“I DON’T SEE WHAT you think I can do to help,” said Dahria. I had arrived at the town house unannounced, and she had reacted coolly, as if merely speaking to me was endangering her reputation.
I showed her the baby I had already begun to think of as Kalla, and she took a step back, her face an almost comic mask of astonishment.
“I’m in danger,” I said.
“If you are going to ask me to look after that—,” she began, appalled.
“I’m not,” I said. “But if I am going to continue my investigation, we need protection. Perhaps I could borrow one of your brother’s men.”
“I thought you were supposed to be working in secret?” she asked. “I hardly think being accompanied by henchmen and an infant is going to lower your profile.”
My face fell. For a moment, she just looked at me; then she made a decision and opened a desk drawer with an intricate key. She produced a long, hexagonal-barreled revolver and a velvet bag of ammunition.
“Do not tell my brother or, for that matter, anyone else in the world, that you got this from me,” she said.
“Can you teach me to use it?” I asked.
“You point it and pull the trigger,” said Dahria wryly. “Pull the hammer back after each shot, like this, and hold it tight. It will kick. There’s little more to it. That’s the great and terrible thing about guns. You don’t need a lot of skill with them to be lethal.”
“Then that should work out,” I said, taking the heavy weapon from her and hefting it less comfortably than I pretended.
“Just…” She faltered, eyeing both me and Kalla. “Be careful.”
CHAPTER
20
I SAW FEVEL ON my way to the Drowning. He was loping down the center of the road by the Westside Gasworks, gazing about him like a weancat, hunting.
For me, I thought, shrinking against the wall of the post office on the corner and peering between the drainpipe and the wall as he walked on, scanning. Less weancat, I decided, more hyena. I hugged the child to my chest, glad that she was sleeping.
When I arrived, Rahvey snatched the child from my arms so that she woke with a start and began to cry, silencing only when she found my sister’s breast. “It’s starving,” said Rahvey, shooting me an accusatory look.
It wasn’t, in fact. Mnenga’s nbezu milk had kept the child satisfied.
“What are you doing all the time?” she demanded. “You look terrible.”
I thought of telling her about Berrit, but Rahvey was the kind of person who thought that the difficulties of her own life—which were undeniable—rendered everyone else undeserving of sympathy.
“Does it matter?” I said.
Rahvey turned to look at the baby she was nursing, and suddenly it was like we were girls again, waiting for Papa to come home. I think I always knew that Rahvey resented the attention I got from Papa, attention she saw as stolen from her. I remember one time when Vestris was reading the tale of Shantali the hunter as we all ate together, and Papa was so caught up in it that his food went cold as he listened, spellbound. The next day I made a clay model of Shantali and the elephant he killed by mistake as a gift for him, but Rahvey broke it. She said it was an accident, but I didn’t believe her, and I was still crying when Papa got home. Vestris took him out of the hut to tell him what had happened, and when he came back, his face was tight with anger. He never shouted except in delight, so his silence was terrible. He told Rahvey she had done a disgraceful thing, and Rahvey wept, protesting her innocence till even I wasn’t sure whether she meant it, or whether she had just started to believe her own lie. Children do that sometimes.
That night as we lay quiet in our beds I had seen Rahvey’s face in the lamplight as Vestris stroked her hair, and she had looked beyond anger and grief. She looked lost and without hope. And then it was like I was seeing myself from her bunk, and I was an interloper, someone who had appeared when no one expected it, stolen her father’s love from her, and captivated her beautiful elder sister.
Had I given her cause to hate me? I didn’t think so, but maybe what I thought didn’t really matter. It occurred to me that the soup my father had allowed to go cold while listening to Vestris’s story would have taken Rahvey most of the afternoon to make.
“Morlak’s boys came for you, Anglet,” Rahvey said now, without looking up from Kalla’s face. “Found Sinchon at his work. What did you do?”
And that was also Rahvey. No concern for me. Just the assumption that her idiot sister had messed up in ways that would incur a punishment she probably deserved. If there was any other emotion, it was irritation that my problems had somehow involved her.
“Please just feed Kalla,” I said, weary.
“Kalla?” said Rahvey. “Who is Kalla?”
I flushed a little. “It’s what I call her,” I said. “The baby.”
Rahvey drew herself up still farther, like some bush lizard flexing its crest to ward off predators. “There has been no naming,” she said in a leaden voice. “When there is, I will name the child, not you. And it will not be called Kalla.”