CHAPTER FIVE #2
Maren's whole body went cold. "You're one of them."
?
The woman froze with her hand on the gunwale.
When she straightened and turned back, her face had closed all the way, and for the first time there was something hard in the gray-green of her eyes, something that had taken a long time to learn how to be hard.
"I was," she said. "A long time ago. I got out. Not many do."
There was a whole life folded down into not many, said flat and handed to no one, and Maren, who folded her own the exact same way, heard it for what it was.
For a moment the two of them only stood there in the heat and the insect-racket, two people who kept everything that mattered well underground, each seeing it plainly in the other and neither glad to be seen.
And the mark over Maren's heart, still as a stone since she had reached the red water, woke.
It did not pull and it did not flinch. It turned over, once, slow, the deep unhurried roll it had made the night Lark died, and then it lay there warm and awake and aware, and Maren could not have told anyone alive whether it had woken to the woman or to the water or to the word them.
Whether it was leaning toward this tall wary stranger or warning her off her.
The not-knowing put a worse fear in her than either answer would have.
"Them," Maren said. "What are they. Give me the name."
The woman looked at her a long moment, weighing it, and the marsh ticked and sawed around them, and the red water lay there saying nothing. Maren was sure she would refuse. Then she said it, low, the way you'd hand over something with teeth.
"Les Noyées."
The French of it landed soft and terrible. The drowned women.
"The city calls them the Slackwater," the woman went on, not looking at Maren now, looking out across the red, "when it lets itself call them anything at all.
They've been here as long as the city has.
Old families. Old money, some of it. The kind that bought up marsh a hundred years back and never would say why they wanted water nobody could farm or build on.
" A pause. "They give things to the water.
To the one they serve. And they don't have accidents. "
Maren stood in the heat with her dead girl turning over against her ribs and thought of a basin of still black water in a shuttered room off Esplanade, three years gone, and a needle, and an old woman with iron-gray hair loose to her shoulders and scars laddered up the inside of both arms, who had married her and Lark in blood and then caught Maren by the wrist at the door with a face like a graveside.
"An old woman," Maren said. Her voice had gone strange in her own ears. "Iron-gray hair, worn loose. Old scars, here, up both arms." She drew a line up the inside of her own forearm. "She does the bindings. She did mine. She leaned us over the water and told us we'd drown into each other."
The woman had gone very still again, and this time it was not the buried-grief stillness. This was alarm, plain and cold. "You know Vesper Calder."
"Is that her name." Maren had never had all of it. Just Vesper, inked on the back of a receipt by a hand she didn't know. The full name settled over the old woman in her memory and fit her like a lid. "Vesper Calder."
"Stay away from her." The woman's voice had dropped and gone urgent. "Whatever you think you're chasing, whatever that thing in your chest is telling you, do not go looking for Vesper Calder. You do not have the first idea what she is."
But Maren was already gone from there.
She was nineteen, bent over black water while an old woman drove a needle into her ribs and made of her and Lark one single thing.
She was at a graveside, watching that same old woman's last warning reach her three years too late.
She was standing now at the red lip of the water where Lark had been drowned, and the woman who had married them in blood ran the cult that gave things to the water and called it no accident, and had known them, had touched them both, had understood to the ounce what a clean unharvested bind like theirs would one day be worth.
It made a terrible kind of sense. The woman who set the mark was the woman who emptied it. Vesper Calder had married them so that one day she could take them back. Vesper Calder had killed Lark.
"I have to go," Maren said.
"Did you hear what I said?" The woman had come a step after her, the alarm naked on her face now. "Stay away from her. Vesper Calder is not what you think she is."
"No," Maren agreed, already walking, not turning round, the ink burning sure and hot over her heart for the first time since she'd reached the dead red water. "She's exactly what I think she is."
"Then take this." Something landed in the mud at Maren's feet: a field notebook's torn corner, a number on it, a name.
The woman's voice came after her, hard and steady across the marsh.
"Rowan. Rowan Keele. When that thing in your chest starts walking you somewhere you won't walk back out of, you call before you get there. Not after."
Maren turned and went. She passed the torn notebook corner where it lay in the mud at her feet and did not stop for it.
She went toward the shell road with the marsh screaming green and endless around her and a name to put to all of it at last, burning behind her teeth.
Once, she let herself look back. The woman called Rowan was still standing in the red shallows where Maren had left her, watching her go, making no move to call after her a second time, and some small mutinous part of Maren wanted to be called after a second time, wanted it badly, and she faced front and walked on before the wanting could turn into a thing she would have to account for.
Over her heart the mark blazed like a match held to dry grass, and she could not tell, walking, and she would go a long way before she could tell, whether it was driving her on or hauling at her, with everything it had, to pull her back.
She had gone a dozen steps up the shell road before she stopped. She went back the way she'd come and picked the notebook corner up out of the mud. She told herself it meant nothing. She put it in her pocket anyway.