Lucky Dan Harker was leaning on the alley wall behind the Drowned Lantern with his two men and his walking stick and his gold tooth, exactly where he had leaned three weeks ago, and he had just opened his mouth to say new moon, Ilsa, love, when the gate opened behind her and seven feet of Varr came through it, and leaned on the wall too.
Harker’s mouth stayed open.
“Morning, Dan,” said Brakka Ironsong.
“Captain.” It came out rather high. “Didn’t know you were back.”
“Half the Lane knows I’m back, Dan. The other half heard me singing.” She folded her arms. She had Auntie through her belt, which she did not need, the way Harker did not need his stick. “Go on, Quire. Pay the man.”
Ilsa stepped up to him and put a purse in his hand.
She did not throw it. She did not slap it into his palm. She put it there, twenty marks in silver counted twice, and closed his fingers round it with her own, and looked him in the face with the scar through her eyebrow and said, “That’s thirty-six, three times over. Count it. Then we’re done, and the arrangement doesn’t change, because there isn’t one.”
Harker looked at the purse. He looked at Brakka. He looked at the two men behind him, who had found something very interesting on the far wall.
“Lovely,” he said. “Lovely. Glad it’s sorted.” He tucked the purse away and straightened his coat and did not pat her cheek. “Give my best to your brother.”
“Give it yourself,” said Ilsa. “He’s got a dog now. It bites.”
Harker went, and at the alley mouth he glanced back once, at the Varr, and the Varr smiled at him with all her tusks and said, “Dan. The Ledger says you owe that girl a look,” and Lucky Dan Harker found that he had urgent business on the Wharves.
Wick, who had watched the whole thing from the top of the yard wall with Skritch, let his breath out.
“I told her,” he said, as Ilsa came back through the gate. “On the stairs, in the Hall. I’m sorry. I said I’d not keep things any more, so—”
“I know you did, Saltings boy. So did I. On the ferry. Turned out she’d known since the first week and was waiting for one of us to say.” A pause. “She’s horrible.”
“Yes.”
“I’d die for her.”
“Yes,” said Wick. “Me too.”
Hettie had cried when they came in, which she said she had not, and had fed everybody, which she said was only sense, and had looked at Wick’s arms and said nothing at all.
The taproom was mended. The split table had a new leg and the window had new glass and the frost-damage on the flagstones had been scrubbed until it was only a paler patch by the cellar hatch, and Admiral the cat sat on the bar as if it had been paid to. The twelve brass lamps burned yellow on their chains. Wick stood under them on his first morning back and did not count them.
The notice was still on the contract board, curling, old, with the damp in it: GREY HOUND COMPANY. LOST BY ORDER OF THE MERCHANT COMPACT. Fifteen names. The fourth name down.
He put his hand flat on it. Then he took the pins out, one at a time, and the paper came off the board into his hands, and he folded it in half and in half again and put it inside his coat with the journal, and stood looking at the pale square it had left.
“Right,” said Hettie, behind him, with her arms folded. “And what goes there?”
He had Aldo’s fish knife. He put the point of it to the pale square, and scratched. A wave, with a flick at the end like a hook. And under it, carefully, so it would last, a circle.
“Safe,” he said.
Hettie looked at it with her mouth set in a line, and then the line gave, and she pushed his hair out of his eyes like somebody’s mother, and went to shout at the kitchen.
Aldo signed at noon, at the Lanterns’ table by the hearth, with Brakka’s pen.
“Marsh,” she said, reading it over. “Aldo Marsh. Weaver of Rime and whatever else gets put in him, same as his brother, which makes two buckets, which is one more than I ever meant to have.” She blotted it with her thumb. “You’ll not be paid till you can lift a pack. You’ll do what Quire says in a fight and what Tallowby says about your hands. And if you ever hide a thing from me the way he did—” the thumb went at Wick ”—I’ll hang you up by your boots next to him. Clear?”
“Clear, Captain.”
“Good.” She shoved a small flat thing across the table at Wick.
It was a pin. Brass, cheap, the size of a bit, stamped with a lantern: a little ship’s lantern, the kind that hung over the door with the seawater in it, with a flame in it that had been scratched by somebody’s knife to look as though it was lit.
“Sprat,” said Brakka. “Lantern Company. We go and look.” Her voice did not change at all, and it did not need to. “Put it on before I change my mind.”
He put it on. His hands shook, and the pin went through his collar crooked, and he did not fix it.
Skritch got one too.
The Compact had sent a clerk down that morning with a paper that said no licensed company might carry on its roll any person of the drain-folk, and Brakka had asked the clerk whether the Compact would like its six hundred marks back, and the clerk had looked at her tusks and gone away to ask. Skritch wore the pin on the string with his tin button and spent the afternoon walking up and down Lampwick Lane on his hind legs so that the lamplighters could see it. “First one,” he told everyone, whether they had asked or not. “First Skitter in any company ever. Squeak true.”
Seven stood in a pot by the hearth.
It was Hettie’s pot, the big earthenware one she had used for the ale-yeast, and it had Saltings mud in it, because Wick had walked out to the ninth post from the shore road and dug it with his hands, and under the mud, with its folded shape just showing above, the seed-pod sat brown and hard and warm. You could feel it from the bench. Hettie’s dog had taken to lying against the pot with its chin on its paws, and nobody moved it.
Every night, when the taproom was shut and the lamps turned down, Wick sat on the hearth-bench with his white arms in his lap and did the only casting he knew how to do without anyone’s help.
He asked.
He asked the lamp. He had not known you could; Seven had never said; but every lamp was Gleam, a little, and on the first night back he had sat under the big iron ring and said, out loud, feeling a fool, give. And it had. A thread, white, thin as a hair, and it had not bitten. He had held it a breath and then sent it, gently, into the pot.
The pod had beaten. Once. Slow.
He did it every night. On the third night Ilsa was at the far end of the bench cleaning a knife, and on the fourth Aldo was on the stair, and on the fifth Oswin was at the bar under proper light with every screwdriver he owned in a row and Pip in pieces in front of him, talking to the pieces, and when the thread went into the pot that night the moth’s glass bead went from dark to grey to a faint, sleepy, uncertain green, and the wings opened, and shut, tick, and Oswin put his bald head down on the bar between his hands and did not say technically for a quarter of an hour. On the sixth night all of them were there, and the dog, and nobody said anything about it.
Veyra Sel came on the seventh night.
She came in the door of the Drowned Lantern without a carriage, with Dace behind her carrying a dark red chest with brass corners, and the whole taproom went quiet in the way a room goes quiet when it has decided to stare. She walked between the tables to the Lanterns’ bench by the hearth, and Dace put the chest on the table, and the smell of camphor came out of it, and Wick found that it did not make him think of anything much any more.
“Tea,” said Veyra. “From my country. It is thick as tar and you will not like it. You drink it very sweet.” She looked at Hettie. “I will need six cups and a great deal of honey.”
Hettie, to her own visible surprise, went and got them.
The tea was thick as tar and Wick did not like it and drank it anyway, and Veyra sat on the end of the bench with her thimbles on and her back very straight, and looked at the pot by the hearth.
“It beats,” she said.
“Every night.”
“Hm.” She drank. Her breath steamed over the cup. “I did not come for the tea, child. I came to say a thing, and then I shall go, because your landlady is looking at me as if I were a cat on the bar.” She set the cup down. “There are other gates.”
The fire popped.
“My house has known of three. One under my country, which is watched. One in the Ironbacks, which is ice, and is left alone. One at Kell, which you have shut, and my house will not believe.” She folded her thimbled hands. “Quill’s papers name more. I have had five days with his case, and the man wrote everything down, and half of it is Carrovan and the other half is worse. But I have found one line, in his own hand, underlined twice, with a date on it from eleven years ago. He wrote: the sixth stands under the Low Streets, below the Lampwick, where the old drain goes down. It is closer than Kell. It is only harder to reach.”
Wick looked at the cellar hatch.
It was only a hatch. Oak, iron-bound, with a paler patch of flagstone round it where the frost had been scrubbed. Oswin’s three flash-eggs still hung on their strings across the drain arch below it. He had gone down there with a candle three weeks ago and found nine Skitter marks going down a stair into the dark, and had put that in the box in his head, and had never, until this moment, let himself finish the thought.
It had only been the first thing to wake up.
“The Skitter went up-top,” said Skritch, from under the table, with his whiskers flat. “The warren. Out of the Low Streets. Because of the cold.” He looked up at Wick. “Skritch said. In the drain. Skritch said.”
“You did.” Wick’s voice was steady, which surprised him. “You said, and I didn’t tell anybody, and that’s the last thing I’ll ever keep.” He looked at Brakka.
Brakka was looking at the hatch too. Her tusks were out, and her good hand was on Auntie’s haft, and her face was the face she had worn on the Throat, before she sang.
“We go and look,” she said. “That’s the whole job.” She picked up her cup. “Not tonight.”
“Not tonight,” Veyra agreed. She stood. “May your hearth stay lit, Lanterns. I will be in Saltmire the winter. The house of Sel has, it seems, business here.” At the door she paused and looked back at Wick, and one corner of her mouth went up, the width of a thimble. “Child. Your arms.”
“They don’t hurt.”
“No. They will not.” She nodded, once, the precise inch. “Mine did not either. After the first time.”
And went out into the fog.
The first calm night after the storm came three days later.
Wick had forgotten. It was Hettie who said it, looking out of the window at a sky that had gone clear and still for the first time since they came home, with the fog bells silent on the Wharves and the stars out over the Sound. “Calm night,” she said. “First one.” And went to the cupboard under the stairs for the paper and the wax.
They made the lanterns at the Lanterns’ table. Little paper ones, the size of a cupped hand, with a stub of candle in a dab of wax at the bottom, the way every family in Saltmire had made them for as long as anyone knew. Brakka made one with hands too big for it and swore. Oswin made three, very neatly, and would not say for whom. Marta Keel made six, one for each name she had cut at Greystep. Aldo made one. He did not say who for. Wick made one too, and did not say either, and their hands touched over the wax.
They went down to the Saltings at the ebb, the whole company, in the dark, over the mud on the boards Wick knew by heart, to the ninth post from the shore road with the lean. The tide was going out fast and silver under the stars, and up and down the shore, far off, other lights were going down to the water, other families, dozens of them, each with their small cupped flame. Nobody spoke. That was the custom. You set them on the ebb, and you let the Sound take them, and you did not say the names because the sea knew them.
Wick lit his off Oswin’s sulphur-stick. He crouched at the foot of the post, where the bread used to go, and set the little paper lantern on the water, and the ebb took it, and it went out over the mud toward the dark with its flame standing straight and small, and he thought of a woman kneeling in mud with her face very close to his.
Never show it, Wicky.
He held up his hands. White to the shoulder, in the starlight, in plain sight.
“I showed it, Mam,” he said, so quietly that only the post could hear. “They gave.”
Twelve lights went out on the ebb. Not thirteen. Seven was not dead, and nobody had made a lantern for Seven, and nobody had needed to say so.
He went up on the roof afterward, because he could not have slept.
The slates were cold and dry and the whole of Saltmire lay under him in starlight, and he sat on the ridge where Seven had sat, with his knees up, and the city breathed. Every hearth in it was a little Ember, every lamp on the Lane a thread of Gleam, the Sound going out below was Tide; he could feel all of it now, and it did not pull at him. It was only there, the way the sea was there.
Under him, through the slates, he could hear the taproom. Brakka had started the song. Somebody had thrown something. Oswin’s voice went up, technically, and was drowned, and Skritch’s whistle went over the top of all of it in a key of its own.
And under that.
Under the taproom and the cellar and the drain arch with the flash-eggs on their strings and the nine marks on the stair; under the Low Streets, where the old city lay in the dark with its doors shut; deep, deeper than the Marrow, directly beneath the Drowned Lantern, so faint that he would have missed it if he had not known what to listen for—
Cold.
Not a song. Not yet. A note held so low it was not a sound. Something lying with its face to the stone, and sleeping, and not quite.
Wick sat on the roof and felt it, and found that his hands were not shaking. He counted anyway, out of habit, to the rhyme. Six lights for six doors. One for the cellar floor. Snuff them all and shut your eyes. And something Quiet comes to rise. All four lines, for the first time since he was five, and on rise he did not jump. He sat where he was, and listened to it, and it was only a thing children skipped to.
He went down through the skylight into the warm.
The taproom hit him like a wave: the song, the smoke, the lamps all yellow and ordinary on their chains, Brakka standing on a bench. Nobody saw him come down the ladder. Nobody was looking at the hatch. They were all looking at the hearth, where Hettie’s dog had got up off its place against the pot and was standing with its ears up and its head on one side, making a small noise in its throat.
The pod had split.
A crack, hairline, down the long seam of it, from the top. And in the crack, in the firelight, no bigger than the tip of a fish knife, pale, and curled, and so bright a green that it hurt to look at—
A leaf.
“Oh,” said Oswin, into the silence, with his frill going out round his head like a dish, and Pip ticking on his shoulder. “Oh, Pip. Look.”
Wick stood at the foot of the ladder with his white hands at his sides and the cold under the floor and the warm in front of him, and found he was laughing, which was a stupid thing to do and happened to him in fights.
Spring, little flame.