink to cover up my nervousness.

“You cannot come back.”

So she will side with honor. I expected it, true, but I had hoped … Ah well, if anything, it makes easier what I have to say next.

“I know.” I set my cup down and stare at the little spill of tea in the saucer, gathering my thoughts. “I have a proposition for you.”

“Go on.”

“I will leave Pelimburg.”

My mother nods in approval.

“I thought to MallenIve.” And now the part that gives us both an out. “It might be possible for me to take over the apartments there and oversee our business ventures in MallenIve.” It is a solution that allows my mother to save face and to blissfully continue her existence here without my presence spoiling her pleasures or shrinking her social circle. But it also gives her a chance to hold on to what little family she has left. It gives me a chance. “There may be some talk at first.” I know this, and I rush to convince her that it will not be all that dreadful. “But people will soon forget, once I am gone.”

“So they will.” She touches her cup as if she is about to raise it, to finally take a sip, but then she puts her hands flat on the table and shakes her head. “There will still be rumors, and our standing will fall.”

“You can tell them anything you want to save face,” I say. “Tell them that I was kidnapped, that Hobs made me do it, that I took up with some cult—whatever lie will put the best spin on your story.”

My mother grimaces. “Save our House face at the expense of yours?”

I bow my head. It’s what I expected.

She speaks again, her voice a steel whip. “All very well,” she says, deciding my fate as neatly as she would slice a tea-fork through a cake. “Only you’ve never shown any aptitude for business. How do you propose to make your way in MallenIve? Indeed, to secure our holdings there.”

“I plan to be the face of Pelim,” I say. “Making the contacts we need, cultivating the ones we already have.” I swallow some more tea and try to keep my voice airy. “My husband will be the one who deals with the financial aspects. He has rather a head for figures.”

“You’ve secured yourself a match in MallenIve already?” She’s aware that no House here will spit upon me, let alone tie me to its bosom.

“Yes,” I say. It takes all my courage to continue, knowing the rage my mother will unleash. “In a manner of speaking.”

*   *   *

I
T SEEMS THAT
after the city heard that my brother had been devoured by the sea-witch, my resurrection raises almost no questions. All I need for my wedding is two witnesses, and the official accepts the Pelim House lawyer and Jannik’s father, hollow cheeked, gray, and tired.

My mother does not attend even though I had half hoped she would find some measure of forgiveness for me.

It comes as a shock that I keep my House name, that Jannik becomes a Pelim. When I question this, the lawyer merely shakes his wizened head.

“You will understand someday,” Jannik’s father says before he takes his leave. He gives us the ghost of a smile, and it is surprisingly warm in such a pale, cold little man.

There will be no wedding feast. Our House is trying to keep the recent developments—my return from death and subsequent marriage to a bat—as quiet as they possibly can. I look down at the dress I’m wearing, yellow, for weddings, but the shade is not quite the right one, and it’s certainly no wedding gown. It’s a dress I wore last season, just once. There was no point in buying a dress for such an insignificant moment. Nor time to have one made. My mother wants us gone from the city as soon as possible. She’s even brought Owen’s widow into the old family home, in waiting for the new Pelim heir.

Understandable, really. As long as I am here, I remain a humiliation. The gossip has started, whispered no doubt by our army of servants. From our House to Malker—who will revel in this chance to sink their own scandal under ours—and so, like a disease, it will spread from one mouth to the next. Mother has sent word to her own family in MallenIve that we will be taking over the Pelim apartments, but I expect little welcome there. I can only guess what she wrote in her letters.

Jannik and I take our few belongings and make our way to the docks. The shambles of broken, burned-out warehouses is being slowly rebuilt. Hobs and Lammers together are hoisting wood and slate, and there are even a few vampires in the crowd, working with them. The dock is busy, the people industrious. Through the noise and bustle I see small moments of quiet community, people sharing tea or ’grits. Sometimes it is enough even that they greet each other, when before they would have not made the effort.

While my mother has made no move to see us off and Jannik’s family has withdrawn as carefully and quietly as wyrms, a company of familiar faces is waiting at the docks to wave goodbye: Nala and Lils, standing hand in hand holding their red kerchiefs high, Esta, still scowling, and Verrel, looming over them with Kirren yapping from his arms.

When Jannik and I brought Dash’s body back to Whelk Street, I felt the final door to their companionship shutting in my face. They took him back, and with that our partnership ended.

They no longer needed me, and I was a high-born Lammer, not one of them.

The separation seemed inevitable, so it lifts my spirits to see them now. Perhaps, after all, Dash did manage to change something.

*   *   *

T
HE JOURNEY BY BARGE
is slow and tedious. Even with the extravagant berth paid for by Jannik’s family, we are hemmed in on all sides by large wooden crates of produce. The wherrymen hoist the sails, and the fresh wind coming off the ocean gives us a chance to coast upriver. We are the only passengers, and every Hob here knows our story it seems. No one says a word to us.

Jannik and I stand together on the
Gray Moth
’s deck and watch Pelimburg fall away as the Casabi curves through the vineyards that lie beyond the city. Then the vineyards of Samar slowly give way to other pastures. Little towns flick past, toy bright and small. The sun is dipping below the fields when Jannik puts his hand on my shoulder. His touch sends a shiver through me. Not disgust and not just the headiness of magic.

“Come to the cabin. You’ve still some packed food.”

I agree even though my stomach is too knotted up for me to eat. I don’t ask Jannik what he plans to do, although I’ve heard that there are butchers in MallenIve who specialize in the clean blooding of animals for bat purposes. In the dank little cabin, I try to sleep, try to remember what little I’ve learned of MallenIve, that city of scriv and palaces. I’ve left behind everyone I know, my family and my motley collection of friends, for something bigger. MallenIve is a monster, a city known for her vices and pleasures. And yet—and yet she is endlessly faceted and fascinating, a city full of magic, and when people speak of her there is a fire in their eyes and their voices are hooked with desire.