Chapter Fifty-Four Patrick
Nina led them to a grubby drinking hole with few patrons beyond the windows.
He guessed there wasn’t much coin to spare for a pint of late.
Colson & Sons had been the same in the winter before the rebellion.
Tess had given people a cup of tea and a stool anyway.
They stayed for hours and played cards and didn’t buy a single drink.
Sometimes it was just the warmth and company they needed.
Something told Patrick this bar wouldn’t be as hospitable.
John procured some coins from his pockets and flashed them before Patrick’s and Nina’s eyes, likely pinched from some sorry Artisan’s pocket in Lavnonshire. He gave them a wink and disappeared inside the pub, only to give Patrick a nod through the window several moments later.
With their hats pulled low and noses down, they followed John inside. No music, no fire in the hearth. Just a handful of men at the bar. One other playing checkers alone by the window. The air was so full of tobacco smoke, he could hardly see their faces.
Up the rickety stairs they went, and into the first pair of rooms they came to. John gave a key to Nina, then used another on one of the doors, holding it ajar for Patrick to follow.
Patrick found himself shaking his head. “I’ll be a moment.”
John sighed knowingly, then shut the door.
Nina seemed in a trance. She tried the lock three times with no success. He had to take the key from her. “Here,” he said. “Let me.”
He let her into the room and watched as she drifted inside, her fingers already pulling at the men’s cap she wore, letting her hair out. She pulled off her coat and left it on the skinny bed, its mattress sunken in the middle, the coverings on top wrinkled.
She said nothing, did nothing more. Just stared at the coat as though she couldn’t recall whose it was.
Patrick stood at the threshold, feeling horribly unsure of himself. The cogs of his mind clanked an assault. No fix in sight. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed so audibly he thought the building sighed with him.
He had watched Nina retreat into herself incrementally from the moment she stepped off the boat, disappearing into realms of memory. Now, beneath this roof, she resembled someone much smaller than he knew her to be.
At twelve, she’d come into that courtyard ten feet fall and stolen all his bravado. In Kenton Hill, she’d come down that tunnel spitting fire at him. But somewhere between the clutter of her childhood home and this hovel of a pub, she had faded into the gray of Scurry.
A voice told Patrick to take her away from this town, to shut her eyes and not let her open them again until they were long gone. He wanted to return her to Kenton Hill and walk her among the yellow hills and show her that there were still parts of the world not all bad.
He was swelling with premonition. An omen.
“Is there something I can bring you?” he asked, almost desperate for it.
She looked up, as though just now realizing that he stood there. She shook her head. “No. No, I’m all right,” she said in a voice that barely held, each word breaking away from the last. “Really, Patrick.”
She dusted her hands together as though concluding some sort of business, nodded in a perfunctory way at the wall, then went to the waiting basin bowl on the credenza, half filled. She took the pins out of her hair, one by one, her lovely face growing wetter with each.
There was something strange that happened to Patrick when Nina cried. Like God had grown tired of giving him chances and was demanding his toll.
How else to describe the rupture of his heart?
Or perhaps it was just evidence that she’d changed him irreparably. Made him a man possessed of something more than anger.
He went to her and took the towel from her hands. He turned her by her shoulders and gathered her in his arms until he felt her bones against his. He tried to absorb from her the pain.
There was no fix for this, but he thought he could ease something in them both, with her head beneath his chin, his fingers against her lower back. He pushed his brow into the crown of her head. Breathed in the scent of her for a moment.
He felt her cling to him. Shake.
“Just breathe, Scurry girl,” he said.
They stood there like that for a long time. For as long as it took for her heart to break and piece itself together again. Patrick wiped the backs of his fingers over her freckles until the tears ceased.
“If you tell me you want to leave and never come back, I’ll take you away,” Patrick told her. “You only have to say it.”
Nina took a moment to answer, armoring herself bit by bit.
“The last time my mother really spoke to me was in that house, in this town,” she said.
“She left it to try and find a way to dig me out, and she died for it.” Nina looked at Patrick with steely eyes.
“There are people all over the continent with their last hope in our hands. What you saw…” she said, and he knew she was imagining her father, deteriorating into that cot.
“It’s not just in that house. It’s everywhere.
You and I, we can change it,” she said. “It’s about time I did something to change it. ”
He paused, not knowing if he should say what he was about to. “I need you to survive it,” Patrick said. “I can’t see you hurt.” Though he feared she had already been hurt in all the ways a person could be.
“When I was under the Artisans’ roof, they wanted to weaponize me,” she said. “When I hid from them, they found me. What is there to do but fight back?” She squared her chin, pushed her shaking lips together, and Patrick felt relief overtake him at seeing this strength return to her.
“I’ll do the fightin’, darlin’,” he promised her, looking from one hazel eye to the other. “But you’ll be the one to change everythin’ for good.”
He pressed his lips to her forehead and held them there. Felt heat and hurt and a thousand other things transfer in that touch.
And then he backed away from her. Wishing, as he had innumerable times, that the two of them were any other pair.
“G’night, Nina.”
“Would you stay if I asked?” she said. “Just to sleep.” She paused. “I—I don’t sleep well anymore. Not since…”
Since Kenton Hill, where they’d shared a bed.
He should deny her, but what man could bring themselves to?
He sat in an unforgiving wicker chair all night, pulled close to the bed, where Nina slept fretfully.
But when his hand rested against her forehead, she quieted. Her eyelids settled. Her lips parted and released a breath, like it had been trapped in the cage of her.
So he kept it there until his arm deadened, and until his own eyelids drooped shut, and he dreamed of yellow hills, yellow hair, and a girl who felt like the sun.