4

BY THE TIME I see the Levelling Bridge, the sun is streaking the horizon pink. Gold edges the last of the smeared clouds, and the sails of the returning fish boats are cheerily white. My feet, however, are far from cheery. The whole of my right heel feels like one huge blister—the boots are certainly a size too small. My toes are pinched and sore. With my teeth gritted, I hoist my little holdall higher and walk down Spindle Way, drawing closer and closer to the bridge. Around me the first of the early-morning delivery carts are clip-clopping past. The large goatlike nillies with yellow eyes—unicorns who have had their horns sawed off to feed our need for a cut-rate replacement for scriv—shove at one another, and the stone road is already covered with the little black pellets of their dung. Straw and mud have been tracked here, and they mingle with the fine white sand that blows in from the harbor.

I stand with one foot on the bridge. The bridge-houses loom on either side of me, packed close as cards in a Saint’s deck. Once I cross and lose myself in Old Town, it’ll be done. That’s what you want, Felicita.

Or I could be a little bird again and fly back to my tower. And then what? A lifetime of dull and careful parties, a marriage engineered for Pelim’s fortune, and then a long stretch into eternity. Gray and featureless.

Old Town might stink of fish and feces, but it still has to be better than that.

Even the thought of my mother’s face creased in anguish can’t slow me. She will soon forget any heartache, I’m sure. After all, she has Owen. If I return before my mother has time to panic, all that will happen is that I’ll be watched more closely, have less privilege. A few months and then I’ll be trapped in House Canroth, watching Piers blow baubles of glass. Perhaps, dutifully, I’ll even make my own.

I imagine his white fingers touching me, slug-like in the dark, and I shudder. A show of weakness that I can’t allow myself. If there’s one thing my mother taught me, it is how to wear the perfect mask. Never show them what you’re really feeling because that’s how they hurt you. I picture my mother’s face when she must go out in public with Owen, the cold arrogant look she wears, as if the whole world is filth before her. It is an expression I’ve learned to copy well, and like all roles, if you can believe it, you can be it. I press my hands to my face and push, smoothing the worry and fear away. I’m better than them. Better than Owen, than Canroth Piers. They can never really control me because they cannot bridle my thoughts.

It works. I’m calm again. Let Piers and Owen make the wedding arrangements, just don’t expect the bride to be there like a dog called to heel. I’ll choose my own Gris-damned husband, thank you. If I even want one, and I’m not exactly certain of that. I want life on my own terms, not on the dictates of tradition and of haggling over power and land.

I will never let myself be caught like that—any marriage I make will be my own. A choice. A free one.

Idiot girl. Owen always called me that. And perhaps now it is truer than ever, but I don’t care.

The thought of my future husband isn’t easily forgotten, so I try to replace it. In my head I turn Piers’s pasty fingers to long white ones, the overpowering smell of scriv to that strange subtle magic I got off the bat on the promenade … I shake my head, breathe deeply.

The stench of Pelimburg thickens as I go farther across the bridge. A few hardy souls have already set up open-air tea stalls, and fat Hob women with dark faces and screeching voices call out as I pass. “Tea’s champ,” they say. “Hot for the girls and cold for the boys.” Another one fries elvers in oil and wraps them in flat-bread cones. The air smells of shellfish, sweat, rotting seaweed, and strong tea. I wrinkle my nose and wonder if pressing a kerchief to my mouth will give me away as a House Lammer. If people remember seeing me, and talk to the sharif, then my game will be up.

A sudden chill stops me. Someone did spot me before and told my brother where I was. How long before word reaches him and I am hauled back, on a tightened chain? I need to do something. I look this way and that, suddenly terrified that everyone is staring at me and wondering why it is I’m here in Old Town, dressed in tat.

Then I see them.

Two bats are standing outside one of the bridge tailor shops, waiting for it to open. Most businesses will only serve them at prearranged times or unlikely hours so that more respectable Houses will not have to endure the bats’ presence. They’re watching me. One walks away from his kin, toward me, frowning. While bats all look similar, there is something about him that tugs at me, about the way he stands, as if he is not really a part of this world, as if he is merely someone looking on. I lower my head and walk faster, pretending that I don’t notice, that he is not the Sandwalker bat I met the last time I ran. The memory of his scent and magic makes my breathing tight.

“Felicita?” he says. It is him. Please, please, I whisper under my breath. Please go away. Please don’t remember seeing me. I do not look up. If I make eye contact, then he will know that it’s me.

He doesn’t call my name again, and after a few moments, I risk a backward glance. The bats are gone. The tailor has ushered them into the shop. Curiosity, or something like it, makes me backtrack. I peer through the dusty windows into the warm glow. The spry little tailor is talking to them. The bats have their backs to me. I linger, my palms pressed to the glass, just watching the shorter one as he stands with an easy, casual grace, his hands in his trouser pockets.

Then, as if a string has tightened between us, he turns around and sees me.

I jerk away from the window and lurch down the pavement, blindly knocking pedestrians out of my path.

A cleaning-Hob flicks her street-broom at me. I step out into the street, trying to avoid the press of bodies.

“What about this,” says one Hob, her hand reaching out for me. “Lost, are you, little Lam?”

I rush past her and pull my ugly brown shawl from my holdall and cover my head. I’m too recognizable as a Great House Lammer—the auburn is a dead giveaway. It won’t be long before I’m caught out for what I am. Gris-damn the Pelim red in my hair.

I pause in my tracks.

Some of the low-Lammers dye their hair red. It’s a cheap dark color, with no subtlety or life.

Perfect. And for the first time since I left my prison, I find myself smiling.

“Here! Out of the way, frail-bit,” yells a man, and a cart clatters past me with a full load, a tangle of tarred ropes and netting. I twist out of his way and hurry on down the sidewalk. All I need to do is keep my nose high and wait till I smell the distinctive pungent aroma of hair paste.

It doesn’t take long. The hairdresser’s is a dark little shop squeezed between a fish stall and a nilly-runner’s. Already a line is streaming from the runner’s door, as the men place bets on the racing.

The hairdresser’s glass-and-wood door is grimy, and I push it open gingerly, wondering if my mother is not completely insane in her belief that all the Hobs and low-Lammers carry filthy diseases. A little ivory bell clacks, and a girl with her hair in many long thin braids looks up. She’s leaning on the counter, and next to her elbow is a fatcandle, its oily smoke drifting about her head. Her hands are stained a deep red as if she’s wearing bloody gloves, and she stares at me over her interlaced fingers. Her wide eyes are slanted, the deep gray green of true Hobs. Her skin is warmed gold by the candle-lamps, and she looks otherworldly, beautiful.

“Clear off,” she says, giving me a dismissive glance. “You’re in the wrong shop.”

She can make it so that no high-Lam or bat with a passing acquaintance could possibly recognize me. Carefully, I straighten my shoulders and pull the shawl from my head.

“Oh.” She taps at her teeth with a brown fingernail. “Definitely in the wrong shop.”

“I want you to dye my hair,” I say. I try to stare her down but she just looks at me, her forehead puckered. She’s still tapping at her teeth.

Tap tap tap.

Tap.

“All right, then,” she says, just as I’m about to pull the shawl back up and look for another shop. “But it’s no money back if you don’t like it none.”

“How much?”

She peers sidelong at me. “Three bits.”

“I’ll give you one.”

“Cheap little whore,” she says with a shrug. “Fine. One bit it is.”

A few minutes later, she’s got me sitting on a three-legged stool, my knees up awkwardly high and a stained piece of waxed silk over my shoulders. She slaps paste onto my coiled-up hair with an even precision, then works the muck into my scalp.

“’S a shame to dye this lot,” she says. “But you won’t be the first little bastard to go on the game an not want your da seeing you.” Her fingers knead and pull, spreading the paste over every strand.

“I’m not—” I grit my teeth.

“Oho! Really.” I don’t have to see her face to know that she’s smirking at me. Her voice just has that quality. Sharp fingernails scrape my scalp. “Next you’re going to tell me that it ain’t your da you’re running from. There’s no other reason for a high-Lammer to run—you’re in trouble. You’ve lost your House face, and now you’re running.” She pauses. “Mind you, I’d run too.” Her fingers tremble against my scalp, pulling the hair. “Whatcha do? You in trouble with a boy, is it?”

“That’s not it,” I whisper. “There are other reasons—” I stop. The less I say, the better.

Her hands have begun their rhythmic massaging again, and with each long slow stroke the silence gathers. “Are you one of ours?” she finally asks, in a voice unlike her earlier one. No longer jocular and mocking. Her tone is heavy.

I do not know what she means or how to respond. “Ours?”

She snorts. “Never mind. It was a stupid thought. We got no use for your kind an you ain’t got no pity for ours.”

Anger bristles through me and then fizzles out in confusion. I’ve no idea what she’s talking about, but there is one thing she has right: high-Lammers have no pity for Hobs. At best, we think of them as children we need to discipline. I remember my parting words to Firell, and a vague guilt chews through me, making me ache.

Water sluices over my head, washing away the excess dye, washing away the picture of myself as a pampered little House daughter.

“Take this,” I say after the girl is done, and hand her the necklace Firell threw back at me. Nervous, I try my best at the city patois. “Don’t tell no one that you saw me.” It sounds strange on my tongue, stilted, the vowels not flat enough. The look the Hob gives me makes me flush, but she grins again and snatches the gift from my hand.

The mother-of-pearl necklace clatters onto her table. She examines it in the dim light, then waggles her head, as if she can’t decide between a no and a yes. “Fine.” She sweeps it off the table and undoes the clasp. As she pushes her hair up away from her neck, I see bruises and wounds on her flesh. It looks like someone’s stabbed her repeatedly with an awl. Then her hair drops back down, and the marks are hidden by her beads and braids.

The largest piece of mother-of-pearl sits between her breasts. She looks down at it, her fingers twisting it this way and that. “It’ll do. I ain’t seen nothin’.” Then she stills, her red-dyed hands at her new bauble. “You made a good choice.”

I pause at the threshold.

“To run,” she says. “Bad things are coming to the Houses, and you’re best out of there.”

“Bad things?”

Instead of answering, she squints. Then with a final dismissive wave she says, “Head down Whelk Street way.”

“Why?”

“You go down that way and ask out for Dash. Tell him Anja sent you. He’ll see you straight,” she says, and then the door closes behind me with a sharp snick.

My hair feels rough and strange. I’ve little idea how bad it looks, but no one on the street even gives me a second look. With my clothing already spattered with dung and roadside dirt, and my hair a tangled mess of fake red, I’m just another low-Lammer on her way to work. Whether I’m working a street corner or a market stall, well, that’s none of their business unless they’re buying. The anonymity is comfortable, like going around draped in magic, hidden from view. The thought of never having scriv again pulls at me, but only a little. We’re so rationed here in Pelimburg anyway, what with those MallenIve prats charging an arm and a leg for even the tiniest thimbleful.

Still, I never had to worry about that before. And now …

And now, my mother will have discovered that I’m gone. How long before the golden-brown shawl or an embroidered slipper washes up against the rocks? Will they lower sharif on long silk-thin ropes to inspect? Till they find anything I’m just missing once again, and I’m relying on my mother’s sense of House honor to keep quiet about it for as long as possible.

*   *   *

ON EITHER SIDE OF ME, the bridge buildings drop away, and Spindle Way diverges and dips toward the mudflats. If I keep along the raised stone promenade, I will reach the tip of the Claw. There are only squatters and Hobs living in that area, and no one will think to look for me there.

Or I could go straight on through Old Town and lose myself in the Hob-infested marshes of Stilt City. Ugh. I’m safer on the Claw, among the fish-gangs. At least the houses there are built on solid land. Solid mud, anyway.

A wind rises in the east, winding around the jut of the cliffs and blowing across the harbor. The masts wail eerily and the smells of kelp and tarred wood compete with the stench of dye whelks rotting in barrels. It’s strong enough to make me gag.

Certainly, I won’t be getting a job on the wharf.

A job.

I’ll think about that later. For now, all I want is a place where I can hole up and wait for the sharif to find my “remains.” I ask a Hob leaning against a wall for directions to Whelk Street. He stares at me strangely, then tells me. His directions lead me to a place that seems horribly familiar.

It’s only mid-morning and the weather is already changing. The easterly brings clouds scudding in from the ocean, gathering thick and low. Soon it will be raining again, and with the promise of rain comes the smothering kiss of the fog. I need to find some kind of shelter. The end of the promenade with its rows of dilapidated buildings—that’s where I need to go. Back to where the selkie-girl threw a piece of windowsill at me. The place is a tangle of squats.

My feet won’t move.

No one will recognize me, I tell myself as I pat my hair reassuringly. There’s no chance that I look like a House Lammer now. And I stink. The rough cotton of my housedress and coat smells of sweat and dirt and dye. Still, I’m nervous as I trudge forward.

The sun slips behind the cloud blanket, and the day goes dark, the shadows lengthen. It feels like late afternoon even though I know full well that it isn’t.

Pelimburg has always been a city confused by time, running on rhythms set not by clocks and minute hands but by the internal lollop of its sea-heart. Tidal beat. I match pace with the waves that crash into the promenade wall and keep my eyes open for a likely shelter.

I’m so busy peering through the shuttered, glassless windows, and dubiously eyeing the damp-rotted walls, that I don’t notice the gang until they have already circled me.

The leader of the pack grins, doglike. They’re Hobs. Dirty and ragged, with a feral look, like the marsh-jackals that hunt rats in the long salt grass and steal food from the rubbish dumps on the edges of the city. They close in tight.

I’m frozen.

“Lost are you, kitty-girl?” says the leader, drifting close enough to me that I can see the dirt in the pores of his brown face. “You won’t find paying customers down the Claw.”

The next person to assume that I’m a streetwalker is going to get punched. I ball my fist and try to keep my breathing calm. It’s hard—my heartbeat is skipping and stammering, and I’m cold. My breaths are beginning to sound more like gasps than anything else. I wonder if the Hobs can smell fear the way dogs can.

Perhaps I should ask them if they know who Dash is, but the air has become claustrophobic and tight.

The pack crowds closer and I hug my bag to my chest. I want to cry, there is a prickling at the corners of my eyes. I should have stayed at home and accepted my planned-out future. I wonder if it’s safe to go back, if by some turn of luck no one will have noticed that I’m gone and there will be no punishment waiting for me. The longer I’m gone, the harder it will be to go back, the greater the dishonor.

I think of what Owen will do to me.

“Sphynx got your tongue?”

I try not to let my lip tremble, but it’s useless. “I’m not looking for customers.” The words sound like brass bits falling one by one onto a glass table. Precise, clipped, and too loud in the otherwise empty street.

“That’s good,” he says. “’Cause I weren’t looking to pay.”

I close my eyes and hug my bag tighter. I can’t run, there’s too many of them, and my boots are too tight and my legs ache from walking and right now all I want is to be back home. His breath smells of fish and vinegary cockles. It’s on my face—hot and sweet-sour and overwhelming.

They’re so close now that the heat radiates from them. One touches my hair, and I snap.

I go from frozen statue to spitting fury. Even if what’s going to happen is inevitable, I’m going to do my best to scratch their Gris-damned eyes out or deprive a few of them of any future Hoblings. I grab the leader’s genitals and twist, just as one of his lackeys throws a punch at my cheek.

He yelps and I screech. My terror is still there, let loose on them. What I wouldn’t do for a pinch of scriv now.

The noise erupts as the Hobs lay into me. Someone knocks me to the ground and I curl up on my side, trying to protect my belly and breasts and also to get in a few well-aimed kicks. At least these ugly boots are good for slamming into soft flesh. Tears are streaming down my face because even though I keep fighting, I know it’s futile. I’m outnumbered. I’m soft and I know nothing about fisticuffs. Owen used to taunt me when our mother wasn’t looking, and I feel the same defeated fear now that I felt then.

“Oi. What the fuck are you lot doing down our way?” a girl asks over the noise of the scuffling, her voice a fish-market drawl.

The Hobs still. The leader stands, pats nonchalantly at his trousers, and grins. “Weren’t doing nothing,” he says, and aims a sly kick at my back. Pain bruises down my spine.

I can’t see the girl who’s talking, just a forest of bare feet, hobnailed boots, and dirty patched trousers. Already my right eye is swelling up. It feels hot and watery and sticky all at the same time.

“If you’ve touched one of ours, boyo, and Dash hears about it, then I wouldn’t want to be in your skin.”

Dash. A flicker of relief. I don’t even know why—I’ve nothing more to go on than the word of a Hob hairdresser and a feeling that, somehow, this Dash will help me. The girl is one of his, a friend or partner, I suppose, and she’s stepped up to protect me. It’s something to cling to.

My attacker speaks again. “We were just leaving, Lilya, darling. No need to get all stormed up,” he says. He walks past, grins, and cocks his hat at me. The pack follows him, and I’m left in the middle of the street. A faint drizzle is misting around me, covering my hair with a veil of tiny droplets.

“And who the fuck might you be?” the girl says as she drops to a crouch to get a better look. “Not one of ours, Gris knows. You’re a long way from Kitty Lane.”

“I am not,” I say through my split lip, “a Gris-damned prostitute.”

“Says you.” Lilya is short and dark, with sizable hips that soften her otherwise hard figure. Her waxed hair is pulled back in a tight bun, pinned close to her scalp with an assortment of glinting pins, revealing wide cheeks and slanted eyes. She has a fish-worker’s blood-and-scale-spattered apron slung over her shoulder. She holds out one calloused hand. “Come on then, up ya get, kitty-girl.” She smirks as she says this, and there is the faintest trace of bitter humor.

Lilya’s hand is warm and rough, and she hauls me up with ease. Her arms might be skinny under rolled-up sleeves, but it’s all wiry muscle.

“They really did you over,” she says, after peering at my bruised face. “This way, we’ll get you sorted out.” She’s not friendly, just abrupt and sharp, like she’s dealing with another problem in her long day.

“Thank you,” I say, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to talk. My lip is swelling up and going oddly numb, and my right eye is tingling, hot from the bruising. I can barely see through the puffed-up lids, and the whole side of my face aches. Not to mention the sharp pains shooting along my ribs. I keep one arm clutched across my side, like that’s going to help. I’m about to ask her about Dash when she sighs loudly.

“Gris.” She sweeps up my bag, casually flinging it over her shoulder. “Dash is gonna love this like a punch to the face. Like we need another mucking stray hanging around.”

Best to keep my mouth shut until I know exactly where I stand. Silently, I hobble after her, barely keeping up as she strides down the street toward a house that I recognize. It’s green and faded. Lilya pushes open a door that just barely qualifies and leads me into a musty narrow entrance. Someone has tied an old sheet over the next doorway, and Lilya holds it aside and beckons me through.

The whole place smells of rotting wood—a curiously loamy and pleasant smell—and of smoked fish. The latter is decidedly less pleasant. A layer of sucking gray mud coats the floor.

“We don’t use the downstairs much,” Lilya says, and nods at a flight of rickety stairs. “Head on up.” She shoos me with her hands, and, clutching the rail for safety, I edge up the staircase. The boards creak ominously underfoot, but as I reach the second and then the third floor, I realize why the squatters prefer to use the upstairs part of the house.

The gloom falls away. Faint streaks of sunlight poke through the cloud cover and stream in the windows and dapple the walls and floors, and the wind blows through the empty windows, bringing the clean sharp ocean scent with it.

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.