When the Sea is Rising Red (7 page)

I stop. The upper floor is wide open, with only fragments of the dividing walls remaining. A few sheets and blankets here and there cordon off private areas, but most of the space seems to be taken up by a common area demarcated by a filthy piece of wool carpet.

There’s another girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen lounging against a collection of stuffed sacks, her hands busy with needle and thread. Like me, her hair is red, but hers isn’t dyed. It’s a carroty mass of flyaway tangles, and she has the pale porcelain skin of a Mata. No House child ever looked so pinched and underfed though. My immediate guess is that she’s one of the bastards that House Mata seems to set out like spores, though we’re a long sight from MallenIve and the Mata High Lord.

She lowers her embroidery and tucks her bare feet under her thin skirt. “Lils,” she says, “I thought
I
was supposed to bring home strays, not you.”

Lilya drops my bag. “Jaxon’s lads had got a hold of her down near the bend. What was I supposed to do—leave her there for their sport?” She thumps down next to the redhead, then looks at me. “Sit. Nala’s good with fixing people up.”

“Am I now?” Nala laughs and gets to her feet. She’s tall and thin. A strong breeze could probably send her sailing off over the sea. “You best do what my Lils says.”

So I sit. I’m relieved. My head is swimming with pain, and the dizziness keeps threatening to send me careening to the floor. I have to keep my movements slow so as not to make the pain in my ribs flare. With my free hand, I wipe at the itchy dried-up tears on my face.

Nala winces. “Lils, put some water on for us, dear.” She walks over to me with an armful of the burlap cushions and plumps them under my back. “Oh,” she says. “That’s a nasty cut.” With careful fingers, she brushes the loose dirt from my face. “Jaxon’s a little rat turd, coming all the way down to our side. Wonder who he damn well thinks he is.”

She’s not really talking to me, I don’t think, just nattering on in a way that is rather soothing. I relax a little into the rough cushions.

“Here.” Lilya is back with a bowl of warm water. Nala grins at her friend’s scowl and wets a small scrap of cleanish cloth in the steaming bowl.

The water stings my cuts, but I keep quiet as she dabs at the open wounds. “Bit of meat on that eye would work wonders,” she tells me, “but there’s no chance of that. You just keep this wet cloth on it and hope for the best.” Nala wrings out the rag, wads it up, and puts it over my swollen eye. The warmth helps a little. I close my other eye and let the grayness swirl around me. All I want to do is sleep, but the pain keeps me lingering on the edge of consciousness. Voices drift over me, distant and meaningless.

“Soon as it wakes, you’re gonna have to walk it back up to New Town,” says Lilya. “It can’t stay here. Dash doesn’t need another charity case.”

Nala laughs. “Me? I didn’t drag it in here. And why take it back anyway? Are you scared of Dash?”

“Isn’t everyone?”

Nala laughs again. It’s a carefree sound, full of fluttering leaves and white wisps of cloud. I decide that I like it—it’s a laugh that makes fires grow brighter. “You’ve known him for years, he’ll say nothing if you make like it was your idea. Besides, she has well-kept hands, soft like a House Lammer’s. Dash won’t mind a kitty-girl of his very own. He’ll let her stay.”

Lilya snorts. “Little frail-bit says she’s not one.”

“Only kitty-girls dye their hair.” Nala shifts, and I realize she’s stretched out alongside me, warm as a blanket. “Anyway, he let Kirren stay.”

“Kirren’s a dog. At least he’s useful.”

“So?” Nala touches my matted hair. “Maybe he’ll find a kitty-girl useful too. Especially a kitty-girl with a manner so
polished
.”

Gris
. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

5

M
ETAL CLANGS AGAINST METAL
,
and when that sound fades, the shrieks of the seabirds rise. The melancholy cry of a look-far’s horn drifts in with the faint breeze: a storm warning. The day will bring wind-lashed misery down on Pelimburg.

I’m awake.

My right eye is sealed tight, gummed together with hardened pus. The left is fine, and I open it to stare at a ceiling dusty with cobwebs and the carcasses of brittle-winged sand-dragons. The thought of those bugs flying in and out of the room makes my skin crawl. Carefully, I tease the gunk from my eyelashes, crumbling it between my fingers until I can force my eyelids apart. The skin still feels tight and tender, and a touch assures me that my right eye is swollen and the whole side of my face disfigured. It feels bruised. Huge.

There are people talking in low voices, just murmured conversation. Someone says
kitty-girl
and I focus.

“I’m not wasting good tea and water on her,” says Lilya. “We’ve barely enough for us, and Esta will be back from the docks soon.”

“She’s awake.”

I turn my head and take a good look at Nala, sitting on the carpet with her legs stretched out, wiggling her long pale toes at me. “Would you like a spot of tea?” A wide urn of tea sits on a crate next to her, steam rising and making the air seem clean and comforting.

“Oh go on. Next you’ll be offering her cake and berries and real cream and calling her miss.”

Nala answers by stretching her foot over to poke Lilya in the thigh. The Hob girl scowls and pushes Nala’s foot away. The scowl doesn’t last long though—Lilya is fighting to not smile. The smile changes her face, makes her look younger.

A creak whispers up from the stairs, the old wood sighing.

“Esta!” Nala yells. “Come see what strange manner of fish Lils brought us yesterday.”

Yesterday
. Can I really have slept all through the afternoon and night? The light falling through the window is pale, and a pink-lined mass of cloud hangs low in the sky. It’s early morning.

I struggle into a sitting position, and my bones scream at me. I’m bruised all over.

As I rise, a young girl of perhaps eleven or twelve, with silvery-black hair sheared close to her skull, ascends the staircase. She’s darker than most Hobs, her skin like heartwood. Gray eyes and her strange, sleek hair give her away as a half-breed. It’s amazing that she doesn’t stink like a selkie too. She looks at me flatly, says nothing, then turns her attention to the tea urn.

“Storm warning,” she says, glaring at me.

Oh damn, it’s the girl who threw the wood.
Please, please, don’t recognize me.
I look down at my hands, hoping that the hair falling across my face is a good enough disguise.

“Wonderful,” Lilya says. “I thought I heard the bloody thing. Another day with no wages. And Verrel says the whalers have seen witch-sign.”

“Pelim ship didn’t come in last night.” The selkie-cross helps herself to a small bowl of tea and slumps down on a pile of burlap bags.

It’s as if a cold wind has blown through the room, darkening and chilling the squat. Everyone is silent for a moment, then Nala rises and pours a bowl of tea for me. I take it gratefully—my stomach is tight with hunger and even a little tea would go a long way toward easing that.

Esta finishes her tea in three swallows, then balances the bowl on her knees. “Be the third ship Pelim’s lost this year, counting them two little ketches last month,” she says to the teabowl. She looks up. “Not all they lost last night neither, rumor says.”

The black tea is bitter and strong.

“What d’ya mean?” Lilya pours more tea for Esta.

“Jaxon’s runner heard from the sharif that the Pelim wretch took the Leap.”

I swallow hard, bow my head lower so as not to look at their faces.

“Second girl this month. What are those nilly-mucking Houses doing to them?” Lilya snorts in derision. “Besides clapping the daft things in iron and wasting their talents. What Dash could do with one of them in his palm, I don’t know…”

“It’s bad luck, these girls,” Nala says. “They’ll bring things out of the deep. And Pelim’s the worst of the lot for bringing bad fortune down on the city. It won’t be the first time they’ve brought a sea-witch to the shores.”

Witch-sign,
they said. Little eddies, like miniature storms breaking the surface of the ocean. Witch-signs rise up in great numbers, last a few minutes, and then disappear. When the whirlpools are gone, all that’s left is floating petals. Black sea roses.

Anomalies.

I’m not afraid. A queer chill settles into my bones, and I huddle, pulling my knees closer to my chest. What if Ilven’s death really did raise something up out of the waters? But those stories Nala is talking about—they’re just … fancies. There’s no real truth to them, they’re Hob tales. That’s what our House crake taught me. Of course, Ilven always did find the old stories fascinating and told me how she secretly wished that they were still real, that there was more to magic than just the scriv-forced power of the Houses.

Oh Ilven.
Bound now below the sea, caught in the kelp forests, nibbled at, her hair full of crabs and little ghost shrimp, a ghost herself. I choke on a sadness so sharp that it has sliced me in two.

“Hush.” Lilya waves her hand. “There’ll be no talk of bad-luck girls and boggerts and sacrifices and all that rubbish. That’s the sort of shite only idiots gab about. And it’s all just rumor. Till there’s a body washed up, we don’t know nothing about the Pelim wretch.” She narrows her eyes and turns her attention back to Esta. “Have House Pelim gone and made an official announcement about the ship?”

Esta shakes her head. “They’re still hoping the ship comes in. And that’s all they damn well care about—their precious
Silver Dancer.
”

The name makes me shiver. There are paintings of our ships all over the house, and my brother would often point to this one with pride. To me the ships meant nothing, merely a means to an end, but Owen loved those monstrosities. The
Silver Dancer
, bright with harpoons, the huge lamp-whales cresting the sea around her.

Nala cocks her head. “But Rin’s on board…”

“I bloody know he is!” Esta stands, throwing the bowl to the ground. She disappears behind a curtained partition and the drape flaps, then drops still behind her.

“Shite,” says Lilya. She picks up the bowl. “I best go have a word before we all go up in flames.”

Nala turns her own empty bowl around in her hands as if she has never seen it before. Then she looks up, smiling at me. Her voice gives her away though, all falsely brittle bright. “Rise and shine, kitty-girl. I’ll walk you back up to New Town, make sure you get to your lane nice and safe.”

“No!” My hands claw at the thin blanket, pulling it up to my face. The thought of being set out on the streets again, with no idea of where I’m going or what I’m doing—that Hob boy from yesterday, he will just be the first. And in New Town there’s still the chance that someone will see past the mess of my hair and somehow recognize me. And if they do, Owen will hunt me down.

Fear lances through me. He will make me suffer. I remember the last time I saw him, the black in his eyes. I don’t think I would fare well in another such meeting.

Heat flares in the corners of my eyes, sharp as needles, but I won’t let myself cry. “I—can’t I stay here?” Even as the words slip out I realize how feeble and desperate I sound.

Nala sighs and sets down her empty teabowl. “And bring your clients here?” She shakes her head. “Come on, sweet. You’ll be better off with your own, anyway.”

“Please. You don’t understand. I’m not a kitty-girl. I r—” I can still tell the truth, in my own way. “I ran away from home, dyed my hair so that my mo—mam wouldn’t find me. If I go back to New Town, she’ll spot me. Or someone will.”

The red-haired girl is frowning. “I won’t ask you what your business is, ’cause it’s none of mine,” she says. “And I know what it’s like to run, for sure.” She leans her head back and stares at the ceiling, like she’s looking for answers trapped there in the webs with the insect husks. Finally, she faces me. “I’m not in charge of Whelk Street though, and I’ve no say in the matter.”

“Who is?” I crawl out from under the thin blankets and stand, careful and slow. “Is there someone I can speak to?” Beg, in other words. Or bribe, if I still have my trinkets and the Hobs haven’t robbed me while I slept. I keep my knowledge of Dash to myself. I want to see him before I decide to trust him. And I certainly don’t know if I trust Anja.

“Well, it’s Dash who has the say-so here.” Her face brightens. “And he comes and goes as he pleases, so I’ve no idea when he’ll be back.”

“Can’t I stay until he gets in? I can ask him then. There must be something I can do?” Panic makes my words rush. I can’t go back home, not now—in disgrace. If the sharif are already saying that I must have jumped, then there is no future for me in the Houses.

The wind picks up, threading through the glassless windows and ruffling Nala’s hair. She doesn’t answer me, but she’s deep in thought again, her brow furrowed with the effort. I wrap my arms around my bruised ribs and wait. In the silence, the faint sound of sobbing and the soft slow soothing of Lilya’s voice come from the curtained-off area.

Someone here died, I realize. Someone these people loved and cared for. I’m not the only person in the world tangled up in grief.

Maybe the
Silver Dancer
will limp into harbor later today, and no one will be dead. There’s still a chance.

I snap out of my morbid thoughts when Nala stands and holds out her hand. “C’mon then,” she says, and winks at me. “We’d best go find you a job if you’re to have any chance of Dash letting you stay.”

Every bone and muscle in my body might ache, but I want to be out of this death-house. At the back of my tongue is a strange bitter taste that I can’t swallow away. It feels like metal in my mouth.

Scriv-withdrawal.

Not possible. I’ve never taken much at a time.