“Don’t shoot,” Cerise said. “It’s Urow’s children.”
The one on the left sprinted and dived into the water off the branch. The gray body shot through water, and the boy launched himself onto the deck.
They swam like fish. William made a mental note never to fight one in the water.
The kid rose, dripping water. His face was young, sixteen or seventeen, but his body was thick and muscled like that of a bear. The boy glanced at the gray man’s body and bared his teeth in a feral snarl.
“Copper poisoning,” Cerise barked. “Tell your mother, Gaston.”
The boy dived into the water.
The stream made a tight turn and opened into a pond, cradled by giant cypresses. A house perched on stilts, with a small dock. Built of logs and stone, with a roof sheathed in green moss, the house looked like it had grown from the swamp like a mushroom.
A woman ran onto the dock and clutched a rail. Bright red hair fell in a braid from her shoulders. Urow’s wife.
Cerise snapped the reins, pulling a burst of speed from the exhausted rolpie. They docked with a bump.
The woman glared at them. William had a feeling that if her eyes could shoot fire, both he and Cerise would’ve been burned to a crisp.
“Damn it, Cerise. What did you do to him?”
Cerise’s face clenched into a rigid mask. She turned her back to the woman. “William, can you help me lift him?”
“Follow me,” Urow’s wife snapped and took off.
William grasped Urow under his arms and paused, unsure how to get four hundred pounds of deadweight onto the dock. Another of Urow’s kids surfaced and pulled himself onto the boat. This one was older, layered with thick slabs of muscle like his father. He grasped his dad’s legs and together they hauled him onto the pier and to the house.
“Hurry!” Urow’s wife yelled. “On the floor here.”
William followed the boy through the door. They maneuvered through the cramped inside into a dimly lit room and lowered Urow on the stack of quilts.
Urow’s wife bent over her husband. The swelling was half an inch from his throat. “Mart! Herbs!”
The boy ran into the kitchen.
Urow’s wife dropped on her knees, threw open a large box, and pulled out a scalpel sealed in plastic. “Cerise, tracheotomy tube, now.”
Cerise tore at another plastic bag.
The red-haired woman crossed herself and sliced her husband’s neck with the scalpel.
William escaped outside.
WILLIAM stood on the dock and watched hundreds of tiny worms crawl up the roots of the cypress. The worms glowed with gentle pastel colors: turquoise, lavender, pale lemon. The entire pond was bathed in the eerie glow. He once had a drink in a bar with LED glasses that lit up when you tapped the bottom. The effect was strikingly similar.
He’d waited on the dock for at least two hours. At first he caught brisk orders filtering through the walls from the inside, then magic had brushed against him. Now all was quiet. He couldn’t tell if the gray man had survived. William hoped he had. The gray man had children, and children had to have fathers.
He had no father. He’d never find him, even if he wanted to look for him, which he didn’t. At Hawk’s some changelings had talked about finding their parents. William saw no point in it. Why? When he was twelve, he’d broken into the archive at the academy and read the records. His father hadn’t stuck around to see him born. His mother gave him up as soon as she was strong enough to walk after giving birth. That was the Adrianglian No Questions policy. If a woman had a changeling child, she could give her baby up, no questions asked. The state would assume responsibility for the kid. They would stick him into Hawk’s and grow him into a monster.
He’d been whipped for breaking in. It was worth it. Before he’d wondered if he had a family. Afterward he knew. Nobody wanted him. Nobody was waiting for him. He was alone.
Steps approached. William straightened. The door swung open, and Urow’s wife came out and leaned on the rail next to him.
Up close she wasn’t as pretty as the picture made her out to be. Her skin stretched too tightly over her sharp features and bony face. She reminded him of a haggard fox, driven crazy by her pups.
Cerise was much prettier.
“I was short with you back there,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be.”
“Will your husband make it?”
“The worst has passed. He is sleeping now. The swelling has dropped and we took the tube out.”
“That’s good,” William said to say something.
Urow’s wife swallowed. “Cerise said you saved my husband. Our family owes you a debt.”
What was she going on about . . . The rope, William remembered. “I shot at the rope and happened to hit it. No debt.”
The woman straightened. A spark of pride flared in her eyes. “Yes, we do. And we always pay our debts. You’re called William?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Clara. I’m going to return the favor, William. In the morning, we’ll get our fastest rolpie and our best boat, and my sons will take you back to town.”
“I can’t do that.”
She nodded. “Yes, Cerise said you’re invited to the main house. Don’t go.”
Now that was interesting. “Why not?”
Clara sighed. “Cerise is a beautiful girl. Woman, I should say, she is twenty-four now. Striking. But you have to understand something about Cerise: she is a Mar. Mars are loyal to the family first.”
“You’re a Mar.”
She nodded. “Yes. And I’m loyal to the family. They treat my husband as if he’s one of them. It’s not every clan that will take in a half-thoas bastard. They treat my children well, too.”
Her gaze flicked to the base of the tree, where one of her sons climbed out of the water to sit on the roots. “My problems with the Mars are complicated. You don’t need to know them. If you go to the Rathole, there will be no turning back, William. We have our own law here in the Mire. We do a lousy job of enforcing it, but we manage better than other places in the Edge, from what I’ve heard. You aren’t one of us. Your clothes are good, and you hold yourself like you aren’t from around here. The Mire law won’t shield you. You go to the Rathole, and if you step an inch out of line, Cerise or one of her cousins will cut your throat with a pretty knife and bury you in the mud. They won’t lose any sleep over it. You seem like a decent man. Walk away. It’s about to get real bloody down there between the Mars and the Sheeriles, and it’s not your fight.”
She was wrong. It was his fight. Until William figured out how Cerise’s parents were connected to the Hand, he had to stick to her like glue. He wouldn’t leave her now anyway. Not after he’d seen the way she fought. But he wasn’t about to explain that to anyone.
“Thanks for the warning,” he told her.
She shook her head. “You’re a fool. Cerise will never fall for an outsider.”
“I don’t expect her to fall,” he said.
Clara slumped over the rail. “Well, I’ve tried.”
“Why are you with Urow?” William asked.
She looked up and he saw warmth in her eyes. “You could get shot for a question like that.”
With what? “I don’t see any rifles.”
“You’re an odd man, William.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
“Why do you want to know?” Clara asked.
He saw no point in lying. “Because he has someone and I don’t.”
Another of Urow’s kids dropped from the branches, swam across the pond, and sat next to his brother. That, plus the youngest one inside, made three. They’d all gathered around him to protect him. His own pack.
Clara sighed. “I’ve had men before him. Some were nice, some were bastards. But when I’m with him, he treats me like I’m his world. I know that no matter what happens, he will do all he can to keep me and the kids safe. His all might not be enough, but no matter how bad it gets, he will never run off and leave me to pick up the pieces. He will never hurt me.”
There had to be more to it than that. “And is that enough?”
She smiled. “That’s more than most people have. They’re alone in the world, but I’m not. When I lay in his arms at night, there is no safer place. Besides, what would that big lug do without me? I let him go away for four days by himself, and he gets himself shot.”
The smile drained from her face.
She’d thought of something bad. William focused on her face. “What is it?”
“If you’re bound and determined to go down to the Rathole, you need to know this: thoas aren’t common to the Mire. Someone told those men my husband was meeting Cerise down by Sicktree. Someone who knew what copper does to a thoas.”
A traitor, William realized. She was trying to tell him there was a traitor in Cerise’s family.
“She will go down there and start a witch hunt. Don’t let yourself get caught up in it. Don’t let yourself be used. Let my kids take you back to town. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose.”
Cerise walked out on the dock.
Clara’s face shut down. “Are you leaving?”
“Yes,” Cerise said.
“Not while it’s dark? It’s pitch-black out there.”
“It will be fine,” Cerise said.
Urow’s youngest son had followed her out. Gaston, William remembered.
“Lagar sent people out to watch the waterways.” Gaston’s voice was a deep guttural snarl. Trying to make himself seem older, like his father. If he were a cat, he would’ve arched his back and puffed out his fur. “Ry said he saw Peva out in the Mire.”
“The court is tomorrow,” Cerise said. “If I wait, I won’t make it to the hearing. I’m late enough as is.” Her gaze flickered to William. He looked into her dark eyes and lost his train of thought.
Want.
His ears heard her speak, but his brain took a couple of seconds to break the words down to meaning.
“If you would rather stay ...”
“No.” He walked down the dock and stepped into the boat. He had to figure out some way to keep her from catching him off-guard like this.
Cerise hesitated. “Clara, at first light, you should come, too.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Clara crossed her arms.
“The Hand has a tracker,” Cerise said. “He may follow us here.”
“The Hand wants you, not us.”
“It’s not safe here.”
Clara raised her chin. “You may be in charge of the family, and if Urow was awake, he might listen to you, but he isn’t awake and I’m not about to take orders from the likes of you in my own house. Be on your way.”
Cerise clenched her teeth and climbed into the boat. Anger rolled off her in waves. She touched the reins, and the rolpie took off, pulling them across the pond.
“Why doesn’t she like you?” William asked.
Cerise sighed. “Because of my grandfather. He came from the Weird. He was a very smart man. He taught me and all of my cousins. We don’t have normal school here in the Mire. Some people can’t even read. But our family had Grandfather. We know some things that most Edgers don’t, and that makes us different.”
“Like what?”
Cerise switched to Gaulish.
“Like speaking other languages. Like knowing the basics behind the magic theories.”
“Anyone can learn another language,”
William told her in Gaulish.
“It’s not difficult.”
She peered at his face.
“You’re full of surprises, Lord Bill. I thought you were Adrianglian.”
“I am.”
“Your Gaulish has no accent.”
He overlaid a thick coastal drawl over the Gaulish words.
“Is that better, mademoiselle?”
She blinked those huge eyes, and he switched to a harsher Northern dialect.
“I can do a fur trapper, too.”
“How do you do that?”
“I have a really good memory,”
he told her in refined upper-class Gaulish.
She matched his accent.
“I have no doubt of that.”
Her grandfather must’ve been a noble and from the East, too. She stretched her
a
’s. William filed it away for further consideration.
“That’s really impressive,”
she said.
Ha! He’d broken bones, killed an altered human, carried her rhino of a cousin, and she didn’t blink an eye. But the moment he said two words in another language, she decided to be impressed.
Cerise dropped into Adrianglian again. “People like Clara don’t like it. She thinks we ‘put on airs,’ as she says, as if what we can do somehow makes her less. She is right, you know. You’re heading straight into the den of cut-throats. You should’ve taken her up on her offer and gone back to town.”