12

GIDDY WITH VAI AND MAGIC AND MUSIC we spill out into the streets. The night is starry but the streets are wet. A squall must have blown over while we danced and sang inside the Crake. The moon grins down on us, and the stars flash and glitter. Silver light makes the windows gleam, and the shadows are strange and shifting.

Music booms and echoes in my head, although it’s been a while since the band played their final encore and bowed to rapturous applause. The buzz of conversation seems stuck in my ears, and the ground feels too rubbery to walk on.

Someone catches my hand as I stumble.

“You all right there?” Dash says, and the laughter bubbles through his voice like sugar melting on a stove.

“I am perfectly,” I tell him as I summon deep reserves of dignity, “perfectly all right, thank you very much.” The words seem to take forever to draw out of my mouth, and I find myself getting bored with the sounds I’m making. With a supreme effort, I concentrate on stopping the buildings from spinning about me and focus on the other Whelk Streeters instead. At least they’re supposed to be moving.

Lils and Nala are skipping ahead of us. Well, Nala is skipping and tugging Lils along with her. Finally Lils takes a few reluctant, experimental gallops, and the sound of their giggling echoes off the shuttered shops.

At the noise, Esta whoops, and the windows bounce her shout down the narrow alleys. She’s smiling and Verrel is hovering around her like a protective older brother. He’s nearly twice her height and they make an amusing spectacle.

Dash still has my hand, and he pulls me back to a slow amble so that we fall far behind the rest. “So just what was that in there, darling?”

“Don’t know what you mean.” The words trip and stumble all over each other, and this makes me laugh again. I imagine each word as a juggler or an acrobat, leapfrogging down my tongue. The rubbish in the gutter bounds, mimicking the thoughts in my head. A crumpled paper ball leaps over a mud-laced leaflet. The leaflet stands on one corner and after a few staggering steps pirouettes after it. Accidental magic. Just how much vai did I drink? The papers collapse back into the muck and I frown. Not enough obviously. I wonder if Dash has any more on him?

“No, I don’t. You drank at least half a bottle,” he says.

Oops. Possibly, just possibly, I’m thinking out loud.

“Just possibly,” he confirms. Dash stops, and I jerk to a halt.

At first I can’t quite work out why I’ve also stopped moving until I notice my hand in his and put two and two together. Happy with my sudden flash of genius, I smile up at him. “I am very drunk,” I inform him, just in case he hasn’t noticed. “Therefore you must not take advantage of me, because that would be awfully ungentlemanly … and … and … stuff.” I wave one hand to indicate the importance of said stuff.

“Hmm,” he says, then leans forward and kisses me.

I have never been kissed like this by a boy before. It’s different and strange and rather enjoyable. Of course, my only comparison is Ilven and that was tentative and wet. I pull away. The memory of Ilven is salt against my raw skin, and I blink furiously, pushing the image of her white face and the soft brush of her mouth away. There is only Dash here.

“You’re not a gentleman,” I tell him as solemnly as I can. This is very serious.

“I never said I was, darling.”

Oh, right. He’s telling the truth. I decide that he can’t be all that dreadful if he’s honest, and I kiss him back.

I shouldn’t be doing this. The ghost of Ilven watches, her face drawn in sadness, her leaf hairpin glinting under the starlight. I pull back from Dash and turn to her. “Go away,” I say. She just stares. “Go on! Shoo!” I flap my hands at her memory, and the image dissolves into the faint mist that’s creeping in off the ocean. She wasn’t really there. I rub my hands over my face, scrubbing the vision away.

Dash is looking at me, head cocked. “And that?”

“Nothing,” I mumble, and hug myself against his chest. “Just stupid memories.”

“Ah. Those.” He nods. “Nothing quite like ghosts for making you feel guilty.”

I pull back from him to stare at his face. He is serious, not mocking me at all. Eternity passes. Dash might be fickle, deep and treacherous as the Casabi, but he’s also someone who takes care of his own.

This time it’s me who presses in for a kiss.

The mist roils up, thick and white, spreading through the streets like a low, clinging ocean of ghosts. It swirls around our legs, making us a little skerry in the street.

“Look,” I say as I pull away. The air is cold and smells of salt and fish, but it’s a clean smell.

Dash looks down. “There’s a tale,” he says, “that the whalers tell, about how sea-mist that comes in this far is all the spirits of the dead, looking for the ones they left behind.”

I shiver. “Old sea stories.” But it’s sucked the beauty out of the scene, and now all I feel is cold and wet. There are other stories about mists like this, about how they’re portents of the Red Death. “Let’s go home.”

“I ain’t arguing with that idea.” He’s grinning, the little lech.

We take a very long time to walk back to Whelk Street, kissing all the way, and the others are already asleep by the time we crawl up the stairs, laughing and shushing each other. Dash takes me through to his side of the house, and I realize that although his bed is narrow, you don’t need all that much space to do what we do. There are moments when I think I should worry more, or hurt more, but then I touch skin and taste sweat and forget.

I jerk out of my strange hallucinatory world when my fingers brush over a deep gash on Dash’s thigh. “What’s this?” I ask him. There is blood there, tacky still.

“Nothing.” He moves my hand away. “Accident at work.” Or at least whatever scheme currently passes for employment in Dash’s world. I wonder what tricks and deals he was organizing this time. And when exactly he’s going to fall foul of the sharif.

Not long after that, I’m curled up so close to him that we might as well be one person instead of two, and I fall asleep.

*   *   *

“YOU’RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR WORK,” Nala says, far too loudly.

My head aches and my mouth tastes like marsh-rat fur. I sit up and blink in the unexpected light. Belatedly, I realize two things: one, I am completely naked, and two, I am not in my own bed.

“Oh Gris!” I pull the blanket up to my shoulders and look around. Dash’s bed, Dash’s room. No sign of Dash. A feeling rather like nausea fills my belly, and my face heats. I am revolting.

Nala taps her foot, then her face softens. “You don’t take Rake’s parsley, do you?”

Gris. No. Another wave of something halfway between shame and terror swamps me, and I feel like crying, only my eyes are too dry and itchy to produce even the smallest teardrop. I huddle deeper into the blankets and wonder if you can fall pregnant your first time, if, on top of everything else I’ve managed to do, I’m going to end up like one of those Hob girls who stand on the side of the road with some scruffy woebegone brat in tow, begging for a meal. I close my eyes in horror. “No,” I whisper, and feel even stupider for it.

She lets out a long sigh. “And we don’t have none. Lils and I don’t hardly need it.” Nala holds out a bowl of tea, long since cooled by the look of it. “Dash left that for you. Drink up, and then you best run as fast as your legs’ll take you before Mrs. Danningbread gets it in her mind to let you go.”

A cold wave courses through my body, leaving my skin tingling.

The tea is lukewarm, and I swallow it as quickly as possible—anything to kill the taste in my mouth—and then dig through the debris of Dash’s bed for my clothes. I pull my shift over my head, then pause to survey his domain.

There’s still a single book lying near the bed. Curious, I pick it up. It’s an old copy of Prines’s Mapping the Dream, so old that the red cover has faded to a dull brownish pink. The Dream is famous, and Prines has the dubious honor of being a crake worth studying, especially because of his historical connection to Mallen Gris. But why a Hob would be reading verse detailing the poet’s obsessive and ultimately erotic encounters with his House Master’s son is beyond me. The language is archaic, couched in layers and layers of metaphor, as impenetrable as a snarl of fishing line.

I lift the book, and a small folded note drops from the pages. Dash’s name is written on the outside in a neat slanted hand. An educated hand. I pause, feeling the crinkled edge against my fingertips. Dare I?

Perhaps it’s some girlfriend; perhaps I am just one of many. I unfold the letter. It’s short, merely stating a time and date, and ending with the word yours. A jealous heat crawls through me, and the taste of bile fills my mouth.

Hastily, I shove the note back, hoping that Dash won’t notice. I need to leave his room.

I’ve never scrubbed and dressed and brushed powder over my teeth as fast as I do now.

I arrive at the Crake almost a quarter hour late, but Mrs. Danningbread does nothing more than raise one gray eyebrow at me in disapproval. “Get to work,” she says, and I slink into the scullery, feeling very achy and miserable and sorry for myself. I keep wanting to spin around and dance, and then five minutes later I want to hurl crockery across the little room. Or do both at the same time. My face is being pulled in two directions: mouth wanting to laugh, eyes burning because I need to cry and I can’t.

My head is a giant ball of pain and even though I drink cup after cup of water, I still feel like a sea-sponge left in the afternoon sun.

Who is she? Every Hob girl I’ve ever seen becomes my rival in his affections. Then again, it need not be a Hob. The writing was educated—perhaps I am not the first high-Lammer to sleep in that room.

The whole morning I try to quash these contradictory feelings. And I don’t know if I want to vomit because I’m hungover like a street-Hob or if it’s because I’ve fallen in some kind of love with one.

The dishes pile up, and I lean against the wall and press the wet cloth to my head. For a moment, my eyes are soothed, and the coolness masks my headache. Except then I’m able to think, and I really don’t want to do that.

I drop the cloth. Across from me the whitewashed wall is pitted where the plaster has fallen out in chunks. The brick underneath is cheap red clay. What am I doing here? I look down at the cloth, at my hands wringing it over and over. These are not my hands. This is not my life.

But it’s what you have, a resolute voice says, echoing in my apparently empty skull, and you’d best make the most of it.

*   *   *

IT’S JUST AFTER THE ELEVENSES CROWD and before the lunch rush, and I’m slowly cleaning the last of the morning’s dishes, when Mrs. Danningbread sticks her head into the back room. “Firell?”

I look up from my dishwater and wipe the hair from my face with raw fingers.

“There’s someone up front who wants a word with you.”

My heart does a giddy flip, and my skin goes icy. Jannik. Gris, I’d forgotten I was supposed to meet him tonight. The last five days have passed in a blur.

Then I shake my head. It can’t be that damn bat—he said eight in the evening, and by no stretch of the imagination could late morning qualify.

After drying my hands, I peer tentatively around the doorway. The Crake is fairly quiet at the moment—a welcome lull in the general routine of rushed panic—and my visitor is immediately apparent. Sitting at a table, surrounded by the dragon-dogs she’s paid to exercise, is Nala. Esta is with her.

In a way, Nala reminds me of a Lammic version of the dragon-dogs: they are both impossibly thin and long-legged, with long noses and a hunched look to their shoulders. Nala’s carroty hair is a bit more orange than the deep chestnut of the dragon-dogs’ silky ears, but it’s still uncanny. Next to these pale slender creatures, Esta looks dark and out of place. She’s lighting matches and watching me with a sullen air as she flicks one after the other onto the tabletop where they smolder out, trailing smoke to the ceiling.

Nala waves at me, as if it is somehow possible that I didn’t notice her, and Esta rolls her eyes in exasperation. A day spent in Nala’s permanently jubilant company must be rather trying, I imagine, and I give her a sympathetic smile.

Esta sucks her teeth in response and rolls her eyes again.

Fine. I’m not here to make the little brat like me, anyway. “You’ve come for tea?”

“No, no.” Nala swings her dog-walking satchel onto her lap and digs through it. It’s stuffed with scraps of paper, nubs of chalk that cover everything with colored dust, various strange shells, a withered stick that looks like it came from a flowering irthe tree, and a large bone with meat scraps still attached. She rummages until she finds what she’s looking for, beams at me again, and pulls out a carefully folded fat paper envelope.

“Uh, yes?” I stare at it as she waves it between us.

“For you.”

I take it. “Thanks.”

Nala looks at me expectantly.

“What is it?”

“Rake’s parsley. You’ll need to take a double measure every day until you bleed and from then on a single teaspoon every morning. Mind you, it tastes like the back end of a dog.” She says this so cheerfully that I can’t help but stare at her. “Make a tea, hot as you can, and swallow it fast.”

I’ve heard of Rake’s parsley, of course, but have never actually seen it before—why would I have? I can feel my cheeks burning, the blood rushing to my face. Quick as I can, I shove the envelope into my apron pocket.

Nala seems oblivious. “It’s just enough for a week, and it’s fair brass so that’s all I bought. I got it from the apothecary down on Richmond. She’s the best for this sort of thing.”

I thank her again, the words sticking on my tongue. I am thoroughly embarrassed. Then I wonder—since Nala seems to be somewhat more in tune with all things feminine—if she could help me with one other problem.

“Do you know where I could borrow a good dress, something fashionable but not too expensive?” I blurt out.

“What would you want one of them for?” She squints at me. “Trying to impress His Flashness?”

“No.” I twist my hands. “I have to attend a, well, a party tonight, you see, and I need something to wear…”

“A party. What kind of party?” She draws her brows together.

How do I explain this one. “A b-bat party.” I say the words fast, swallowing them under, hoping Nala doesn’t really hear me.

She does. “Oh. You won’t need tat too fancy for one of them,” she says as she wrinkles her long narrow nose. “I might have something at home that you can use for the night.” She gives me a flat look. “Did Dash tell you to go to this?”

Why would Dash send me to a bat party? The question is so unexpected that for a moment I am thrown. The silence is dragging on too long, and anything I say will sound like a lie. “No, um, I was invited.”

She shrugs. “Your business then, but I daresay I wouldn’t have picked you for one of them.”

One of them who? I want to ask her but she’s standing now, and the dogs whine and press their long heads against her hands, eager to be gone. Esta flings the last burned match down and follows the pack as the dogs flow out the door in a river of silky white and red fur.

*   *   *

EVEN WITH THREE SPOONFULS OF SUGAR, I can’t disguise the bitterness of the Rake’s parsley in my tea. Nala assured me that it’s best drunk fast and so hot that you burn your tongue. It leaves me feeling even more nauseated and shaky.

Wonderful.

Perhaps there’s a way for me to get out of Jannik’s party tonight. The last thing I feel like doing now is prancing off with a bat to some demented vampiric shindy.

The fear that he will go to my mother if I refuse overrides the pain. Above and beyond the shock, the humiliation would destroy her: House daughters do not run away, and they especially do not fake their own suicides and then go live with Hobs and half-breeds in filthy squats out on the Claw.

And they never bed Hobs.

Of course, it’s something of a lie. I know well enough that the men of the Houses take Hob women sometimes. There are enough of their bastard spawn littering Pelimburg.

I shove my aches and tiredness down into a ball at the pit of my stomach along with the ever-present craving for scriv, and when the second-shift scullery girl comes in, I head home at a slow angry trudge.

Nala’s still not back when I get there, but Lils is waiting.

Her face is set in a grim mask, angrier than her standard expression of general irritation at the world. “You’re a fool,” she says when she sees me. “And you’re not the first.”

“Explain.” I dump my bag down on the floor and go to pour myself a bowl of whatever blended tea is Lils’s special for the day. She’s got a pot on the boil, and there are tea eggs rolling at the bottom of the murky water. The thought of biting down into an egg just about has me running for the little balcony so that I can throw up. The taste of Rake’s parsley wars with the dregs of my hangover. Never again.

Lils sighs and shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she says. “Don’t be a fool when it comes to Dash.”

“I’ll thank you to keep your advice to yourself.” Anger burns, choking me, and I think about how if I just had the slightest bit of scriv in me, I’d pin her against the wall, let her feel the slow crush of what a War-Singer can do when riled.

“All I’m saying is, don’t lose your head or worse over him.” Lils pushes past me to check on her eggs. “You don’t have the foggiest when it comes to that lad and what he’ll use you for.”

I take a deep breath. “Your concern is noted.” I think of Dash’s letter, of how I am far from the first, but I won’t let Lils see my fears.

“Don’t you get all fancy-Lam on me.” She snorts. “It won’t stir me none. Don’t go thinking you’re his and he’s yours. There’s things you don’t know—” Footsteps sound on the stairs and she falls silent. She turns her attention back to her pots and prods the eggs with a wooden spoon.

Nala and Esta are chattering on the stairs. Or, at least, Nala is talking, and Esta is presumably listening. I back away from Lils to go scrub myself clean and await whatever dress Nala has tucked away.

I’m hiding in the washroom when Nala peers around the door. “Do you want to have a look at it?”

I nod. Whatever it is can’t be worse than the tat I’m wearing.

It turns out to be a high-waisted crimson gown. Very last season, and the hem is a little ragged. It’s been re-dyed at least once but the faint stains won’t be visible at night or by fatcandle-light. It’s obviously meant for someone a little more bosomy than me, but it’s a good enough fit, and at least I have a clean pair of cream-colored stockings to wear with it.

Nala paces before me, looking at me from every angle.

“And?”

“It’ll do.”

“Now I really feel like a kitty-girl.” I look down at the rather-too-gappy bodice.

“Well you’re just about halfway there,” Nala says. “What about shoes?”

I don’t, however, have anything remotely resembling suitable footwear. One glance at Nala’s muddied feet tells me that there’s no point asking her if she has any shoes that I could borrow.

“Your new boots will do then,” she says. “You won’t see them under all that material.”

The knowledge that I’ll be wearing heavy leather lace-up boots with an evening gown of MallenIve silk is somewhat irksome. I don’t know what I was hoping for—perhaps my pair of embroidered slippers to rise with the tide and wash up at the doorstep.

I tie my hair up, pinning it in place as best I can. My mouth is full of hairpins, and my speckled reflection looks sallow and ratlike. Before, I would have been powdered and perfumed, my hair done in an elaborate style by the patient fingers of servants. The household crake would have written lines in my honor, my dress would have been new, and I would have been as beautifully turned out as a glass sculpture from House Canroth. And as empty. I jab the last pin in place, stick out my tongue at my reflection, and set to cleaning the grime out from under my fingernails with a splinter of wood. My hands are red, chapped. They smell faintly of hard soap. The creams and unguents in my bathroom back in my mother’s house are like phantasmagorical things, little jewel-glass bottles, worth a month’s pay for a Hob out here on Whelk Street.

Perfumes and pretty things. I’m reduced to nothing without them. Is that all I am, all I ever wanted for myself? I face the wretch that glares back at me from the mirror. I am more than my wardrobe, more than my family name, more than my mother’s aspirations, more than a toy for my brother’s whims. The girl gives me a haughty look; it is one I recognize even without kohl and reddened cheeks. It is the look of self-possession. I smile slightly and nod back.

Nala also loans me a black lace shawl. I cover my shoulders and head downstairs looking completely out of place on Whelk Street. The few Hobs I pass whistle and jeer, but I keep my head high and ignore them. It’s a good walk back to the Crake, and I’m in a mood halfway between anger and tears when I finally pull up a free chair next to a wild-eyed crake and wait for the Gris-damned bat to arrive. The outside tables have all been lit by fatcandles in little glass cages, and warm orange firelight blossoms over the polished wooden tabletops. Some of the crakes are wearing wide-brimmed hats set with small candles that gutter out in the wind then promptly relight themselves. In this strange fluttering of light and poetry, I wait.

A snatch of rhyme drifts down from a high window. It’s the skip-rope song the Hoblings in the street are so fond of singing while they play. Mostly I barely hear the words these days, the taunts slipping over me as smoothly as the finest silk from MallenIve. This time though, they’ve added a new verse.

A corpse for a corpse, the sea-witch said,

A hand for a hand, a head for a head.

Pelim rose and Pelim fell,

A death for a death to end the spell.

The words are meaningless—children’s gibberish—but I shiver anyway, hoping for Jannik to arrive soon so I can leave this place.

The faint chimes of the tower bell are calling out the hour when I spot a black coach rounding the corner of the cobbled street. The six unis pulling it are soot black, their backward-sweeping horns crystal and silver. Even the most demented crake stops whispering to himself when House Sandwalker’s coach comes to a halt. I die inside. Everyone is watching, and for days after this they’ll be gossiping about some tarted-up kitty-girl getting into a bat coach. I pull my shawl tighter and try to pretend that everything is normal as I rise and walk over to where the coachman is holding the door open for me.

“Are you trying to get me noticed?” I whisper to the dark figure inside. “People will talk.”

He smiles in answer, fang tips flashing. “Get in, and then you can berate me to your heart’s content.”

Impossible damned bat. I sit opposite him, and the coach sets off with a jerk, bouncing so hard over the cobblestones that I’m certain that any moment I’m going to be violently ill. If I am, I shall aim in Jannik’s direction. Serve the insolent, grinning fool right.

“Are you feeling poorly?”

I glare at him. House Sandwalker is up in New Town, a hillside villa, so I have at least a good half hour of bone-rattling traveling to endure before we get there. I am not in the mood for conversation. I perch on the edge of my seat and make sure my feet are tucked away under my dress. The only thing remotely comforting about this nighttime ramble through the city streets is the faint tickle of magic that brushes my face. I’m almost tempted to lean closer to him just to feel more of it. Idiot. I concentrate on glaring harder instead.

He sighs and leans back against his seat. “It’s not that bad.”

“And I have only your word on that.”

“Come now, Feli—Firell, it’s a party, there’ll be wine and food and music. Nothing you haven’t faced before.”

“And if someone recognizes me?”

“The only people who will recognize you are unlikely to care.”

A tendril of worry winds its way up my spine. “How do you mean?”

He sighs again and looks out the black window. Vague shapes flit past us, ghost houses and lights. “You’ll see.”