When the Sea is Rising Red (15 page)

Mrs. Danningbread has left for the evening, but her daughter-in-law, Stella, takes one look at me and sits me down by the tearoom counter. The waiters are clearing a space in the corner of the shop and laying down wooden pallets to make a low stage. I watch them without any real interest, my head cradled in my arms.

“Eat this,” Stella says, and puts a plate loaded with scones and gooseberry jam before me. The scones are dry and the jam a little badly set but I don’t care. I wolf the scones down so fast that I feel like I’ve stuffed my stomach with chalk.

Finally, when I’ve gorged myself so much that I don’t think I’ll be able to stand, let alone walk back home, I take a look around the emptying tearoom, half hoping that I’ll see Jannik scribbling away, his dark head bent over a book. But the poets are gone, most of them, and a younger, smarter, brighter crowd is taking their place.

They remind me a lot of Dash. They are low-Lams, Hobs, and half-breeds, but they carry themselves with a gallant swish, their coats are deep navy or black, and they wear crisp white shirts that wouldn’t look out of place in a House wardrobe. Their waistcoats are jewel bright, and some are heavily embroidered with delicate patterns. They’re none of them well-bred though, for all their finery. They laugh loudly and shove at each other’s shoulders as they tell ribald jokes and off-color anecdotes. They slap the thighs of their tight dark trousers and stamp their high boots.

“What’s going on?” I ask Stella as I push my empty plate away. With one finger I press at the crumbs, wanting to prolong the sweetness.

“It’s the night crowd,” she says, and measures poisonink leaves into an urn. “They’re always a bit boisterous on a music night.”

The small stage suddenly makes sense. I wonder what kind of music they play—if it’s going to be like the street-theater musicals. Curiosity makes me linger. Already it’s growing dark out, and the thought of running through Old Town in the night isn’t exactly appealing. Stella shoves a cup of the poisonink tea across the counter toward me and I sip it, watching the crowd.

I’m about to get up to leave before the last light is gone when Nala comes bounding through the door, her red hair in a frizzy cloud around her shoulders. She’s wearing a loose dress of faded purple and, as usual, not a stitch on her feet. They are gray with mud splatters.

The boys who greet her with wild hugs and plant overenthusiastic kisses on her cheeks don’t seem to mind. She waves them off, still laughing, and then spots me.

“Firell!” She dances through the crowd and takes my hands in hers. “I didn’t know that you’d be coming tonight.”

“Neither did I,” I say.

“Verrel is coming later with Esta and Lils.” She claps her hands. “It’ll be good, all of us, just the thing to keep Esta from thinking too much.”

“And Dash?”
Felicita, you idiot.
I can’t believe I’m even asking. My heart speeds up. Too much tea, obviously.

Nala gives me a sidelong look. “Of course he’ll be here. We better snag good seats.” She grabs my arm and maneuvers me to a table near the stage. I sit down and I relax and let myself forget about Jannik and his stupid intrusion into my life. I’ll go to his little party, and then never think of it again.

Charl is working the night shift and he ducks and weaves among the patrons, filling tea orders and selling bottles of brown ale from under the counter. He grins at me and touches my shoulder as he passes.

The Crake is filling up quickly, and Nala stands on her chair to wave Verrel, Lils, and Esta over. Esta is still expressionless, but she allows Verrel to order her tea while the others get ale.

Night falls, and the flickering glow from the outside lamps and the fatcandles on the tables casts everything in oily yellow light. Faces are in shadow, and as I drink the last cold drops of my ’ink-laced tea, I find myself staring at the door, watching for a familiar head of tousled dark hair to appear. The places where he kissed my throat feel branded.

Stop it
.
Stop looking.

Lils scowls at me and shakes her head. I look down at my empty teabowl instead and let the thrum of noise and voices lull me. I won’t look up again, I tell myself.

But, of course, I do.

I can’t help myself.

“Another round?” says Verrel as he stands, and I murmur assent along with the others. He flags Charl down, and the sweating low-Lammer nods, tallying the order in his head. When he leaves, Verrel pulls a half-jack of vai from his pocket and grins at us. “Drop of the blood?”

Dash arrives after a long, uncomfortable hour with us squashed together at the table. Esta is still drinking straight tea, but Verrel is happily tipping cheap vai into our empty bowls and bottles when I spot Dash talking to one of his compatriots at the door.

He sees me and raises a hand in greeting, then saunters over to our table. The crowd parts easily before him, and he never has to ask anyone to step out of his way. Sometimes I have to wonder if perhaps Hobs really do have magic of their own.

Nala stands, sending her chair tipping backward. “Look.” She points at the knot of people by the makeshift stage. “They’re here.”

The band sets up, tapping drums and tuning fiddles. A tall, nervous boy is crouched on a stool, bent over his kitaar and strumming it while he fiddles with the ivory tuning nuts. A short girl with dirty-blond hair is sitting on a tall barstool on the stage and drumming her heels against the struts, her right hand shimmering a tambourine against her thigh.

“Have you heard them before?” Dash asks as he squeezes into the tiny gap between me and Lils.

I shake my head.

“They’re very good, but I don’t think they’ll be to your taste.”

“What does that mean?”

He leans closer so that his breath is tickling my ear. “Just that it’s not the sort of thing you’ll find in the ballrooms of House Malker.”

“So?” I shrug. “I’m always open to new experiences.”

At that he laughs and puts his arm loosely behind me.

I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do, but no one seems to notice his actions, or they put it down to the room being crowded and not to some strange idea of courtship that Dash—uncultured clot that he is—feels is appropriate. So I settle back with my heavily laced tea and wait as the crowd slowly quiets. His arm is a strange weight, uncomfortable and pleasant at the same time. I round my shoulders and try to concentrate on the band.

The girl on the stage is still gently rattling her tambourine and it fills the suddenly silent tearoom with an expectant hiss. The fiddler raises his fiddle and draws his bow across the strings. The music is slow, sad.

Then the drums come in and the tempo picks up, and the melody becomes a rousing, stomping whirl.

It slows again, and the girl begins to sing. Her voice is soft and the tearoom is quiet quiet quiet. Her voice wavers, then strengthens.

She’s singing a song about goodbyes and sunlight. The drummer joins his voice to hers, and they sing the chorus louder, the words strong and no longer sad.

Faster and faster the song goes, and I realize it’s about more than what it first appeared. It’s about wealth and poverty and injustice, and the tearoom crowd knows the chorus and with each verse more and more of the crowd begins to sing, until everyone is hollering around me and thundering their boots against the wooden floors, making the tables shiver, the teabowls dance.

The words seem familiar, as if I’ve heard them in a dream and then forgotten them.

Inside me, the scriv from the vai dances too, and the whisper of magic runs through my veins. I shiver.
Gris,
I need this. Even this pale imitation of a scriv-high is enough to make me weep with frustration. The little relief it gives is not a salve, it’s a lure.

Dash is pouring straight shots of vai, no longer even pretending to hide the illicit drinking. No one cares or notices. The vai calls to me, pregnant with scriv, promising me power.

I down my shot and Dash pours me another, and another. I lose myself in the swirl of sound, in the headiness of the music and the crowd’s reaction. The only thing I wish is that I could hear the singing girl clearly—half her vocals are drowned in the hubbub.

There is a way, of course, and the more I think about it, the better the idea sounds. It’s only the smallest of magics, using no heat, and I’ve enough scriv in my system to do it. I can be subtle—they’ll never know it was anything more than the art of the musicians, the strength of the music itself. I look quickly around me, at the rapt faces, everyone singing and cheering. They are focused on the stage.

Satisfied that I’ll attract no attention, I reach out with invisible hands and shape the air, making the particles vibrate against one another, and gradually the music grows louder and louder, until the chatter of the crowd is lost under the surge.

The band members exchange confused looks but carry on playing, and the crowd just cheers more, singing until they are breathless. Dash hugs me closer to him with one hand and I hear the whisper in my head like an echo.

“Oh, you are an interesting one, little House Lammer,” he says, and I smile dreamily.

Magic.

12

G
IDDY 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.”