‘What?’
‘Of course, I understand that you’re currently engaged in a very important and secret mission for the Winnowry,’ Vintage paused to cough into her hand, ‘but if you were able to put that to one side for a moment, I would be glad to pay you a wage to accompany us indefinitely. If anyone should have any queries as to your whereabouts, my dear, I would of course handle them personally.’
The girl looked startled now, and Vintage suppressed a smile. To be that young and so sure that your lies were subtle things.
‘Listen to me. As far as we knew, winnowfire itself has little effect on parasite spirits. Winnow-forged steel, yes, but not the pure flames. Except yours did.’ Vintage pursed her lips. She knew what she was about to say would not be received well, and yet she also felt instinctively that it was true. ‘I think that was due to the energy you took. Eboran life energy. Together you have made something else. Something lethal to the spirits.’
‘Vintage, did you suffer a blow to the head?’ Tormalin was smiling faintly, but there was a stony look in his eyes. ‘That little fireworks display back there nearly killed all of us, without even going into what this little thief did to me. And you are asking her to do it again?’
Vintage ignored him. ‘Well, perhaps you could sleep on it, Fell-Noon. That’s all I ask. I would like to return to the crevice in the morning, when, hopefully, the night’s air will have dissipated the stench, and then we’ll get you out of this gloomy worm-touched place. Plenty of time for you to consider my offer.’
Noon lay with her back to the fire. She was glad of the warmth, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to look at it.
She felt exhausted to her very bones, but sleep was a distant prospect – her mind felt like a bird caught in a tent, bouncing from wall to wall in a panic, no way out. At the forefront of her mind was the fact that the woman knew. She knew she was no agent, that her story stank worse than horse dung. She had been kind, and polite, and hadn’t come out and said directly that she knew Noon was lying, but it had been there in the hard glitter of her eyes when she had offered Noon the job. Noon had never met anyone like Vintage. Her cleverness was evident in her every word, in her assessing gaze. That could simply be because she was older than Noon, although it was difficult to guess her age; her warm brown skin was largely unlined, save for a handful of creases at the corners of her eyes, and a pair of laughter lines by her mouth. She had full hips and a thicket of dark curled hair, shot through here and there with a few touches of grey. Her eyes were kind, and to Noon she was beautiful. It made her more difficult to trust, somehow.
Noon pulled the collar of the jacket up to her chin. She needed to think, but whenever she closed her eyes she saw it all again, as if the image were still seared onto the inside of her eyelids: the strange creature made of lights, the soft way it had flowed around them, like a deadly flood. And then she had summoned her fire and it had lit up the night, an impossible torch, and she had been frozen with terror and exultation. The parasite spirit had burned, so wildly and so fast, and the noises it had made . . . She knew from the expressions on the faces of Vintage and the Eboran that they had never expected it to make such noises, but then they had never heard a living thing burn before. She was certain of it.
In the dark, Noon curled up as tightly as she could. Somewhere, deep inside her head, that noise went on forever.
Behind her, she could hear the small sounds of the others. Vintage was asleep, her hat – which she had insisted they retrieve – placed delicately over her face. The rhythmic fluting noise was her snoring. The Eboran was still awake, watching over them in the dark – she could hear him shifting every now and then, the occasional small sigh as he stood up to work the stiffness from his legs, the creak of his leather coat.
How strange to be here in the dark with such company. Ten years of nothing but the Winnowry and the witches, and now she made camp with an Eboran. It was like sleeping next to the bogey man, next to a monster out of one of Mother Fast’s tales. He was everything she had said the Eborans were – beautiful, graceful, quick. His eyes were red and cruel, just as they were in all of Mother Fast’s stories, and it was easy to imagine him on the battlefields of the Carrion Wars, tearing out the throats of men and women and drinking their blood while it was still hot.
And there was something else. In her fear and her panic, she had taken energy from him to fuel her winnowfire. Just a touch, and it had filled her in moments, something dark and old and unknowable – she had felt no other energy like it, and just like the winnowfire, it was frightening and glorious. She wanted to be far from here, to be alone so that she could never feel it again. She wanted to go to him now and place her hand against the smooth skin of his neck and taste it again. Take all of it, perhaps, and become someone else entirely.
Noon squeezed her eyes shut. Perhaps the Winnowry was right after all. She was too dangerous to be out in the world.
11
The story of Tomas the Drowned is an interesting, if ultimately tragic, one – tragic, mainly for the hundreds of women who have been imprisoned as a result of his unusual life.
Tomas was a fisherman, or so the tale tells us, and one night he was out alone in his fishing boat when a great storm came upon the reef. His boat was smashed into pieces and Tomas sank beneath the waves, supposedly lost forever.
(Interestingly, shards of his boat have been sold as holy relics for the last hundred years or so, collected by the faithful as they were washed up on the beach. How the faithful knew to collect those pieces when, as far as they knew, Tomas was just another drowned fisherman, I do not know, but it does not do to dwell too closely on the origins of ‘holy’ relics, I suspect.)