Work Text:
Of course she didn’t like visiting that underground place by the river. It was full, always, with boisterous, shoving bodies, soggy voices and the feeling that, at any moment, someone might reach out to grab her. It flaunted its silks and debauchery like a woman who planned to die wrapped in them, and the man who called it home, who called it kingdom , always looked at her as if she should love it.
Or as if she would understand someday. She should never have admitted to liking the smell of the air there, even if it did have a smoky richness to it that made the chill of the night seem very far away.
He smirked at her now, lazing against a corner of the counter where his customers tried to wash away their fears with twyrine. Such a terrible idea, when it was fear that would save them – that would make them eager to seek out the way to be saved, through humility.
“Looking for converts?” the would-be king, the architect Stamatin, asked. “You won’t find any here, I’m afraid. Not a real soul in the place anymore. If you’re looking to trade for a way to join them, on the other hand...”
“None of your potions are for me,” she reminded him. As she did every time, though it hardly seemed to be any use. “But I can at least give them to the ones in pain. They deserve that much comfort.”
His smile changed strangely. She would never understand him, that man of fire, and she never wanted to.
“As if I don’t do the same,” he muttered. “Well, you know the prices and the bows and curtseys by now. You’re becoming a real veteran of this.”
And then it should have been time for her to trade the handful of brisk, singing herbs she had gathered in the evening and take herself away from that place. But as she pulled them from the bouquet she’d made in her pocket, an odd feeling came over her, as it did from time to time – what she’d learned to recognize as the chance to say or do something out of the ordinary. Perhaps something that would grant her a little extra knowledge, or lead her down a new path.
She tried always, now, to be sensitive to and follow those feelings. At a time when anything might make the difference for dozens, hundreds of lives, dreams and intuitions were a precious tool – more so, surely, than needles and knives. She let it lead her eye behind the counter, and knew at once what had woken it.
“What’s that little bottle?” she asked. “There, at the end.”
Less than half the size of most of them, and tucked away not quite well enough to be discreet. The writing on its label was in thin, blurry ink and no language she knew; Stamatin frowned at it as if he’d almost forgotten it was there.
“That’s not for the likes of you, sweet pea,” he said. “That’s for adults to resolve their differences.”
And of course her mind could only leap to two particular adults at that. Two who might be able to do much good, if only they could resolve their differences. Like sky and earth, she had always assumed they were just too different, some fundamental gravity holding them apart so that they could touch each other only in storms. But if there was some mountaintop of the soul where they could meet, neutral ground where they might put aside their horrible, pointless feud...
They might join forces against her. It had seemed to her in the past, sometimes, that letting them charge past her to seize each other in anger was the only thing that had saved her. But what if she were the one to bring them to that place of reconciliation? If she joined their hands, might they finally believe in her?
“Is it very strong?” she asked. “Will it work even if their differences are very great?”
“If you use enough,” Stamatin confirmed. “But again, this isn’t the thing for saintly girls. You’re supposed to charm people with earnest speeches of grace and lay aside their grievances with your own hands, aren’t you?”
She truly did hate when he looked at her that way. Like it was all a joke to him, and worse, one he thought she should share with him. She scowled in a way that would tell him, she hoped, that she never would.
“What would you know about saints?” she grumbled. “Or grace? You do nothing but mock them here every day. Sell it to me – I have a good use for it.”
“Mockery requires a good knowledge of your subject matter,” he retorted. “And no – I’m afraid my conscience would prick me too sharply for that. I’ve introduced you to too many vices already.”
“It isn’t for me.” She sorted the herbs between her hands, brown and black and rasping blood. “Why would you care, anyways? I know nothing matters to you that can’t be pierced or poured out.”
His eyes narrowed. A lurking, fiery green; sometimes, he seemed not so different from the awful Bachelor at all, Dankovsky drawing incisions down the streets with his steps, opening the town’s secrets for autopsy while it still lived. Perhaps he hadn’t been once, before he had dug that deeper wound for himself and gotten lodged in it.
“That covers just about the world entire. You should be more careful with that saintly tongue,” he warned her. “Fine, though – if you’re so intent, I’ll sell it to you. With the promise that you won’t touch a drop of it yourself, or let any of the pups on the street near it, either. You could sow chaos with that. Some differences exist for a reason.”
#
She knew that, of course. Such as those between her and her sister – some things had to be cut off and set aside.
But there had to be a way for others to live in harmony. The little bottle was heavier than she had expected, made of thick glass, with hardly a gulp of clear liquid in it. He might have charged her far too much in twyre for it; she wouldn’t have known.
If it worked, she would call it time and herbs well-traded. She sniffed at its open lip- he hadn’t warned her against doing that- and sighed brisk relief to find that it smelled like nothing in particular.
Of course it would have been better if she could have simply asked them to drink it. They should have wanted to set aside their quarrels. But she had watched them pursue their tireless anger for days across the town. They hated each other more than the disease; they would have burned paradise to bury each other in the ashes, so of course they didn’t hesitate to hound each other through hell.
So she stood two water bottles on a level stoop, in a safe, quiet yard where no one would see her, and hesitated with the bottle she’d bought poised over their rims. An equal share for each might be best. But Burakh was the bigger man, and made of denser stuff, it seemed to her. Roots and clay and blood. It might be better if he had more.
She measured it out that way, carefully, and the clarity of the bottles didn’t change. The smell was still clear and innocent; she couldn’t check the taste without breaking her promise.
She would just have to hope it was well-hidden, and that they would understand afterwards. She licked her thumb and marked a smear of dust on the neck of Burakh’s bottle, so she wouldn’t mistake them, and nested them carefully, together, in a pocket of her coat. No one had told her where to find those hellish fighters today, so surely it was a sign she was doing the right thing that she seemed to know so surely anyways.
And that they weren’t so far away. She was sure, in the scorched-glass, crackling air of the Tanners district. Where the plague had passed the day before, and so the streets ran with cracks, the fronts of the houses warped and puckered like parched skin. She set off that way, following her sense that Dankovsky would be first, trying to cut his truths out of a small house near the river.
#
He was just stepping out onto its stoop when she arrived. Days before, her heart would have lurched like a rabbit’s at the bay of a hound to see him, but every one had made their roles clearer and clearer to her. He and Burakh would ruin everything if they were allowed to do as they pleased. Someone had to show them a better way, but since they were so prideful, it would have to be someone they didn’t expect.
Like her. He caught sight of her, she could tell the instant he did, for how his hand tensed towards the terrible promises of that black bag he always carried.
Knives and pistols and fine surgical gloves. He had done terrible things to life, she knew, to try to make it longer. Now, to shorten it, he might do the same.
“Please,” she said. And for how he hesitated, he wasn’t too lost and merciless to know that word, at least. “Stay your hand. I only want to talk.”
His lip curled. At least Stamatin never looked at her that way, as if judging her from a cloudy height. Deciding whether to throw thunderbolts.
“What could there be for us to talk about?” he didn’t really seem to ask. “We’ve demonstrated empirically that you aren’t the carrier of this damned disease. Or are you here to tell me again about the wicked sister who is the cause of all your woes and mine?”
No, Stamatin only ever looked like he was waiting for a chance to trip her to the ground. How awful they both were! If circumstances hadn’t been so desperate, she would gladly have left them to each other and Burakh to his bloody inheritance.
“No,” she said. “I’m here because...I’ve learned that you need badly to find Burakh. Don’t you?”
And it was a terrible fire that caught in his eyes as he heard the name. How had they become so greedy with hatred for each other? Was it really just in their nature? The sky and earth fought in storms, but they also cooperated to make the world between them. Was it just the plague that had thrown everything so badly out of balance between them?
“I would pay dearly to know where that bastard is making his den nowadays,” Dankovsky confirmed. “Are you saying that you know?”
“Yes.” And she did, though she shouldn’t have, and so it had to be right. She drew a deeper, shaking breath; she had to get it right. “And I’ll tell you, but let me ask one thing of you first. Bachelor, oh, Bachelor...is it true that you need Burakh’s help, but only don’t know how to ask him?”
It wasn’t the whole mantra she had known by heart since she had woken in the cemetery. It wouldn’t let her sink a hook firmly into his, gently drawing out his deepest secrets. But she didn’t need it to – she only needed his own grip on his heart to slip, however slightly, so she could reach it with a kind touch.
And it seemed it had. His hand wavered away from his bag. His eyes took on not the trusting haze of watching his secrets settle safely in other hands, but an odd guardedness, as if he had just looked around to find himself not quite where he had expected.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she assured him. “Nothing, only...aren’t you very thirsty? I’m sure it’s been a long search. I have water – I was lucky enough to find a barrel with some left in it. I took more than I needed, only to share, of course. Here – I’ll give you a bottle.”
None of it was really a lie, of course. But it was close enough to tug at her conscience, and his brows. Of course he would be suspicious – had kindness, freely given or received, ever been a part of his world?
Still, his hand tugged out towards her. Curt and strangely, as if led by a string; she pressed the bottle into his palm, holding his gaze like a kind grasp, like trying to soothe someone through panic or pain, while he pulled the cork free and his eyes tried to ask why.
He drank deeply, fully before they could find an answer. If he tasted anything out of the ordinary, he showed no sign of it – when he had swallowed the last of it, he looked back to her with his own uncharmed frown, clear and close enough to cut.
“Tell me where Burakh is,” he said, and might not even have noticed the empty bottle he was still holding.
She smiled. Soon, he would understand how much good she had just done for him.
“Do you have a map? I’ll point out the house,” she said. “He’ll be there very soon. If you wait for him there...you’ll stay your hand, though, won’t you? Don’t attack him on sight! If you talk to him, I’m sure the two of you can come to an agreement.”
“Our business isn’t yours.” He hesitated, halfway through rolling his map back into his bag. “Thank you. Are you certain I can’t compensate you for...”
Only by making peace with Burakh, she thought of saying. But if she pushed too strongly against Dankovsky, he was sure to push back.
Maybe with a little bread or coin, she thought of saying. But the idea of taking food from his hand like a stray cat made her shudder, never mind how hungry she was.
“No,” she repeated. “Except by being kind and merciful. This town already suffers so much.”
He huffed. A smaller sound than she would have expected from him, less the sky than a dying breeze. His gaze lifted away into the distance; his pupils swam wider, drawing in more of it than they had a minute before.
“Sometimes, I wonder if the only kindness that will be left to us is closing its eyes,” he confessed. And seemed, frowning again in that lost way, confused that he had. He shook his head and, still holding the bottle loosely by its neck, started towards the street.
She stared after him, her heart racing as if to catch up. That bit of honesty, softness from him had to mean it was working. If he and Burakh met in the same state, there would be no knives, no guns. No more destruction or waste as they tried to destroy each other.
All she had to do was find Burakh and convince him as well. Quickly, so he could meet Dankovsky in that abandoned house and, together, they could find peace.
#
The first part was as easy as she had felt it would be. Even in that time of such chaos, the smell of blood pointed uncannily to Burakh. All she had to do was close her eyes, breathe in deep, and follow the shudder down her spine to where, fortunately, she didn’t find him crouched over a body. By the look of things, he had been taking a moment in that sheltered backyard, amidst the ashy smell and droning flies, to try to have a hurried, unharried lunch.
She didn’t envy him being so large at a time like that. She could walk for hours on a sip of milk and feel only a little dizzy, but he must have felt like a haystack burning in that greedy autumn air, trying to add enough to himself to make up for what it ate constantly away.
He glared at her over a piece of gnawed, gnarled meat- or was it leather? In his place, she might become that desperate. Would it anger him to know that she pitied him a little?
“I don’t have enough to share,” he told her, as she closed the gate to the little yard behind her. “So if that’s what you’re after, I’d suggest you check the shop down the street. I think the keeper still has a few scraps of bread tucked away for favourite customers.”
“Do you think I’m one of those?” she asked. It did smell good, whatever he had been tearing between his teeth, though the scent of blood still got between it and her growling stomach.
He shrugged. Seated in the grass, he wasn’t nearly as frightening as Dankovsky had been on the stoop. Or as he had been the first time she’d seen him, looming around a street corner as such a sudden shadow that she’d frozen before him. With the moon in his eyes and that smell running in rivulets ahead of him, she had been certain she was about to be torn apart.
“I’m sure you could be,” he said. “You seem to be good at winning people’s favour.”
Now, while she certainly wouldn’t let him close enough to touch her, being closed in that small yard with him didn’t frighten her. He was very sensible, in his way. He cut when there was something he needed to reach on the other side of a solid surface. He knew where his truths were; he wouldn’t start a fight that didn’t lead him closer to them.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes, they shun me, and I don’t even know what I’ve done.”
“We have that in common, then.” He tore off another stringy bite of what she was now certain was meat, and her stomach seemed to stretch as well, in need. “Well? What are you here for, then?”
She blinked out of the trance hunger had been trying to put her in – as persuasive as any of hers.
“I thought you would want to know,” she said. “Your counterpart, the Bachelor, is very close by. I-”
She swallowed the saliva that had been pooling at the bottom of her mouth. Like last time, this had to be just right.
“I know of you this.” Even if it wasn’t the right mantra. Even if it wasn’t a deep hook. “Haruspex, oh-”
He made a sound like laughter stifled with meat. Which, well, seemed to be exactly what it was – wry and wiped clean with the back of his hand.
“What?” Her cheeks burned. Whatever holy rhythm she had been reaching for was lost. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Only that an old friend of mine told me you had tried to play mind games with him. He suggested I keep my father’s old charm close at hand, in case you tried the same with me.”
He looped two fingers under the collar of his smock, lifting out something much like the necklace Filin had brandished at her a few days before. It hadn’t driven her off, she wasn’t a shabnak or a mara or whatever else he had called her, but just having it had seemed to make him vigilant against the sort of questions she asked.
It didn’t matter if it was just a symbol of suspicion, or if that suspicion was really woven somehow into its red, shiny braids. Either way, it meant the plan she’d had to reconcile Burakh and Dankovsky had just crumbled in front of her.
“That face,” he chuckled. “You’re not used to being caught out, are you? Why don’t you just tell me what you were going to say, then? No tricks.”
Her fingers wound around the neck of the bottle, with its smudge of dust. She swallowed again – no tricks. Maybe it hadn’t all crumbled just yet. If she was very careful, she might not even have to lie.
“I do know where he is,” she said. “I sent him there. I decided today, I would find you both and give you a drink out of kindness, so you wouldn’t be desperate and angry, and I would tell you where to find each other. I hoped that, if you were both calm, you might see eye-to-eye and be able to sort out your differences.”
There. Every word of it true, if not quite as much as she would have liked. Real truth was saying the whole of what was in her heart, not letting it show in bits and pieces that could spell out other things.
Burakh seemed to be looking for what else it could spell out. Staring at her with his brows raised over his proud face, the scraps of his lunch all but forgotten in greasy fingers.
“You mean that for me, then?” he asked, nodding to the bottle. “If so, I’ll gladly take it. I haven’t been able to find a barrel with a drop in it all day.”
“Really?” she must have asked too earnestly, with one step forward in the orange, brittle grass. “I mean...you really believe me?”
“About kindness and hope? I don’t know about that,” he said. “But I believe you’d know better than to try to poison me. And I believe I won’t last much longer without water, so what does it matter?”
“You shouldn’t be eating dried meat without water. You’ll only make yourself thirstier.”
“Meat is what I have. If I don’t eat, I’ll just die a different way,” he pointed out. “We do what we can for ourselves. And...for each other, I suppose.” He straightened up from the grass to the height that had made her feel like such a hunted thing once, and held out that torn bit of meat. “Here. A trade.”
Hardly a table scrap in better times. But she had never known better times, and her stomach ached just as much as her pride stung, staring at it.
“I...I shouldn’t,” she said. “You should keep it. Things always work out for me somehow, in the end. The town won’t let me starve.”
Though it had come very close sometimes. Did it love her, or just happen around her, and she’d happened, so far, to only fall from heights that would let her land safely?
“No deal, then,” he said. “I won’t take charity from a starving girl and leave her with nothing.”
Maybe that made him a better man than Dankovsky. Or just a more stubborn one. Or maybe Dankovsky hadn’t had anything to offer, as hungry as she and just unwilling to admit it.
“Fine,” she decided. “I’ll eat this, and you drink your water.”
At least he hadn’t insisted she drink some first, to prove it wasn’t poisoned. He took it readily enough once she held out her hand, laying the meat, in the same moment, on her palm. Still warm with the heat of his; she shuddered at that, but the smell of slaughter and surgery was fainter, up close, than the peppery scent of food at last.
He drank more greedily, more decisively than Dankovsky had. Like taking hold of life with both hands, while she chewed gratefully at the meat, trying to savour every bite even as the hollow ache in her stomach demanded that she swallow as quickly as possible.
Oh, to feel alive again, and not like a spool running out. He might have been thinking the same thing, licking the last drops from the rim of the bottle and gazing contentedly across the hazy day.
“Do you mind if I keep this?” he asked. “I never can get my hands on enough bottles.”
For his frightening concoctions, no doubt. She had heard terrible things about them, but then, she had also heard of people surviving who should, by rights, have been claimed by the Sand Pest.
“Of course,” she said. “Now, I’ll show you where the Bachelor is. Just don’t be too quick to strike a blow against him, all right? If you remember how it feels to be given charity and try to act the same to each other, I’m sure you can make peace.”
“A moral lesson, huh?” He huffed almost as Dankovsky had, wiping his hand first on his smock- grease on old blood- and then heavily across his forehead. “I can’t make any promises. But show me. If he’s willing to be reasonable, maybe it won’t end in bloodshed today.”
“I’m sure it won’t,” she said. “Do you have a map?”
#
She couldn’t follow him down the street, of course. But she had learned the yards and back lanes very well, and she ran, where he had set off from their meeting place at a sort of determined, slouching jog.
Maybe what she’d given him in a greater dose didn’t agree very well with moving the body gracefully. If so, was that such a bad thing? They wouldn’t be able to attack each other with the ferocity they might have otherwise. They might even sit- she could picture them, on either side of a small, warped table, in a ray of dusty sunlight- and talk out their differences while time creaked gently by.
She would give them time. At least a little – she would watch from a distance, from a window, if possible, while they found their way together. Once she saw some sign that they had, she would go inside and tell them what she had done. The whole truth, once she could be sure they would understand.
She managed to secret herself in the scrub surrounding the chosen house a minute before Burakh appeared at the intersection. His stride was worse than before, loose and dogged, dragging its shadow after it. His face was set; a bright red flush had bloomed in his cheeks.
Had it been too much? If so, she would have to apologize afterwards as well. With the label all run together in inscrutable ink, she hadn’t been able to read anything about dosages; surely Stamatin would have warned her if the gulp in that little bottle could be dangerous.
Chaos, he had said. Not death. She curled her fists on her knees as Burakh drew close.
He paused a moment outside the door, as if deciding whether to knock on it. Whether to give his adversary that advantage? Or to walk away? She would rush out if he tried. She would apologize, and explain everything.
But his next move was to test the doorknob. And, finding it unlocked, to let himself inside.
She crept through the snap and scratch of the plague-burnt bushes, to the window she had marked as her best chance. It had a view of the kitchen no one inside would be likely to catch sight of, not unless they were pressing their faces to the glass and peering out. And the man leaning against the wall didn’t look as if he had any intention of that, or of anything but carefully keeping his balance.
It must have been too much. Dankovsky looked as if the wall might be the only thing in his world not spinning. He had set his bag aside, and lolled his head towards what must have been the sound of the door closing.
Incuriously, for a second. Then his eyes sharpened, the scalpel of the heavens, lightning incarnate in trembling flesh. He pushed away from the wall, swaying as much on two feet as Burakh had at a jog.
Burakh entered from the hallway. He trailed one hand along the wall, that wall that might have been the only thing stable in the world, and stared at Dankovsky as if he had forgotten he was coming to find him there.
Clara held her breath. Gripping her side of the sill, forgetful of the risk that one of them might look out and see her.
Whether she’d made a mistake or not, this was it. Sick or not, they were standing face to face, and their hands were still open to the chance of peace – neither closed around a weapon.
Dankovsky must have been speaking. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear through the thick glass. She could tell only by Burakh’s expression, and it told her little more than fever.
Fierce eyes. Proud eyes, red cheeks. Then he was speaking, and still she couldn’t hear, but it didn’t look as if he was offering words of peace or charity. The pace of his words carried him a step closer to Dankovsky, who drew himself up like a cornered cat.
No, no, that was wrong. It was all wrong. Her fingers loosened on the sill; it wasn’t supposed to be that way, with them staring each other down like they were about to collide in earthly cataclysm after all. She had to stop them, before-
Dankovsky lunged. One step before she could step away from the window, curling his fists into the front of Burakh’s smock and yanking him down into a kiss.
Clara gaped from her place still at the window. How could she do anything else? It was violence of a sort, but nothing like she’d feared – Burakh’s hands not around Dankovsky’s throat, but his back, tackling him tighter, grappling him in turn.
How could either of them win out? It was a stalemate in the end, a mutual collapse. They fell to the floor together, a tangle of hands and kisses and an impact she could feel and hear through the rattling glass.
She stared rapt. Stretched up on tiptoes for a minute longer, with her hands pressed against the glass. Then turned to shove through the bushes and flee down the street, her cheeks burning red, unable to outrun the racing of her own heart.
#
She would have to talk to them, wouldn’t she? She couldn’t just leave things that way.
The intuition that had made it all seem so inspired the day before certainly said so. It told her where she would find them as if telling her to go make her apologies.
She didn’t knock at the door of the Stillwater. Something would certainly have answered, but what were the chances of it being a living resident? She crept up the stairs to the loft on her tiptoes, as if she didn’t plan on making herself known there.
As if there was any chance he would be sleeping, or not home, or too engrossed in his work to have time for her. He glanced over as soon as she nudged open the door.
“Ah. I thought it might be you,” he said.
Standing in front of the window, he didn’t look as though Burakh had been too brutal with him. At least, he had combed and preened himself up clean the way he seemed to every day. The hands he had wrapped around Burakh’s smock were poised, gloved and easy, at his sides; his bag sat on the desk, three strides away, where she wouldn’t have to fear its contents.
Not so long as she stayed near the stairs. She shuffled her feet, trying not to think of his tangled and kicking together with Burakh’s boots.
“I came here to- to talk about yesterday,” she said. “I-”
-and would have said more, said everything, if he hadn’t, at that moment, turned fully to look at her. The neatness he had seemed to wear was one-sided – on the other, his cravat pooled loosely away from his neck and a deep purple bruise.
The brooch that would normally have tucked it up into place was nowhere to be seen. Her face burned as it had the day before, when no breeze, no speed she could flee down the street, had seemed enough to cool it.
His cheeks heated as well. Not cold celestial fire, but just blood as he fussed and smoothed his cravat up imperfectly over the bruise.
“It- ahem. It seems that bastard Burakh has got his hands on my brooch,” he said. “It’s a keepsake of mine.”
“Would you-” It would be a way of making amends. A way of setting things right without- maybe without ever having to say what she’d done. “Would you like me to get it back for you?”
“That shouldn’t be necessary. Though I’d be obliged if you would give him this letter.” He started towards the desk; she tensed towards the stairs, but didn’t flee down them to the door and street.
An empty bottle stood on the desk. Did he not remember?
The puppeted way he had taken it from her, so different from how he flicked up that folded and sealed letter into his hand? He turned back to her, and the cravat slipped again from the yellowing edge of the bruise.
“You’re going to see him, aren’t you?” he asked. “Here, anyways – for your service.”
A small bag of coin, held out to her along with the letter. Pride had, maybe, stuck and lost its stinger in her the day before, but it still found a way to scratch at her at the sight.
“I don’t need your coin,” she said. “Most likely it’s Maria’s anyways, right?”
“Hmph. I’m not as destitute as that yet,” he said. “Though I was close yesterday. Let me pay you back while I can – it’s possible none of us will be able to offer each other anything but consolation in the end.”
She hesitated. The light from the window broke through the bottle into bleak shades of champagne and smoke; perhaps it was a sign she had done something right after all, that he was still willing to share that bit of doubt with her. That he hadn’t said a word about her sister, and that she wasn’t afraid.
“I don’t think it will be that bad,” she said, and accepted the weight of the pouch along with the letter. “Keep up your hope.” And then, another step beyond what she’d thought she would dare, “Maybe with Burakh’s help...”
He scoffed. But he didn’t say anything to the contrary, and stared thoughtfully out the window again as she left.
#
She could have told him the day before where Burakh really kept his lair, of course. Where he had since the start, under one of the silent factories, not so far at all from where she had first awoken.
She had dared poke her head inside only once before, like listening at the entrance of a bear’s den. She had expected the walls to sag and smother with blood, the smell to be all she could breathe. It was there, of course, everywhere he went, and the earthy, sweaty, unsettling odour of someone living with only the earth for a friend and the river to bathe. But there was a brightness and a tidiness to it, overall, and the bittersweetness of twyre, and the chill, damp comfort of stone, like the gravekeeper’s lodge. She could have been comfortable there, if she hadn’t been so nervous about its occupant.
She crept down his stairs as she had up Dankovsky’s. For the earth around her, it felt like a far less escapable place; she shivered as she caught her first glimpse of him bent over his table, nursing the brown, thick, replaced contents of a bottle with a smudge of dust on the neck.
He toasted her halfheartedly with it as she stepped to the stone floor.
“I underestimated you,” he said. “Your courage, and your trickery.”
Her courage in coming there? She had hoped it wouldn’t have to be; she kept close to the stairs, for as little good as it felt as if it would do.
“It wasn’t trickery,” she said. “I never lie.”
But that was, itself, a lie, wasn’t it? Just once, to save herself, she had. And she and the town were still paying a terrible price for it.
“I didn’t lie to you,” she corrected herself. “I’m sorry.”
He smiled against the rim of the bottle. Or it might have been a wince, trying and suffering to drink with his bottom lip so badly swollen.
So badly bitten, split in the middle. She managed not to gape this time, at least, though she couldn’t stop the colour climbing in her cheeks.
“Did he send you for that gaudy trinket of his?” he asked. “He stole my necklace, you know. Tell him he can have it back in trade.”
“No, I-” She swallowed. Without that strange charm protecting him, she might have been able to tease out his secrets. Like fine roots from the earth, and she might have found something vital tangled in them.
But he was still almost smiling at her, bloody-lipped. Almost like grudging respect, and forgiveness.
“I just came to give you a letter,” she said. And she hadn’t read it, though it had seemed to burn in her pocket with its dark red, elegant seal. “Here – it’s from him.”
She wouldn’t walk deeper into his lair. But neither did she tremble as he came over to her. He studied her from far above with his pale marshlight eyes; perhaps she couldn’t trust the senses that had led her into that whole mess, but it seemed to them that, somehow, there was more even ground between her and the bloody Haruspex than there had been before.
He studied the letter with a frown that started real and then seemed to have trouble staying that way. By the time he had finished reading, it was nearly a smile.
“It seems I might be getting my necklace back after all,” he said. “Thank you.”
She took his frown for her own. Perhaps she hadn’t ruined things as thoroughly as she’d feared, but it was still hard to believe he would thank her for the way she had last seen him.
“Really? You aren’t...”
“I’m the fool who trusted you,” he pointed out. “And I believe you’re the fool who tried to do right. So let’s leave it at that. Only...”
“Yes?”
His gaze sharpened to something like a real warning.
“Don’t spy on us again.”
She sighed relief. Settled from her tense posture onto, perhaps, more even ground.
“I won’t,” she said. And then, with that extra step of boldness, “Why would I ever want to watch the two of you, anyways? Grappling and quarrelling – it seems like a dreadful waste of time.”
He scoffed. Not so different, the two of them, after all.
“Maybe you’ll understand someday,” he said. “Go on, now. I’m busy. And, thanks to someone, I have a pounding headache.”
She didn’t wait to be told again. With his butcher’s blessing, back up the stairs she ran, from blood and stone and twyre out to the clear morning air.
Her pocket swayed heavy with every step, with the pouch Dankovsky had given her. She needed no special sensitivity to tell her that her next step should be to find somewhere she could trade it for breakfast.
Not the Broken Heart, though. It would be a long time before she even considered doing business with Andrey Stamatin again.