Chapter 6
Liam had one eye at the gap and he could see almost nothing.
He could see the bright rectangle of the doorway. He could see Nell Rook's black shape standing in it. He could see her right hand, hanging at her side, open, empty, and he watched that hand very carefully because it was the only part of her he could read.
It was shaking.
"Cully," Nell said again.
"Hi, Nell."
The voice was young. Fifteen, sixteen. It had the crack still in it, the place where a boy's voice has not finished making up its mind, and it was cheerful and easy and it was coming from six feet outside the door.
"Look at you," the boy said. "You look old."
Nell did not move.
Behind the crates, Liam eased the Winchester up along his side, slow, so slow, an inch at a time, and got his hand around the grip.
"Don't," Isaiah breathed, right at his ear. "Liam. Don't."
"I'm not going to."
"Your hand's on the bolt."
"I know where my hand is."
Down the hill, the cheerful voice called out again through the fog, and now Liam could hear it more clearly, and it was an older man's voice, pleasant and unhurried and very sure of itself.
"Nell! Come on down and talk to me, I'm not climbing that hill!"
Nell Rook did not answer him.
She was still looking at whatever was standing outside her door.
"It's not him," Petyr said. He had not gone back inside. He was standing three feet behind Nell with the garden fork in both hands and his face the color of paper. "Nell. Nell, it's not him, it's the same as before, it's the same as Ada, it's just doing the thing it does—"
"It's daylight," Nell said.
Petyr stopped.
"It's daylight, boy." Her voice was cracking apart in the middle. "It has never come in daylight. Not once. Not in eight months. It comes at dusk and it goes at dawn and there is sun on that gravel."
And then, quietly, from outside, the boy said, "Nell, they let me go."
Liam's stomach turned over.
"What?"
"They let me go." A laugh, a real one, bright and disbelieving. "I did what they wanted. I dove for them all winter. And Sawtooth said I'd earned it and they brought me home. Nell, I'm home."
And Nell Rook took a step forward.
Liam moved.
He was up and out from behind the crates before he had decided anything, low, fast, keeping the rifle down along his leg, and he got to the doorway in five strides and he put his shoulder into the frame and looked out.
And he saw him.
A boy stood on the gravel path six feet from the door.
He was thin. He was very thin. He wore a canvas coat two sizes too big for him and his hair was cut short and badly and his feet were bare in the cold mud, and he was standing in the flat gray morning light with his arms hanging at his sides.
He was casting a shadow.
Liam looked at the shadow for a full second, and something in him that had been braced very hard came loose all at once.
"Nell," he said. "He's got a shadow."
Nell Rook made a noise.
It was the sound a person makes when something enormous lets go inside them, and then she was moving, she was running the six feet down the path, and she took the boy in her arms and lifted him clean off the ground, and he was laughing, and she was not.
Liam stood in the doorway with the rifle down along his leg and his heart going like a fist on a drum.
And he looked past them, down the hill, into the fog.
There were men on the path.
Three of them, standing loosely about forty yards down where the trees began, and the one in front had his hands in his pockets and was looking up at the blockhouse with an expression of mild, patient good humor.
He was big. Wide, rather than tall, an ox of a man in a long coat that shone wetly in the damp, and he was maybe fifty, with a gray beard cropped close and a face that had been broken and reset more than once.
He raised a hand.
"You'd be the new one," he called up pleasantly.
Liam said nothing.
"Come on down," the man said. "Bring the rifle. I don't mind."
They came down the hill.
All of them, in the end, because Nell would not leave anyone in the blockhouse and Liam would not leave Chloe, so Isaiah and Petyr carried her out on her door and set her down in the wet grass at the edge of the clearing with a blanket over her.
She was asleep. Or something like it.
The Sawtooth men waited on the beach, unhurried, and Liam counted them as he came down out of the trees.
Ten. Exactly ten. He had counted right in the dark at three hundred yards, and he took a small hard satisfaction in that, and Tom Darcy's voice said something dry in the back of his head that he did not let himself hear all the way.
The fire was still burning on the gravel. The five fuel cans stood in their neat row. The longboat was hauled up on the beach with her bow on the stones.
And the ox of a man was sitting on an overturned crate in front of the fire, waiting for them, with his hands on his knees.
"Nell Rook," he said. "You look like hell."
"Sawtooth," Nell said.
"That's not my name and you know it isn't."
"It's the only one I've got for you."
The man laughed. It was a good laugh, warm and genuine, and Liam found that he hated it more than any sound he had heard in the willows.
"Fair enough," he said. He looked past her, at the boy standing at her shoulder, and his face did something almost fond. "Well. There he is. Delivered."
"You took him."
"I did."
"You broke his father's arm with an oar."
"That's true too." The man nodded slowly, as if conceding a good point in a friendly argument. "And I've thought about that. I've thought about that a fair bit, if you want to know."
"You're not sorry."
"No," he agreed. "But I've thought about it."
Liam stood at the edge of it with the rifle held low across his body and he watched the man's eyes.
They kept coming back to him.
Not to the rifle. That was the thing. A man who wanted a rifle looked at the rifle.
This one looked at Liam's face, and at his hands, and at the way he was standing, and then away, and then back, and Liam understood that he was being read exactly the way he was reading, and that whoever this man had been before the world ended, he had not been stupid.
"Introduce us, Nell," the man said.
Nell's jaw was set.
"His name's Liam," she said. "He came in off the water two nights back."
"Off the water." The man's eyebrows went up a fraction. "From where?"
"East," Liam said.
"East is a big place."
"It is."
The man smiled.
"I'm Rennick," he said. "Half the coast calls me Sawtooth and I've given up fighting it. I run about sixty people out of a place up the Sound and I've been running them for two years and they're all still breathing, which is more than most can say."
He gestured at the crate opposite him. "Sit down. I'd like to talk to you and I don't like doing it with my neck bent."
Liam did not sit.
"Talk," he said.
Rennick's smile did not falter, but something behind it settled, and Liam saw the man revise something and file it.
"All right," Rennick said. "Standing it is."
He clapped his hands on his knees.
"Here's my business, Nell, and I'll say it in front of your new friend because it makes no difference to me. I came here in November and I took your fish and I took your nets and I took your boy, and I told you I'd come back in the spring for more."
He looked around the beach. "It's February. I'm early. That's not because I'm greedy. It's because things have changed and I've got a problem, and it's a big enough problem that I've spent five cans of fuel and two days on the water to come down here and offer you a deal instead of just taking what
I want. Which, I'd remind you, I could do."
"You could try," Petyr said.
Rennick looked at the boy, and looked at the garden fork, and did not laugh at him, and Liam grudgingly gave him a mark for that.
"Son," Rennick said, "I've got ten men here and forty more at home and you've got a rake. But I'll tell you what. I'll do you the honor of pretending I'm worried."
He turned back to Nell.
"Cully's yours," he said. "Free and clear. That's not a bargaining chip, that's a gift, and I've handed it over before I've asked you for anything, so you know I'm serious."
"Why," Nell said.
"Because I need you to believe me for the next ten minutes," Rennick said, "and I couldn't think of another way to buy it."
He stood up.
He was even bigger standing, and he walked over to the fuel cans and put one boot up on the nearest one and looked out at the gray water.
"There's a war coming," he said. "Up the Sound."
Nobody spoke.
"There's four crews on that waterfront," Rennick said.
"Ballard. The Yards. The Pike men, who hold the market itself. And a crowd out of the south end that call themselves the Shore and are the worst of the lot. For two years they've been killing each other by the handful over that ground and getting nowhere,
and everyone's been more or less content with that, because a war that nobody wins is a war everybody survives."
He turned around.
"That ended in December," he said. "The Shore and the Yards made an alliance. And there's a man come up out of the south, from Portland way, who's brought them something."
"What," Liam said.
Rennick looked at him.
"Powder," he said. "Real powder. Not the pot-scrapings people have been using. He's found a magazine somewhere, an old quarry store or a National Guard house or God knows, and he's brought it north on a barge, and he's given it to the Shore, and the Shore has given it to the Yards,
and between them they've got enough of it to take that waterfront and everything on it."
The fire snapped.
"So they're going to win," Nell said.
"They're going to win before the summer," Rennick said.
"And then it's over. Then it's one crew from the Narrows to the north end, with powder and boats and four hundred men, and everything that lives on this water lives at their pleasure."
He looked at her steadily. "Including you, Nell. Including your twenty-two. You think I'm a hard man. I am a hard man. But I took four hundred pounds of fish and left you your lives and I did not touch your women and I gave the boy back.