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ADE REACHED HOME WET as a drowned malkin, and in about as good a mood.
Perrin glanced up from her sewing as the door banged shut behind him in the wind. “You’re back, finally. What happened?”
“Nothing worth noting.” Ade thumped down his bag. A small puddle began seeping around it onto the scrubbed floorboards. He shucked his rain-sodden coat and hung it on the carved coat stand by the door. Another puddle began to collect in small, near-silent drips. “Babe was born, not a spark.”
The house was empty. Perrin was there, but no sign that Ma had returned. Nan was gone, probably out to one of her gatherings with the other old women, where they would drink tea laced with brandy and sing Long Tales over the counterpoint clack of needles. Doreen should have been sitting next to Perrin at work on her own projects. That was the way Ma liked it. It had become unpleasantly usual for Doreen to do no such thing and take her chances to get up to mischief while Ma was out.
“Sit down.” Perrin folded her sewing up neatly, needle jabbed in place, and went to reheat the morning meal. “Nan’s saved you something to stick to your ribs.”
Ade slumped in his place at the table, taking the weight off his feet. He was starved from the walk back. The bread and biscuits had hardly made a dent. True, the birth had been relatively quick, but the Stilts were some ways from even the trashest parts of Old Town, and a fair walk. “Where’s Doreen?”
Perrin’s face pinched up in annoyance. “Out.” She began to ladle sticky porridge into a wooden bowl. Perrin was the youngest of the three: long-legged and quiet, and even when she’d just woken it seemed that she never had a hair out of place or a wrinkle in her dress. She had a secret smile that she only showed to her family and Ade knew there were neighbours and fools who thought her stuck-up. As far as Ade saw it, she had a right to be. Perrin was the smartest person he knew.
Sometimes when Ade was so angry with the world and his place in it that he felt like running through Ma’s scrubbed house and kicking everything down and rubbing mud into the boiled sheets and screaming the words he never had the balls to say out loud, he thought of Perrin and all the things he would bear so that she at least could have some chance at a life she wanted.
Perrin and Doreen would never be Onnery-Propers. It was their good fortune to be born after Ade.
Ma knew Ade was never supposed to be the Onnery after her, but she lost her first baby before it was bigger than a marsh-vole, and so the thing that made the Onnerys the Quiet Ones slipped down the line to Ade instead. A strange mistake, though Ade wondered if you could say that about magic. Still, it was a mystery gone skew, something that had never happened before, in all the time there had been Onnerys. A boy had never had the Onnery power. Always, the firstborn was a girl, and if it wasn’t, well, there were ways of dealing with that too.
They should have done that to Ade. They should have drowned him when he was born. The thought, when he did dwell on it, made him feel cold and nervous and out of breath, so he did his best not to. The way Ma told the story, her and Nan had argued for days about what to do with a boy-child with women’s power in its head. Nan said that eventually she’d told Ma to take as what the Casabi gives, and make the best of it. There was something about the way she said it that Ade didn’t trust, but truth or not, Ade was alive.
“The Casabi don’t ask you if you want what she has to give,” Nan would say, placidly. So that was Ade’s life. Boy on the outside and supposed to be a girl on the inside, but not much of either-nor and not happy with the thought. His Onnery-spark was fitful, it came and went, and half the time it left him feeling like he just woke from a dream in the middle of the day.
Not that any of that mattered. People round the Stilts were used to him being what he was. These days Ma was more worried about finding Ade a girl who didn’t mind losing her name to Ade’s when she married. There were few enough girls in the Stilts who would give up their pride like that. Names were important, but it was distracting her from what was going on back at home. From Doreen running wild and Perry’s heart growing smaller and smaller.
After the food was dished up, Perrin set her pins neat in place, wound up her thread and packed away the dress she was working on. One of Ma’s clients had given her the material as payment—the family received lots of trades like that—and Ma decided it would do as Perrin’s work dress. Once it was done, Ma was going to pull strings and get Perrin a job in one of the Houses.
“I’ll make us tea,” Perrin said. “You look like you had to walk to MallenIve and back.”
“Not all as far as that.” Stomach filled, Ade picked at his laces, and eased off his boots. It was a relief to stretch his ankles and feet. “Did Door say where she was going?”
Doreen was older than Perrin but no one would ever be able to tell. She was Ma’s burden. Even the neighbours called her slovenly, and there was nothing Ma or Ade or Perrin could do about it. It was as though the two sisters in the womb had traded and split all their faults between them so that neither could have the same as the other. Where Perrin’s fault was to say yes to everything even when she didn’t want to, Doreen’s flaw was to always say no even when she did.
“A boy came for her.” Perrin measured out tea-leaves.
“Did not.” Ade looked at Perrin’s face to see if she was telling him some grand fib. Ma would have a fit if she heard something like that. “What boy was this then?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“It’s not his name I wonder about, but his type.” Ma wanted them to always be respectable, to set an example because they were an old family and the community needed poles to hold it steady. So that’s what they were—poles and pillars so that people could look at them and go, ah the Onnerys are good folk. But the Stilts was a dank, marshy place, and dank, marshy places bred ill. “Pack lad?” Ade asked softly.
“Maybe.” Perrin poured the tea, frowning like it was a delicate task requiring all her concentration. “I don’t know these things.”
“If Door is out running with packs, I’ll strangle her myself,” Ade said, though it was more from fear than bluster. “Thank you.” The tea was red and rich. “Look in my bag for a wax-paper package—there’s lemon butter biscuits.”
“You’ll have to stand in line to get your fingers round that throat.” Perrin rustled through his leather bag, hauled out the paper-wrapped biscuits and sniffed the corner. “Oh, they smell good.” Once she was back at the table and the biscuits were shared out between them, she sighed. “There won’t be much left to strangle if Ma gets to her first.”
If Ma came home and Doreen was still out, there would be questions that would want answering, and Ade wasn’t ready to see Ma tear Door a new one. “Idiot girl.” Ade pushed the plate of biscuits across the table. “I’ll be back. Save some for Nan and Ma.”
“Where are you going?” Perrin’s grey eyes widened.
“If I don’t tell you, then you can’t lie.” Ade grinned. “Anywise, I’ll be back before Ma.” A slim hope.
“If you’re lucky.
“That’s me.”
The house was warm and Ade was not exactly overjoyed at the thought of leaving. Outside was grey and grainy, the rain spitting in like grit off the ocean. He pulled his damp jacket up over his head and tramped over the bouncing boards of the walks that linked the Stilts together. First place he’d try was the Ricklewick, where they were not all that partial about age when they served their drinks.
At least it wasn’t that far from the Onnery house. Ade had no desire to go traipsing all over the Stilts for one fool girl. Even if she was his sister. The wind dragged at his coat, pulling him along the maze of catwalks to where the Ricklewick stood all at cross angles to itself, spreading out over a confusion of decks. Years ago the public house had been one big, raw wood building on a single deck, but it had since grown wings and shelves and layers like a stack of plate-mushrooms on a fallen log.
The steps bounced under Ade’s boots, the wood wet and black. It was a relief to storm inside and shut the door to the wind and pellety rain. The warmth tugged Ade close, cocooning him. Brass hearths and sweating bodies kept the place toasted, and as usual, it was packed with workers off shift, and ship-hands waiting for work. There were plenty Ade recognized here. Having a ma who was both a midwife and the only kind of sparked Hob the Hob laws allowed meant he’d seen most of these faces. He scanned the crowd but the one he was looking for was conspicuously not there. Ade shouldered his way to the bar counter, and waited for Hen to pull a pint for a weather-crinkled sea dog.
She turned to him, half smiling and half-grim. “You want a half?”
“I wish. Hen, you seen that rascal sister of mine?”
Hen pulled back at her hair, even though it was tied up tight. “Oh, Saints.” Working with all sorts meant that Hen had picked up some of the Lammer slang. Ade didn’t much care for Saints and Warsingers and Readers—alien Lammer magic—but there were plenty, even Hobs, who had some respect for what the three classes of power could do. Calling on Saints had become common even here in the Stilts. “What’s she done this time?”
“Nothing that I know of.” Ade dug through his pockets. “Maybe a short one, then. Brandy.” Hen poured him a drink quick as could be, and Ade sipped it before saying, “The plan’s to find her before she does something stupid. Perry says she’s run off with a boy.”
“A boy, a pack boy?” Hen raised a brow. “That daft mucker. Begging your pardon.”
“Well, can’t say I haven’t thought it myself. Have you any idea where she might be?” It wouldn’t be the first time that Doreen came to the Ricklewick, and there was a chance Hen might have heard something.
Hen poured herself a drink to match Ade’s, and they clinked glasses. “She was in here earlier in the week, but no sign of her today.”
The sea dog sitting next to Ade leaned over. “This young Miss Doreen you’re wanting?” He grinned through his bristles at his joke. Everyone knew it was not going to be Perrin.
Ade took another sip. The snifter was almost finished, brandy warming him down to his toes. It made the thought of going out into the cold again to go hunt down Door slightly less miserable. “Isn’t it always?”
“I seen her, but you’re not going to like it none.”
From the look on the old sailor’s face, Ade was sure he wasn’t. He waited.
“You know Challery Street?”
Old Town. Ade frowned. “Not all that well. I’ve no cause to go tea-housing.”
“Well I saw her on Challery, been seeing her there and about a few times.”
A chill spilled down Ade’s back, and he took a long sip of his fiery drink to chase it away. “Doing what?” He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. His sister running about Old Town like a bloody pack hob; if Ma heard wind then Door was deep in it.
The sailor shrugged and took a long slow pull of his bitter, tippling his moustache with a foamy rim. “Running about—holding nillies when they’re needed, or carrying bags for tips. Leastwise that’s what it looked like she was doing.”
Hen put her hand to her mouth. “Your mam is going to have her head.”
Onnery girls did not run about the streets like pack-children, little better than beggars and thieves. Onnery girls were respectable. They stayed home all quiet-like and sewed pinafores and knitted warm hats for the poor and mittens for ship-men.
“Her head and then some.” Ade stood. “What does she think she’s playing at?” He nodded to the sea dog in thanks. “Challery?”
“Or thereabouts.”
The sticky, beery crowd let Ade through to the door, and a minute later he was back out in the rain and dreary mist. Sometimes Ade hated Pelimburg. At least in MallenIve they had the desert for warmth. Lucky bastards.
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ADE WAS IN NO MOOD to walk back into town. Not in that weather, and especially since it felt as if he had been trekking all day, but it wasn’t like he had the brass to waste on taking one of the nilly-drawn omnis that ran though the city. By the time he reached the rabbit-warren streets of the tea-houses, looking for the writing on the blackened stone walls and hoping to spot the sign for Challery, Ade was in a foul mood. He wasn’t usually the type to get annoyed, because it never seemed worth it, but the day had been conspiring against him. Just as he was picturing how good it would feel to drag Door home by her hair, he saw her, dressed all in ragged clothes like a street urchin.
Doreen spotted Ade at the same moment, and her eyes went rounder than tea bowls, and her mouth followed.
“You,” said Ade, which was as far as he got.
“Shit.” Doreen turned round and ran fast as a hare through the street throngs. Lammers in their fancy dress and stuck-on mask faces sneered as she ducked past them.
The little mucker. Ade took a deep breath and belted after her. With longer legs and a handful of years, Ade was sure he’d be catching up to her in no time, but it turned out that if there was one thing Door was good at, besides being a complete idiot, it was sprinting through a packed city street. It didn’t help Ade that his sister seemed to know the in ways and out ways of the tea streets better than if she’d had a map drawn all over her hands. Ade ran this way and that, following the flash of her heels and hems until finally he stopped, hands on knees, gasping for breath.
When he was able to look up, there was no sign of his sister, and Ade didn’t have the faintest where he was. His side hurt—Doreen had given him a good sprint for sure, and Ade even started laughing a little at that, though he was still powerfully angry. Perhaps we should just cover her with a fur skin and enter her in the nilly races. That long goat face of hers should pass. He ended up coughing, his side twisting in like a knot pulled too tight.
A passing trader spat into the street at Ade’s coughing fit, and made an avert sign, as if they thought Ade had the Lung and was spreading it all around their precious city. Ade caught his breath and turned about to get a good look at where he was. There were only a few Hobs this side, and most of them were in clothes far smarter than Ade’s, wearing House livery, or apprentice blacks and coloured sashes. The rest of the crowd were low-Lammers, and here and there was a big empty bustle of space that meant a high-Lammer was out, using their magic to buffer a gap all around them so they didn’t have to think about getting anywhere near the rest of the city populace. Ade snorted. Good luck and all to that little chit from House Caster, trying to hook her Malker lover and keep him, because this here’s what they think of the rest of us.
There was no sign of one little Stilt-City Hob playing at being Pelimburg street trash. Ade retraced his steps, keeping to the walls and out of the way of all the Lammers until he saw the white sign high up on the corner of one of the packed-together stone buildings. Challery. Back to the beginning.
“Oi, you!” a redhead youth yelled at Ade, who drew up short and eyed him nervously.
It didn’t do to get noticed here in Pelimburg proper. The redhead was more Lam than Hob, for sure, though there was a slant to his eyes that made Ade think he had got strong ties to the Stilts, whether he liked it or not. He wore a felt cap that was probably brown or grey and was now browner and greyer, and his white ankles gleamed out from under his trouser hems. All grown up, and grown up fast and hungry. “What you want with Doreen?” He slurred her name so it rhymed with tureen.
“No business of yours.” Ade shoved his hands in his pockets. It didn’t do to go trusting Lammers, even if they had a touch of the Stilts. “Still, you know where she’s at?”
The youth laughed. “Even if I did, as you say, it’s no business of mine.”
Ade took a chance. It was not like he was going to find Doreen on his own in the rabbit warren of a city. “She’s my sister.”
“Ah.” He squinted at Ade, looking up and down, trying to size him up.
Ade was used to this. Or he thought he’d been used to it, but now that he was under the youth’s stare, he wasn’t that sure any more. He’d been so long in the Stilts and around people who knew him he’d forgotten how open and starey people could be when they met him for the first time. Or the second and third.
He felt his face turn hot and sweaty, and tried to pretend the scrutiny didn’t bother him. “So?” The cobbles were slippery, and Ade picked his way carefully to the youth. Man, more like, Ade thought, and felt the prickle of nerves. He was older than Ade, for all his sharp-faced, thin-ribbed look. He bolstered his courage with thoughts of what would happen to Doreen if he didn’t get her home before Ma. “What’s she been up to, that’s she’s here?”
“You don’t know?” The young man took off his cap and scratched at his head. “You sure she’s your sister, because I can tell you this, you don’t look related.”
Because I look like an Onnery. Mostly Ade let himself forget about it. His Nan and Ma had the same thing, but he’d known them all his life and he simply never saw the marks on their faces, and it wasn’t as though he could see it on his own. So it all just slipped away into the space where the things he knew about himself went. No one ever sat around thinking, “Oh, I have eyes of green the colour of the Casabi in summer,” or, “my skin is just like fig jam,” And sure as Saints could see the future, Ade didn’t waste time thinking about how half his face was one ragged-edge patch of white that covered his left eye and went all the way down to his chin, like a map no one had bothered to fill in.
Ade’s left hand almost jerked up before he stopped himself. When he’d been just a Hobling, there was a time Ma and Nan couldn’t get Ade out the door, and if he’d had to leave the house, he’d walk with one hand pressed to his face, trying to cover that stupid mark away. Ma had rapped his knuckles with a good thick reed every time he’d done it, so it had been a long time since he’d felt the urge. Instead, he kept his hands tight in his pockets and tilted his head a little so the man could get a clear look. “Maybe I’m a boggert.”
The young man signed and spat on the cobbles at Ade’s feet. “You fucker, don’t make jokes like that. Here, what’s your name?”
The question took Ade by surprise and he answered without thinking. “Ade.” He paused, wondering what the best approach was, and decided since he’d never been good at lies and subterfuge, he’d stick with truth. “And Doreen truly is my sister, and I need to speak with her.”
“I’m Gil, and I’m Doreen’s second, so she won’t take kindly to me selling her out. Sure you’ll understand.” Gil gave a mock salute, slow and casual, a flick of long, elegant fingers.
“Second to what?” Ade asked. Gil had to be older than Doreen by more than a good few years, so there was no way he was truly her second. In anything.
“You know jack-shit about your sister, do you—”
“Gil!”
He stopped talking, and grinned ruefully at Ade.
There in the mouth of an alleyway, stood Ade’s idiot sister, hair undone and dress ragged. She looked wide-eyed and hungry, and much younger than her fifteen years. She’d scrubbed dirt into her face and her eyes were sparkling with a fever. Fake, Ade knew. Every Hob in the Stilts had heard of Lady’s Nighteye and what could be done with it.
“What are you doing here?” she yelled.
“Was about to ask you that.” The street was slowly clearing; people were packing up and heading home as the skies turned an even duller grey, threatening another downpour, and Ade crossed quickly over to her. Gil tagged at his heels like an unwanted and vaguely threatening shadow. “What do you think you’re up to?”
“Working.” She was sullen, arms crossed.
“At what—playing beggars? Ma had you a good job all lined up—”
“In a shop, Ade! You think I want to grow all old and twisted in a shop, hauling things about for rich Lammers who think they’re better than everyone else in the whole world? And anyhow, I’m no beggar.” She grinned, and flicked her dark hair out of her face. Ade was close enough now that she lowered her voice and whispered. “See?” She held out a dark blue velvet bag tied shut with a pink ribbon. Bits clinked inside.
“You steal from them?” Ade whispered back at her. The last warmth from the brandy fled his system, and was replaced with a sick, heavy coldness that dug right into his bones and organs. “Are you madder than a spring-time nilly?”
She shrugged and slipped the purse back into the pocket of her dress. “I’m good at it.”
“Ma’s going to proper kill you.”
Door’s eyes flickered. “You’re gonna tell her?”
He should. This was about as far from right as it could get, and if Door was caught, there would be plenty of fun to be had from the Sharif. Sharif weren’t gentle with crims, and the Lammers liked a good market show. But Ade also knew he wasn’t going to breathe a word of this to Ma. There were stronger bonds of loyalty between brothers and sisters than children and dams, and that was the truth of it. Ade grabbed her by the sleeve of her dress. “Get home before Ma does, otherwise I’ll have to say something.”
After rolling her eyes, Doreen followed him, waving back to the redhead like she was a child leaving her playmates. And maybe, Ade thought, that’s all she was. Perrin had done all the growing up so Doreen never had to.
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BY FOOL’S LUCK MA WASN’T home by the time Doreen and Ade were back in the house. Good luck as it might have been, it worried Ade. It meant all kinds of things might have gone wrong with the birth. Never an ending the Onnerys wanted.
Perrin was at the hearth and kettles, cooking salt fish and black rice, and she took a deep breath through her nose when Door sauntered in.
“Nan still not back neither?” Ade asked.
“She went to swap for some milk. Gurda Tan’s brought a whole urn back. And you’re lucky you’re Nan’s favourite, Door,” Perrin said. “She still thinks you’re the darling babe of the house.” She looked over at Ade. “I told her you and Doreen went out for a drink.”
“Nan’s not stupid,” Ade pointed out. “There’s no accounting for people’s love.” He knew that all too well. By rights and words, he knew Ma loved him, he also knew he annoyed her. He wasn’t what she’d wanted in an heir.
“Oh hush.” Door took a seat at the table, like she was ready to be waited on by everyone else. “You ever talk to Nan?”
“’Course I do,” Perrin and Ade said together.
“No, I mean proper talk.” Door pulled the stolen purse from her pocket and loosened the ribbon. A handful of brass tipped out onto the table. “Nan didn’t want to be no Onnery neither, you know.” The bits rolled and settled. A week’s wages. Belonging to someone else.
“So what did she want to be?” Ade asked so he wouldn’t start yelling at Doreen about how that was some poor bugger’s livelihood, and food she’d stolen out of the mouths of babes. Perrin just sniffed and turned her back on them so she could stir the fish and rice over the flames.
“Ask her yourself, but I’ll tell you this much, Nan’s full of stories, if any of you lot ever bothered to listen.”
They didn’t have the time to get into any kind of argument. The door slammed open with the wind, and Door quickly scooped her ill-gotten gains into her skirt and sat there, wide-eyed and innocent.
Ma bouldered in, storm-driven, looking blackly tired. Her hands were still dark with mud, which explained why she’d been so long. A sparked babe then. Cleaned out and given back to the river Casabi.
Silence was expected after a sparked birth. Even Doreen said nothing. Ade went to the back balcony and fetched one of the stoppered urns that the family refilled every time they headed to the clean sea. He heaved it to the front door where Ma stood, just on the verge of entering, and tipped it carefully so that a thin stream of seawater fell over Ma’s hands. She kept silent while the two of them stood outside in the start of the storm, and the salt water washed the Casabi mud and the stolen spark from her fingers. Ade hated this part. The mourning for what could have been, what had changed, and what it was the Onnerys had to do to keep their people safe from Lammer-law and their bloodthirsty city Sharif.
No Onnery liked it when they found a child born with magic. First there was the scooping out, which Ma said felt cold and clammy as digging your fingers into a bellyful of fish guts, and then they had to carry the magic back to the Casabi where it belonged. She said it made her head feel watery and weak, and it was a relief to sink her hands into the black mud and tip out the magic.
The Casabi was just a river. Ade knew they weren’t tipping the magic back into the river itself, though if anyone asked what the Onnerys did, that was the best way they could explain it. What they did was give the magic back to the River Beneath. The flow of magic under the skin of the earth, it followed the traceries of rivers and waterways. It could be said the Casabi was just a guideline for where the real river flowed.
It was complicated, and no one liked to ask anyway. It wasn’t polite. Even so, people were starting to look at the Onnerys sidelong like the spark was somehow their fault. This made it the third Hobling born with magic in as many months, that they knew of, anyhow. Before that, Nan and Ma saw a magic-born once, maybe twice a five-year. And Nan said in her time it was unlucky to see more than that in a decade.
Wild magic wasn’t safe, and the things that could happen to the Stilts and their people because of a sparked Hob were never pretty. Lammers had their prohibitions and punishments, and the Sharif to carry them out.
The Sharif were low-Lammers given the only power they had left—iron prison cells and sharp axes and fire flints. And they didn’t take kind to Hobs. There were still parts of the Stilts so burned that no-one wanted to build there again, where the mist was thick with ghosts.
Ma twisted her hands under the trickle of salt water, scrubbing the skin half-raw. Finally, she stepped inside and dried her hands on a cloth Perrin held out for her.
Now that she was allowed to talk, Ma sighed deep and shook her shoulders. “There better be tea. I need it after today.”
Even sulky Doreen jumped up to help, pulling out the folded packet of tea and setting water to boil. “Nan’s gone to get milk,” she said as if she had not just been running around Old Town, robbing the Lammers blind.
Ade let it go. It was safer this way. They all knew Ma would be on edge after a sparked birth, liable to turn angry for any reason, no matter how thin. “And there’s biscuits,” Ade told her. “Had to go to a birthing this morning.”
Ma sat down onto the edge of Perrin and Doreen’s bed, and groaned when the weight came off her feet. “Did you now,” she said, only half-interested. “All went well?”
“In a Lammer house,” Ade added.
There was a pause, and Ma looked at him sidelong for a moment, before deciding it wasn’t worth chasing. “Well there’s a thing that doesn’t happen every day. Next thing you know you’ll be at a bat-birth. I wonder if they eat the afterbirth?” She laughed.
Ade shuddered; now there was something he didn’t want to think on. The vampires were monsters, even if they looked like people. Blood-suckers and butchers, he knew, even if they paid for their food.
“They take all right to you?” Ma unlaced her boots and pulled them off, stretched out her toes and sighed.
“Mostly.” Ade remembered the way the Lammers looked at him, and red-headed Gil in Old Town and his questions. He stared at Ma, seeing her through borrowed eyes. The white mark on her face was bigger than his, and shaped more like a three-fingered handprint than a map. It was silvery-white like the skin of the rockfishes that tasted so sweet and soft.
Ma accepted the bowl of tea and the biscuits from Perrin. “Anything?” She was asking about magic. Ma had made it clear from as early as Ade can remember that while she thought he was fine at birthing babes, the spark that made him an Onnery was weak as milk-porridge. He’d been born with only the smallest bit of power. As an Onnery, Ade was something of nothing, but he was also all she had. She was a practical woman, his ma. “Anything you couldn’t deal with?”
“No. Babe was as clean as a pebble.”
“Well that’s the best you could hope for.” Ma sipped at her tea.
The door let in another rattle of wind and rain, and Nan smiled from under her cloak. “Bit of a breeze out,” she said as the rising storm sucked the door shut behind her. The whole house shook with the bang. “You’re back.” She frowned at Ma. “This is a bad thing, Shay, and no mistake.” Nan knew without being told why Ma had been so long gone. After all, she’d had more years as an Onnery than Ade and Ma put together.
“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Ma balanced her tea bowl on one knee, hands still cupped around it. “Someone’s going to have to go and speak to the Grinningtommy.”