“He available?”
“Might be. Not sure you want him.” He leaned back against the pole again. “He’s a killer. Had blood on his hands when I found him.”
The man had stopped and was looking toward them. His eyes were too shadowed to make out their color.
“What do you want for him?”
Are … are they talking about buying him? No, surely not. Even here in the goblin market where all the rules were different, you shouldn’t be able to buy people. Even the awful Northern Kingdom with its awful new king didn’t let you buy people. That was barbarism.
“Ten years,” said the yellow-eyed man.
“Not a chance. He won’t last ten years.”
Marra spoke up. “Is he a hireling?”
The yellow-eyed man rolled his eyes. “Anybody who sleeps in a fairy fort is fair game. What you do with them once you’ve got them is your problem. Eat them, wed them, set them free—it’s all the same. He moves boxes for me.”
The man who had slept in a fairy fort reached a hand up to the silver collar and touched it, as if picking at a scab.
The dust-wife eyed the necklace around the man-seller’s neck and said, “Forget years. I’ll give you a nun’s tooth.”
His yellow eyes narrowed, going sharp as needles. “A nun’s tooth?”
“Pulled, not dropped,” said the dust-wife. “Eh?”
“Reeeeeally…” He glanced at Marra.
Marra had a sudden bad feeling. “Um…”
“Smell the convent on her,” suggested the dust-wife.
“But—”
“Hush,” said the dust-wife. And to the seller, “Go on.”
The seller approached Marra, nose working. Marra’s skin crawled. My tooth? What? Is he going to snatch one out of my head?
“Yessss…” said the seller, his nostrils flared so wide that Marra could see an edge of pink inside them, like seashells. “Yes, yes! I taste it. Faith and straw. A hint of vespers. Yes! I’ll take it. A tooth for him.”
“Wait a minute,” said Marra, starting to realize that this was really happening and they were talking about her actual teeth. “Wait. You can’t—”
The seller turned his head and shouted, “Eh! Toothdancer! Get over here!”
“The moth says we need him,” said the dust-wife. “And one of your teeth has been bothering you, hasn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“I thought so. You wince a little when you chew.”
“Eh! Toothdancer! Stir your stumps!”
“But you’re going to have someone pull my tooth? Right now? Because a bug landed on him?” She flailed her hand at the man who had been moving boxes. He watched her emotionlessly. She wondered if he was under some spell, or if he simply no longer cared. Then she saw the Toothdancer emerge from behind a curtain in back of the stall and stopped worrying about the other man at all.
The Toothdancer looked like a stork or a heron, with a long hard bill and a curved, mobile neck. He wore a tattered black suit, with feathers sticking out of the holes, and his hands were very human. When he turned his head, Marra saw half a man’s face below the beak, as if it were a mask, and yet his eyes were clearly a heron’s, the color of new-minted coins, and set back from the beak like a bird’s.
She gulped.
“This one,” said the seller. The dust-wife took hold of Marra’s elbow.
“Will it hurt?” whispered Marra, suddenly six years old again, with a baby tooth that pained her.
“No,” said the Toothdancer in a kindly voice. He sounded like a friend, not like a monster with a living mask. “I know my work.” He tapped her chin with a blunt finger. “Open, please.”
Marra opened her mouth and closed her eyes. It was all completely ridiculous, and she didn’t want to do it any more than she had when she was six, and yet you had to—that was how life went when a tooth went bad. You opened your mouth …
Something pressed against her lips. She opened her eyes, realized that the Toothdancer’s beak was actually inside her mouth, and hastily squeezed them closed again.
Tap … tap … tap … The beak was tapping against her teeth, surprisingly delicate, the end much smaller than it looked. Oh, sweet gods. Lady of Grackles, let this not be happening!
Tap … tap …
The dust-wife held her elbow steady. She didn’t tell Marra to relax, which was good because she was so far from relaxed that she thought she might scream.
Tap-ta-tap-tap. The Toothdancer had found the bad tooth. Lower molar on the right side. It had been twinging when Marra ate sometimes, and she had taken to chewing on the other side to prevent a bolt of pain from lancing through her jaw.
The beak withdrew. Marra clamped her lips shut, breathing heavily through her nose. She poked frantically with her tongue and found that the offending tooth was still there.
Maybe it’s like magic maybe he’s just taking a ghost tooth maybe it will be okay—
The Toothdancer took a pennywhistle from his coat pocket and began to play a spritely tune on it, using the human lips that Marra had seen before. She wondered if the beak opened at all, and then she stopped wondering because her teeth had begun to dance.
They twitched in her jaw like living things. She shrieked, not in pain but in horror, her mouth suddenly full of wiggling bone, as if she were in one of those nightmares where all her teeth fell out at once. It was like chewing and squirming and wiggling a loose tooth, wrapped all together, in time to the pennywhistle’s tune.
She tried to bite down hard, hoping to still the awful dance, but it was worse, much worse, all the teeth rattling against each other, her skull filling up with the sounds of chattering. Oh god oh god no no no no NO!
If most of her teeth were dancing, the one bad molar was kicking. It felt as if it were battering against her cheek and the rest of her teeth, like a bird at a window, slam, slam, slam.
The Toothdancer leaned in closer and played more quickly. Marra wanted to scream a denial, but if she opened her mouth, all her teeth would dance out. Oh god this was worse than anything worse than the blistered land, that had been outside, and this was inside her skin inside her face—
With a popping sensation, the bad tooth pulled itself free of her jaw. It landed on her tongue, bouncing like an insect, and began to batter against the backs of her lips. Marra yelped at the sensation of hard, crawling life loose inside her mouth. She tried frantically to spit.
The Toothdancer dropped the pennywhistle, leaned in, and plucked the tooth neatly from the surface of her tongue with his beak. He turned and dropped the tooth, wet and glistening, into the tooth seller’s palm.
Then he bowed very politely to Marra, patted her arm, and walked away.
Marra wrapped her arms around her ribs and sank to her knees, gasping. It hadn’t hurt. She would have preferred that it hurt. She would prefer that she had never felt the sensation of all her teeth leaping and bounding in their sockets. She touched her tongue to the gap, hesitantly, and tasted blood.
“Oh god,” she said hoarsely.
She thought she might start crying, but that would be to show weakness in front of the goblin market. For all she knew, there was a creature who would pull the tears out of her skull like teeth and sell them. She squeezed her eyes closed and thought fixedly about the pit of bones, the wires in her hands, silver looped over silver, building Bonedog, building calm.
An arm went around her, warm and solid. The dust-wife? No, surely not. Who, then?
For a wild instant she thought it was the Toothdancer, who had a kind voice, and the sudden horror of the thought made Marra open her eyes.
The white moth was just visible on his opposite shoulder. He knelt beside her, arm around her shoulders, the muscles in his jaw tense under the line of blue-gray stubble. “Enough,” he said to the tooth seller or the dust-wife or both. “Stop this. I’m not worth it.”