CHAPTER FOUR Two Kinds of Blood
CHAPTER FOUR
Two Kinds of Blood
It rained for six days. On the sixth the wind backed round to the north, and the whole town went indoors and stayed there. That was the night he came.
On a night like that the Gull and Anchor is the best room in Vaelmoor anyway.
Everything in it steams. The oilskins hang four deep by the door and drip on the flags, and the flags hand it back as a low mist round everyone’s boots.
The fire gets fed twice as often as it needs and spits whenever the rain finds the flue, and the windows run with it.
The lamps burn tallow, not oil, because Wren is thrifty, and they smell somewhere between mutton and chapel.
Thirty-odd people who all know each other, packed into a room built for twenty, and every one of them faintly damp.
I had a corner. Elias had gone to Rellhaven for two days about a letter, and I’d come down rather than sit at home listening to the roof beam complain, and Wren had put me where she puts anyone she wants an eye on: the end of the bar, back to the wall.
“You’re eating that.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re eating that, love, and then I’m bringing you another, and if you leave half again I’ll take it as a personal insult to my kitchen and to my late mother, God rot her gravy.” She was gone before I could answer, off up the far end, bellowing at somebody about a stool.
I was three mouthfuls in when the door opened.
? ? ?
Doors open all night in a tavern. Nobody looks up.
Everybody looked up.
It didn’t happen all at once, which was the strange part.
It went through the room front to back, like wind going through standing corn: the men nearest the door, then the long table, the dice corner, and last of all the two old women by the fire who haven’t looked at anything voluntarily since the war.
Talk didn’t stop. It thinned out, the way it does when people keep saying words while their attention has gone off somewhere without them.
The cold came in, naturally, because the door was open. It brought a smell with it.
Under the rain, right at the back of the throat, was the smell of the cove at the lowest tide of the year, when the water pulls off stone that’s been under for six months. Cold and mineral and faintly sweet. Old water. Nothing to do with the harbour at all.
He shut the door behind him and shook his head once, like a dog come out of a river. Water flew off him in a bright fan and hissed on the hearth. And the room began, very slowly, to pretend it hadn’t seen.
? ? ?
He was not what I’d have expected, had I been expecting anything.
A big man, but not heavy. He was built the way a swimmer builds rather than a fisherman, long in the arm, the shoulders sitting low and loose.
Fair, though there was no sun in the fairness.
His hair was somewhere between wheat and iron and longer than Duskmere wears it, and he pushed it back off his forehead with both hands as he came in and it stayed exactly where he put it, sleek as a seal’s. Forty, perhaps. Perhaps not.
A good coat, soaked black. Boots entirely wrong for the weather, and no hat. None of it seemed to strike him as a problem. If anything he looked mildly put out that it had stopped raining on him.
His eyes were the grey-green of the sea over sand in the hour before a storm. I noticed them before anything else about his face, and I noticed them the way you’d notice paint on a wall. It didn’t occur to me to notice a man.
He got to the bar without touching a soul. That takes doing, in that room, on that night. People moved aside for him and not one of them knew they’d moved.
? ? ?
“Ale,” he said to Wren. “Whatever’s nearest the tap and honest.”
His voice was slow. Not a drawl, and not a performance either, or not entirely. He had the pace of a man who has never once in his life had to hurry a sentence to get it heard.
Wren poured. She’s poured for thousands of strangers.
“You’ve come a way.”
“I have.”
“In that coat.”
“It seemed the thing at the time.”
“It seemed the thing.” She set the cup down. “It’s October, love. It’s blowing a north wind off six hundred miles of open water, and you’ve walked into my tavern without a hat on, looking like something the sea coughed up.”
“How very dramatic that would be,” he said, and drank. Then he looked at the fire with open distaste. “Must it be quite so hot in here?”
And Wren, who in nineteen years I have never once seen stuck for the next line, stood there with the cloth in her hand and had nothing.
? ? ?
He turned round with his cup, leaned his elbows back on the bar and looked the room over like a man who’s been asked his opinion of a painting and has already decided it’s overpriced.
Then he looked at me.
Men have been looking at me since I was fifteen, and I know the whole catalogue.
The young ones go stupid and red. The married ones go guilty, and then angry that they’ve been made to feel guilty.
The old ones go sad, and those are the worst. I know the exact half second where the wanting arrives and what a face does on either side of it.
None of that happened.
He looked at me the way you’d glance up at a weathervane to see where the wind had got to.
Then he smiled, though not at me. It went off to one side, at nothing, at some joke of his own. He came down the bar with his cup and stopped four feet off, which is one foot further than a man stops.
“You’ll be the one, then.”
? ? ?
I did it before I’d decided to.
I hadn’t done it on purpose since I was twenty-six.
Well. Once, at the fish rail in September, when I reached for Elias out of sheer bloody-mindedness and he didn’t so much as blink.
Once. I’m not proud of that and I’m not proud of this, and this time I did it in a crowded room to a stranger in less than a heartbeat.
Nobody can see me do it. It’s a lean, a turning towards, somewhere in behind the ribs, like opening a hand you’ve kept shut a long while.
At summer’s end, in that same room, it had got out of me without my say-so, and a man across the fire had stood up so fast he knocked his stool over.
Nothing happened.
With Elias at the fish rail it had been like pushing against a wall, something there, something politely declining.
This was worse. This was reaching for a stair in the dark and the stair isn’t there.
All of me went down through the missing step and there was no floor under it and no wall beside it, nothing, and I grabbed the edge of the bar.
The stranger watched me do it. All of it, start to finish.
“Mm,” he said, and drank. “I’d not trouble yourself again, madam. It’s like whistling at a stone.”
? ? ?
“Who are you.”
“Kael.”
“That’s a name. It isn’t an answer.”
“It’s most of one.” He turned and set his elbow on the bar so that we stood side by side instead of face to face, both of us looking out at the room, which meant nobody in the room could see either of our faces.
He’d arranged that in one movement while appearing only to shift his weight.
“You want to know what I am. Ask it properly. I shan’t faint. ”
“What are you.”
“The same thing you are.” He tipped his head a fraction at the window, the black rain, the harbour under it. “Rather less watered.”
The fire spat. Someone at the long table laughed, and the laugh went round the table and came back.
“You’ve about nine questions queued up,” Kael said. “You’ll ask the wrong one first. Everybody does. Go on.”
“How did you know me?”
“Wrong one.” He sounded delighted. “I’ll answer it anyway.
You smell of the Deep, madam, and before you take offence, don’t.
It isn’t a bad smell. It carries, like woodsmoke in a coat.
” He turned the cup on the wood, slowly, a quarter turn and back.
“You went down. Something down there set its attention on you and left it there and hasn’t taken it back, and any one of us within thirty miles could have walked to that door with our eyes shut.
It’s taken me five weeks. I stopped a night in Rellhaven, which I don’t recommend.
It’s appallingly dry. None of this is subtle. ”
“Five weeks.”
“Since you came up out of the water. Yes.”
Thirty-odd days, and then the six of rain on top. I was counting. He let me.
“You’ve been on the road since the day it happened.”
“Since the day it happened. Which ought to tell you how far the news went, and how fast. And I’d give some thought, madam, to who else can do the sum you’ve just done.”
? ? ?
Wren came down the bar then, and not casually.
“Rose.”
“It’s all right.”
“I didn’t ask if it was all right.” She planted both hands flat on the wood in front of Kael, which I’ve seen her do to men twice his size. “You. Are you drinking or are you working?”
Kael looked at her a moment. Then he came upright off the bar and gave her a small bow, an actual bow, ridiculous in a room full of wet fishermen.
“Drinking, mistress. And working. Though I’ve no intention of doing the second tonight, because I’ve walked a long way and yours is the first honest fire I’ve met since Rellhaven, and I say that as a man who can’t abide fires.” He laid a coin on the bar. “For the fire. Not the ale.”
Wren didn’t touch the coin.
“There’s a room at the Crown. It’s a filthy room. You’ll like it.”
“I’m certain I shall.”
He drained the cup and set it down and lifted his sodden coat off the back of the stool.
And on his way past me, without stopping or slowing, so low that I’ve wondered since whether anyone else in the room caught a syllable of it:
“The comb was mine to find. The rest of it wasn’t. Whoever went to the trouble of the fish loves you. I’d worry about that, if I were you. I am not.”
Then the door, and the cold, and the smell of low water going out into the rain after him.
Wren picked up his cup. Her hand wasn’t steady. She put the cup back down instead of carrying it off, and stood with both palms on the bar staring at the door, longer than she’d have wanted me to see.
“Rose. What in God’s name was that?”