CHAPTER FOUR Two Kinds of Blood #2
I was watching the door as well. It had nothing to add.
“That was somebody’s envoy.”
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The rain stopped in the night the way northern rain does, all at once, and it was the quiet that woke me.
I went down to the Crown at eight. The Crown is what Duskmere has instead of a second tavern: four rooms over a bar nobody drinks in, kept by a man called Bewes who inherited it and has never forgiven it.
The stair smells of mice. In the passage there’s a stuffed pike in a case gone yellow, which has been shedding its varnish since before I was born, and it grins out at you, and I’ve never once walked past it without wanting to say sorry.
Bewes was doing his accounts, by which I mean he was holding a pen.
“Tall one? Fair? Came in about ten.” He didn’t look up. “Paid for the night, went up, and the bed’s not been sat on. Blanket square as a biscuit. I’d have said he never set foot in the room, only the window’s open, and it wasn’t.”
“He left the window open.”
“He left the window open in a north wind,” said Bewes, with the tired satisfaction of a man whose low opinion of the world has been proved right before breakfast, “and there’s sand on the sill.”
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I found him in my own cove at the foot of the cliff steps. I’d known I would, on the way down, and I still wasn’t ready.
It was the lowest water of the month, and at that tide the cove stops being a cove.
The shingle runs out, and past it is forty feet of reef that nobody in Duskmere sees more than twice a year, black rock in long ribs reaching for the mouth, and in every trough between them a flat pane of still water.
Weed everywhere, all combed over the way the sea had gone.
Kelp stalks thick as my wrist, glossy and brown-gold and stinking gloriously.
The pools were full of light. The anemones had clenched into red buttons, and a green crab went sideways with enormous purpose about nothing.
After six days of rain the air was so clean it stung. The wind had dropped to nothing at all, and out past the headland the sea lay grey and flat under a long slow swell you could see and not hear.
Kael was sitting on the furthest rib of the reef with his boots off and his feet in the water, doing nothing whatsoever.
“You’ve come down those steps like a woman who means to be angry,” he said, when I was still twenty feet off. He didn’t turn. “It won’t last the walk over the weed. Nobody has ever stayed angry on kelp.”
I nearly went over twice getting out to him, which knocked the legs out from under it, damn him. By the time I sat down on the rock I was winded and my temper had gone into something more use to me.
Close to, in daylight, he looked worse and better both.
The fair hair had dried stiff with salt.
He had fine white lines at the corners of his eyes, the sort you’d get from squinting at water for fifty years, and on the skin of his forearms a faint patterning like fish scale.
Old sun, or not sun. It wouldn’t come clear however I looked at it.
“You didn’t sleep in the bed.”
“I paid for the bed.”
“That’s not.”
“I know what it’s not.” He lifted one foot out of the water, inspected it with distaste, and put it back. “I’ve slept in a bed eleven times, madam, and I don’t care for it. Lying dry all night strikes me as a thing people do only because someone told them to. And the blankets. Wool. On purpose.”
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“You said the comb was yours to find.”
“Ah.” He nodded, slowly. “Good. I’d have been disappointed if you’d started anywhere else.”
“Then start explaining.”
“Nineteen years ago, give or take a season, I was in the water off the harbour steps hunting for something else entirely, and a comb came down through eight feet of green with the light behind it, turning over and over.” He made a small tumbling motion with two fingers.
“Tortoiseshell. Three teeth gone. It’s an ugly comb, madam.
I’ve carried it about for nineteen years and I’ve never once warmed to it. ”
“Why keep it?”
“Because a girl went in after it.”
Somewhere under us the swell ran in beneath the reef and sucked back out.
“I don’t remember that.”
“You wouldn’t. You never got near it.” He turned his head and looked at me straight for the first time, and again nothing in his face did what men’s faces do.
“You went off the steps in a temper in a good dress, and you were in the water four seconds, perhaps, before someone had you by the collar. I was under you the whole while. I could have touched your foot.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I’d been sent to look, and I looked, and looking was all I’d been told to do.
” He said it flat, with no apology anywhere in it, and I knew I was being handed something true and faintly monstrous.
“You were fifteen, and you were nothing. Not a gleam on you. I went home and said there’s a girl and there’s nothing in her, and everyone above me was exceedingly pleased, and that was me and Duskmere done with for nineteen years. ”
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“What changed.”
“You went down.” He tipped his chin at the water. “And came up.”
“That’s all?”
“Madam, that’s the entire matter.” Something close to amusement crossed his face and moved on.
“There are perhaps four hundred people on this coast with some thin thread of the Deep in them. Bastards, and the grandchildren of bastards, and women who swim rather too well. It isn’t rare.
It’s common, and that’s what nobody up here grasps.
Stand on your harbour of a Sunday and you could pick out six. ”
“And none of them come up glowing.”
“None of them are spoken to.” He set the word down carefully, like something that might break.
“That’s what the fuss is about. Nobody minds a little sea in the blood.
What they mind, what had me on the road inside a day and will put others on it, is that something very old opened its eyes and used a name. ”
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“Who sent you?”
“That I shan’t tell you tonight.”
“It’s morning.”
“So it is.” He allowed it with a small turn of the hand.
“I shan’t tell you this morning either. It’s hardly a secret worth keeping; you’ll have it inside a month.
But hand you a name now and you’ll spend the month deciding what it means with nothing to go on, and you’ll be wrong.
And then you’ll be wrong in a room where being wrong costs. ”
“How very convenient.”
“Very convenient,” Kael agreed. “Also true. The two get on perfectly well.”
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Then he said the thing I’ve turned over more than anything else from that morning, and he said it while scratching the back of his neck, idly, as if he were remarking on the weather.
“You’re waiting for me to want you.”
I didn’t answer.
“You’ve been waiting since the door last night.
” He wasn’t unkind about it. That made it worse.
“You’re braced for it like a man walking past a dog that bit him once.
It hasn’t come, and now you’re wondering what’s wrong with you, which is a very stupid thing for a clever woman to wonder, and you’d wonder it anyway. ”
“You’re extremely rude.”
“I am, yes.” He sank both feet in to the ankle.
“Here’s the part you’ll not care for. Down there, madam, you’re not remarkable.
What you have, the thing that’s been used on every poor sod in that tavern since you were fifteen, is a middling gift in a line of middling gifts.
There are women in the Deep who could walk into that room and stop every heart in it, and they’d think you a sweet girl. ”
The cold of the rock had come up through my skirt. I let it.
“Then I’m nothing there either.”
“No. You’re something there. Only not that.
” He shrugged. “Everything that’s made your life a misery up here is ordinary down there.
Nobody will stare. Nobody will lose their footing.
You’ll walk into a room and be ignored, and I suspect it’ll be the strangest thing that ever happened to you, and I suspect you’ll not know what to do with your hands. ”
I looked out at the grey swell sliding past the mouth of the cove.
Something moved under my breastbone. Relief, some of it, and some of it grief, and a third thing I still haven’t got a name for, and it sat in me the rest of that day like a stone I’d swallowed.
“If you want that written down, you’d best go and write it. The tide turns in forty minutes and this rock goes under fast.”
He didn’t move. When I got to the top of the steps and looked back he was still sitting there with his feet in it, and the water was already climbing the far ribs of the reef towards him, and he gave no sign of having noticed. I’m fairly sure he had. I’m fairly sure he liked it.
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Elias came back on the Thursday coach, and I told him about Kael before he’d got his coat off, standing in the passage, all of it in the wrong order.
He listened without interrupting. When I’d finished he said, “The window at the Crown was open,” and I said yes, and he said, “And sand on the sill,” and I said yes.
Then he went into the front room and sat on the settle with his coat still on, leaned his head back against the wall and shut his eyes.
“Say something.”
“I’m working out what I think. So I don’t say something I’ll want back.”
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As it turned out, what he said four days later was a good deal worse than anything he’d have come out with that Thursday.
The four days were bad. Quiet bad. Elias doesn’t do loud; he does thorough.
He went back through the six books like a man hunting a dropped coin across a ploughed field.
He was courteous at breakfast. He asked after Mara.
Twice I found him standing in the yard by the new gate with his hands in his pockets, doing nothing, and when I came out he’d start moving again as if I’d caught him at something.
On the Monday, Kael knocked on my door.
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Three people in a kitchen is two too many when one of them is Kael, and mine isn’t a large kitchen.