The bottle was already in the air when Wick came through the kitchen door with six pints on a tray, and he had time to think that’s the good brandy before it went past his ear and burst against the chimney-breast.
He did not drop the tray. He was proud of that later. He stood in the doorway of the Drowned Lantern with brandy running down the wall behind him and the whole taproom going quiet in the way a room goes quiet when it has decided to become a fight, and he counted. One, two, three steps to the bar. Four, five, six to the contract board. Seven to the cellar hatch. Counting was a thing he did. It helped.
Outside, the storm was tearing the Grey Sound apart. Rain came sideways down Lampwick Lane and the fog bells on the Wharves clanged like somebody was hitting them with a plank. Inside, forty people who had nowhere drier to be were packed shoulder to shoulder under the low beams, and in the middle of them, dripping on Hettie Dunmore’s floor, stood the Lantern Company.
They looked like something the tide had brought in and the tide had not wanted either.
“Say it again,” said Brakka Ironsong.
She did not say it loudly. For Brakka that was a bad sign. The captain of the Lantern Company was seven feet of Varr whaler, grey-green and scarred, with lower tusks that showed when she smiled and were showing now. Her coat was soaked black. There was river weed in her hair. The maul she called Auntie leaned against the bar behind her, and her hand was not on it, which was the only reason anybody in the room was still breathing easily.
Across the table from her, Rafe Callow of the Gilded Blades smiled with all his very white teeth.
“I said,” Callow told her, “that the Compact is stripping your licence at month’s end, and everybody knows it, and the only question left in Saltmire is whether you’ll sell that maul before or after they take your chest.” He was a tall, handsome man in a gold-braided coat that had never been rained on. Six of his company stood behind him in matching blue, dry as biscuits. “A barrow full of dead men’s silver, Ironsong, and you let it fall in a river. What was it this time? The ground gave way? The map was wrong?”
“The map was wrong,” said a small anxious voice from somewhere near Brakka’s elbow. “Technically. I want to stress technically. The ground also gave way, but that was after—”
“Oswin,” said Brakka.
“Shutting up.”
Wick edged along the wall with the tray held high. Six to the contract board. He had learned a long time ago that in the Drowned Lantern, when it was about to go off, the place to be was the contract board, because nobody ever threw anything at paper. He got his back against it and felt the pinned notices crackle. One of them, he knew without looking, was the one he always ended up leaning against, as if his body went there on its own. GREY HOUND COMPANY. LOST BY ORDER OF THE MERCHANT COMPACT. Fifteen names. Fifteen months.
The fourth name down was Aldo Marsh.
Hettie had tried to take the notice down twice, because it was old and curling and bad for trade. Both times Wick had pinned it back up before morning. They had stopped talking about it.
“Here’s a thing I know,” Brakka said, still in that quiet voice. “The Compact has a long list of companies that fail, and it hangs it on the wall of the Hall of Scales, and nobody reads it. And it has a short list of companies that run, and the Gilded Blades are at the top. Every time. Lanterns go and look, Callow. That’s the whole job. We went into that barrow, and we came out, and nobody died. You ran from a fog bank in the Saltings three summers ago and left a fisherman’s boy in it.”
Callow’s smile did not move, but one of the Blades behind him shifted his feet.
“Ancient history.”
“Varr don’t have ancient history. We have the Ledger.” She stood up. The bench she had been sitting on came up with her, because she had not let go of it. “And the Ledger says, little gilded man, that you owe that boy a look.”
What happened next happened fast and Wick saw most of it.
A Blade went for Oswin, which was a mistake, because Oswin was small and was therefore nearest. The Blade got two fistfuls of the Pell’s enormous pocketed coat and simply lifted him off the floor like a sack of onions. Oswin dangled. His goggles were pushed up on his bald head and his big dark eyes were enormous and the frill of skin round his neck, which could flare out like a fan when he was excited, had gone completely flat, which on a Pell meant terrified. Glass clinked in forty pockets.
“Please don’t shake me,” Oswin said. “I would like to be very clear. Some of what’s in here is not supposed to be shaken.”
The Blade shook him.
Something in a lower pocket went pop and let out a puff of pink smoke that smelled of camphor and burnt sugar, and the Blade sneezed so violently that he dropped Oswin on his feet and had to let go of everything to hold his own face.
Brakka swung the bench.
She did not swing it at anyone, exactly. She swung it the way you would clear a table with your forearm, across the whole front of the Gilded Blades at about chest height, and the three who were close enough went over backwards into the people behind them, and the people behind them became part of the fight because that was how fights worked. The room came apart. Pewter hit the flagstones. Somebody’s dog started barking under a table. Hettie bellowed from behind the bar, “NOT THE GOOD JUGS,” and nobody listened.
A Blade with a knife came round the end of the bar toward Brakka’s unguarded side. He got three steps.
There was a thunk and his sleeve was nailed to the oak panelling by a slim throwing knife with a black cord grip, and he stopped so hard he nearly took his own arm off. Ilsa Quire was sitting on the end of the bar with her boots on a stool, and she had not appeared to move. She was sixteen, two years older than Wick, with black hair cropped short as a convict’s and a white scar through one eyebrow that made her look as if she was always about to say something unkind. She usually was.
“Oi,” she said. “That’s company property. Don’t bleed on it.”
Wick felt the tray going and got it level again. A pint fell anyway and shattered. He crouched against the contract board with the tray over his head like a roof, and found he was laughing, which was a stupid thing to do and happened to him in fights.
The one person in the room not fighting was the one Wick’s eyes kept going back to, the way they always did.
Seven stood by the hearth with its hands folded, and the brawl went round it as if it were a tree in a river. It was a tree, or near enough. Lumen were grown, not born, and they did not hold with he or she; among Lumen, it was the respectful word, and Seven had once told a Compact clerk who tried sir on it that it was not a sir, it was a tree. It was tall and slender, with skin like smooth pale-green bark, and this far into the year its colours had turned: the green was patched all over with copper and gold, like a birch in October, and when the Blade with the sneeze blundered into it a few small gold leaves shook loose from its shoulders and drifted to the floor. It looked down at him with its still, dark eyes, and steadied him by the elbow, and set him upright, and he was so startled by this that he forgot to hit it.
“You are standing in the fire,” Seven observed. “That is unwise.”
The Blade looked down at his smouldering boot heel and yelped.
Then Rafe Callow, who had been waiting on the far side of the overturned table with the air of a man letting the help sort things out, picked up the second bottle of Hettie’s good brandy and threw it at the back of Brakka’s head.
It was a good throw. Brakka’s back was turned; she was lifting a Blade off Oswin by his belt. The bottle went end over end through the lamplight, and Wick, who noticed things, saw the whole room notice it too and knew that nobody was close enough to do anything.
Seven lifted one hand. Not quickly. It made a small shape in the air with its long fingers, like someone closing a flower.
The bottle stopped.
It hit a patch of air a foot behind Brakka’s head and that air was suddenly full of frost; there was a sound like a boot on thin ice; and the bottle hung for a quarter of a heartbeat sheathed in white, and then dropped straight down and smashed in a spray of ice and brandy and little rainbows of glitter that hung where it had been.
Everybody saw. Everybody stopped.
Brakka turned round, looked at the mess on the floor, looked at Callow, and said, “Oh, you absolute fish.”
And Wick, crouched under his tray, felt the glitter.
That was the only way he ever found to say it. The cold left by the bottle did not stay where it was. It hung in the air for a breath, two breaths, a drift of tiny sparks only he seemed to be looking at, and it pulled at him. He felt it on his face first, the way you feel a window open behind you. Then it went down both his arms, a rush like cold water through the bones, and his fingers tingled and then burned and then were full of something, as if he had scooped up a double handful of snow in the dark.
He had not asked for it. He did not know what to do with it. He thought, very clearly, put it down, and had nowhere to put it down.
The lamps took it.
Every lamp in the Drowned Lantern, twelve brass ship’s lamps on their chains and the big iron ring over the bar, flared at once, and the light they gave was white. A sharp frost-white, like winter sun off ice, so bright that every face in the room went flat and pale and every shadow jumped. The flames stood up tall in their glass and stopped moving. They did not flicker. They looked like flames carved out of something, like a frozen wave. The warmth went out of the room in one gulp. Breath smoked. On the windows, frost-ferns raced across the glass from the edges inward with a sound like a thousand tiny fingernails.
Then, one after another, from the door to the bar, the lamps went out.
Dark. Only the hearth. Forty people breathing, and one dog that had stopped barking.
Wick’s hands hurt. He put them under his arms.
In the firelight Rafe Callow said, in a voice that had lost all its lacquer, “What was that?”
Nobody answered him. Then somebody near the door said, “The Lumen,” and somebody else said, “It was the tree, it threw cold at the lamps,” and it went round the room like that, a mutter, a shuffle, and the Gilded Blades found that they were standing near the door and that it would be a shame not to use it. Callow went last. He paused at the threshold to straighten his gold braid and to look at Brakka, and Brakka looked back at him across the dark, and he went out into the rain without a word, which was the first intelligent thing he had done all night.
The door banged. Hettie struck a taper at the hearth and started relighting lamps with her mouth set in a line.
Brakka threw back her head and laughed until the beams shook. “Seven! By my grandmother’s tusks. I have never seen you do a thing like that in twelve years.”
“No,” said Seven.
It was not looking at Brakka. It was looking across the room, through the people picking up stools, at the boy crouched under a tray against the contract board. It looked, and said nothing at all, and then it bent and picked up one of its own fallen leaves from the floor and put it in its sleeve.
An hour later the taproom was half-mended and three-quarters empty, and Wick was on his knees with a brush getting glass out of the cracks between the flagstones.
“Leave that.” Hettie dropped onto the bench beside him with the grunt of a woman who had been on her feet since dawn. She was sixty-odd and broad and red-faced, and she ran the Drowned Lantern the way a captain ran a ship, which was to say by shouting and then feeding everybody. She put a plate on the floor by his knee. Eel pie, brown bread. “Eat. You look like a drowned cat.”
“I’m all right.”
“You’re shaking.”
He was. He had been since the lamps. He put the brush down and ate the pie with his fingers because they would not work the fork, and it was hot and thick and tasted of pepper and the river, and some of the cold went out of him. Hettie watched him with her arms folded. The dog came out from under its table and leaned on her leg.
“I’ll say this once and then I’ll leave it,” she said. “That notice.”
“No.”
“Wick.”
“No.” He did not look at the board. He did not need to. “It stays up till they come back or till somebody can tell me where they are. That’s all. Then I’ll take it down myself.”
Hettie sighed. It was a long sigh, with the whole of the storm in it. Then she reached over and pushed his wet hair out of his eyes like somebody’s mother.
“Your old gentleman was in Tuesday,” she said. “The one from the Archive, with the cough. Asking after you. ‘How’s the Marsh boy getting on, Mistress Dunmore, is he still reading everything he can lay his hands on.’ Left you a sweet, as he does. The dog had it off the bar before I’d turned round.” She shrugged. “I said you were a nuisance and read the tide tables aloud to the customers. He laughed. Nice man. Lonely, I think. Don’t know why he takes an interest.”
“I ran a message up to the Archive once,” Wick said. “Last spring. He asked me my name and what I was reading.” He ate the last of the bread. “I told him tide tables. He laughed then too.”
“Well. He can bring you another.” She stood up, slapping her knees. “Bed. I’ll finish the glass. Go on. You’re no use to me shaking.”
The attic of the Drowned Lantern was reached by a ladder and a hatch, and it was exactly big enough for a cot, a hook, a candle, and a boy who was small for fourteen. Wick had lived in it for three years. He liked it. The rain was a hand’s breadth above his face on the slates, and when the wind came off the Sound the whole roof creaked and muttered like a ship, and he could lie there and feel the tavern under him settle and tick and go to sleep.
He did not go to sleep.
He sat on the cot with the candle on the floor between his feet and looked at his hands.
The tips of his fingers were white. Not pale. White, like the flesh of a fish, from the first knuckle out to the nail, every one of them, and they ached with a deep slow ache like a bruise. When he pressed his thumb against the candle-glass the glass fogged with cold. He breathed on them. He rubbed them on his trousers. He put them in his armpits and sat hunched over them, rocking a little, and the ache went on, and he counted to it, because counting was what he did, and the thing he counted to was the skipping rhyme that had lived in the back of his head since he was five.
Six lights for six doors, One for the cellar floor, Snuff them all and shut your eyes, And something Quiet comes to rise.
Every child on the Saltings knew it. You skipped to it, and on rise you jumped as high as you could, and nobody had ever told him what it meant.
He made himself stop.
He had not done it on purpose. He kept turning that over. He had not done anything. He had felt the glitter and it had gone into him, and then it had gone out of him into twelve lamps, and he had no more say in it than a gutter has in rain. And it had hurt. And everybody had looked at Seven.
In his pocket was Aldo’s knife, the bone-handled fish knife with the blade worn to a sliver, and he took it out and held it because he always did when he was thinking about his brother. Aldo would have known what to say. Aldo always knew; it was his most annoying quality. Don’t be a sprat about it, Wicky. Think.
What he thought about, in the end, was their mother.
He had been seven. The nets were spread on the Saltings mud to dry, and he had been sitting on a tide-post watching the lamplighter come along the shore road at dusk, and when the lamplighter had reached up his pole to the first lamp Wick had felt the little flame catch, had felt it in his chest like a hiccup, and had laughed and reached toward it, and the lamp had flared up gold and tall as a man—
And his mother had been there in three strides, and had taken his hands in both of hers and folded them shut, and knelt in the mud with her face very close to his. She had not been angry. He remembered that most. She had been frightened, and she had tried not to let him see it, and he had seen it anyway.
“Never show it, Wicky,” she had said. “Never. People will want it.”
She had died the next winter, coughing, with the nets still on the mud. He had never asked her what she meant. He had never done it again, not once in seven years, and had half decided he had made it up.
He looked at his white fingers in the candlelight and knew he had not.
The hatch creaked.
Wick had the knife up before he knew it, which would have been embarrassing with anyone else. But it was not anyone else. A long head, pale and copper and gold, rose through the hatch into the attic like something growing, and with it came a smell he had not expected at all: wet earth, dark and heavy, the smell of the Saltings after rain. Seven looked at him, and at the knife, and at his hands, which he had forgotten to hide.
“Little flame,” Seven said. Its voice was slow and low, like something said from a long way down. “We should talk.”