29th of Eystre, Continued

I put my valise on the rickety table in the middle of the kitchen and looked around, slowly taking in what would be 'our' apartment.

A small, greasy round stove hunched on a patch of tile in the corner, with a funny metering apparatus sticking out of it. There was no cold box, only an open cupboard that must have served as the last tenant's larder, judging from the wedge of moldy cheese left on the top shelf. A chipped porcelain scullery sink stood beneath a small window; the windowpanes were so murky with grime they let in only a dull glow.

Notably, there was no indoor water pump. There wasn't a hot water tank above the stove, either.

Wonderful.

I took a step closer to the cupboard, nose wrinkling when the suspicious black pebbles dotting the shelves proved to be rat droppings.

Arramy came in from the front room, arms crossed over his chest, his mouth set in a grim line. "The roof leaks like a sieve."

"Well, with any luck, we'll only have to deal with it for a few months," I said, moving to peer into the sink. A cobweb stretched like lace over the bottom of the bowl, and a large, black, hairy spider looked at me from inside the drain. She had been undisturbed long enough to make quite the nest for herself in there. I raised an eyebrow at her, then began rolling up my sleeves. "So. Where's the spigot?"

Arramy was giving me an unreadable stare. "It'll be in the yard."

I bent and pulled a bucket out from under the sink, along with a barely used scrub brush and an unopened box of scouring powder. Might as well get started.

~~~

We spent the next few hours shoveling several tenants' worth of filth out of the apartment. I had never cleaned that much in my life, but for some reason it felt good, scrubbing away layers of dust and grease, sweeping down cobwebs, shaking out tattered old rugs, turning a pigsty into something habitable.

The swish of the bristles over the floorboards was lulling, the wash of bubbles and water mesmerizing, the swath of clean I left behind satisfying. I scrubbed until my back ached and my fingers were raw.

I was going to dump the dirty water in the sink and keep right on working when I caught the rapid shuffle of furry black feet in the mouth of the drain. I hesitated. Then I put the bucket down and looked at the spider. She was alive, and she hadn't done anything to deserve a drowning. I knew what that was like, clinging to my tiny life while great big people stomped around, tearing my world apart.

This was what I had been reduced to, finding things in common with a spider in a drain. With a sigh, I grabbed one of the stiff old rags from under the sink.

I was in the middle of trying to get the spider to climb onto the rag when Arramy started muscling a bolster mattress down the stairs from the loft.

He came to a halt in the kitchen doorway, eyeing me over the drooping top of the mattress, his perplexed stare making me turn ten shades of pink. Which was very annoying. Ignoring him, I managed to coax the spider onto the rag, and then made a quick, jittery, cringing dash for the back door before she could run up the rag and onto my fingers ­– whereupon I threw the rag, spider and all, into the weeds beside the steps. Then I dusted my hands off and turned to face Arramy. No nonsense. All business.

With a grunt he started sidestepping the sagging bolster past the kitchen table. "Now that you've saved the local wildlife, would you mind holding the door open?"

Calmly, I did as ordered, keeping the screen from smacking his backside as he hefted the bulk of the mattress down the steps and into the yard, where he flopped it up against the sunny side of the clapboard fence. He looked at me, dry amusement glittering in his eyes.

That seemed to be happening a lot, lately. I pursed my lips and narrowed my eyes at him. "What?"

He shook his head. "Nothing... Was there any louse powder anywhere?"

I shook my head.

"Right. Well, that's another thing to add to the list for market." He squinted up at me. "Get your jacket. We'll pick up something for dinner."

~~~

Shopping with Arramy was an interesting experience. First off, we could only redeem the ration tickets at the commissary run by the dockworker's association. Secondly, Arramy proceeded to take charge of the ordering, trading our tickets in for enough eggs to feed a small army, as well as a full rasher of beef. He passed up the ration of cabbage on offer, preferring potatoes and chilies.

While he placed our order, I wandered down the ramshackle aisle between the meat counter and the dry-goods. The place smelled vaguely of wood polish, dried fish, and old onions, but there was a section of shelves lined with jars of colorful sweets that brought back memories of the shops in Garding. I lingered over the jar of rum taffy, smiling a little at the familiar scent of cinnamon and anise that drifted into the air when I lifted the lid.

I glanced up to find Arramy watching me, an odd expression on his face, but he turned quickly to answer a question from the commissar before I could figure out what he wanted.

We finished at the commissary, then got two-arrum meat pies at one of the street sellers and headed back to the apartment. We ate the pies with our fingers while sitting at the kitchen table, and then we deloused the mattress and finished scrubbing the upstairs.

The whole thing was so mundane that I kept expecting to wake up. I couldn't really be planning to stay in a rowhouse with Arramy, of all people, playing Happy Home. This wasn't going to be my life for the foreseeable future. It was too absolutely normal. Cleaning house, buying food, finding work... Hedwyn was about to dump freezing water on me, and this weirdly domestic day would have been nothing more than a very detailed dream.

But it was real. Sleeping on the floor in the bedroom made that all-too-painfully obvious. The delousing powder had to sit for a full day, so the mattress had to stay outside in the yard. Amazingly, I actually did fall asleep, even though I was using my petticoat as a blanket and my jacket as a pillow. Scrubbing all day had taken its toll.

~~~

30th of Eystre

I woke early the next morning.

My first thought, even before I opened my eyes: I have to get a job today.

My second thought: I speak six languages, I know how to run an international shipping company, and now I am going to hope someone hires me as an inexperienced day laborer in a cannery.

With a groan, I sat up. My entire left side ached from lying too long in one spot, and my arm had gone completely numb. Not only that, but from the sound of a pan clattering on the stove and the sizzle of frying eggs, Arramy was making breakfast already. And he was whistling.

Wonderful.

Lifting my upper lip in a snarl, I pushed myself off the floor, moving slowly in the unheated air of the loft as I pulled on some clothes and buckled on my boots.

Arramy had insisted I take the bedroom, while he slept down in the sitting room, stretched out on the hearthrug like some sort of great guardian hound. I didn't really want to put a name on why that bothered me. It did, though. Aside from not having a mattress, I had woken twice in the night, my heart racing because the loft had been too quiet.

When I stumped down the stairs and into the kitchen, Arramy looked up from the stove, an annoyingly awake grin tugging his mouth askew. "How do you like your eggs?"

I stopped still in the doorway, staring at him. I had daydreamed about a man asking me that question while making me breakfast, but in my schoolgirl head, that man had been dashing and charming and sweet. I would never in a million years have imagined those words coming from a big, grumpy sea captain with a Northlander brogue and a penchant for calling me 'kid.' I was glowering. I had no reason to glower. With a sigh I made myself relax, then moved to sit at the table. "Um. I'll take two over-easy. Is there toast?"

He tipped his head toward a rack of toasted bread on the counter, cracked two eggs into the pan, and that was the blessed end of the conversation until we had finished eating and were on our way out the door. Then I got a gruff, "I'll walk with ya to the cannery."

I glanced at him.

He slid a sidelong look at me. "It's on my way."

I had never been to the cannery, but I was fairly sure I could find it. I had made him draw a little map for me just in case. The map hadn't referenced Padashiri's shipping, so perhaps it really was on his way. From the stern set of his jaw, though, Arramy was going to walk me there whether it was on his way or not.

It chafed, but I held my tongue and fell into step with him. There were bigger things to worry about than my social freedom, and if the Living War Machine wanted to play escort, I wasn't going to fight with him about it.

It was a lovely morning, really, in spite of my still-tingling arm and my stiff muscles. The farther south we had gone, the warmer it had gotten, and while Vreis had been heading into fall and harvest season, the dry season had just begun on Phyrros. The sky was a spotless blue, a balmy sea breeze was driving the smell of the city away, and the streets were starting to come alive with people on their way to work.

I had survived this long. How hard could it be to get a job like a regular working girl?

~~~

"We pack nearly four tons of shellfishes a week. They come in off the boats straight into the loading bay here," the foreman shouted, waving a big, meaty hand around at the concrete floor and rusty corrugated walls of a large shed tacked onto the rear of the canning factory, the open, doorless end butting right up to the wharves, where lorries were unloading crate upon crate of mussels.

"From here, the shellfishes are brought to the shucking floor," the foreman continued, his stout legs carrying him along at a rapid pace as he skirted a lorry and aimed a hand at a long line of wooden troughs, where a dozen or so workers were cracking shells open.

"Down the end there, the shucked shellfishes are steamed in the boiler, brined, and packed into jars. You're for the shucking floor, though. Oi, Nalle! I got a new one for ya!" he bellowed.

One of the shuckers lifted her head, giving me a once-over with keen, merry brown eyes while her hands remained busy scooping the insides out of a large mussel.

The foreman bent to yell in my ear, "This is Nalle! Just follow along with her, you'll pick it up in no time!" Then he gave me a grin and a pat on the shoulder and strode off toward the far end of the building, his introduction to canning apparently over.

Nalle jerked her chin, indicating the space next to her. "Well, come on over, you," she called, loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the lorries and the roar of the boiler's coal burner. She waited until I had come around the end of the trough to shout, "Did he get you gloves, at least?"

I shook my head. She rolled her eyes at the foreman's retreating back, then slipped her shucking knife into a slot on the side of the trough and stepped back to a row of hooks on the wall behind her, grabbing a pair of coarse-looking knitted gloves and handing them to me before snatching up her shucking knife and starting right back in again. "Here. There's wire in the thread. They'll help keep you from cutting your fingers off. Get those on, and I'll show you how we shuck a red-lipped dredge mussel."

It turned out getting the job had been the easy part. I had walked into the front office and said, "I'm here about a job," and the next minute I was following the foreman down to the canning floor. Keeping the job was the harder part. The Shuckers, as they were called, had to cut the mussel or clam or scallop out of its shell, which required a sharp knife and strong hands. The action was easy enough, but it was wet, gritty, salty work, and the gloves quickly got soaked. So did my clothes.

Nalle's fingers moved automatically, cutting the shells apart, cleaning away the unwanted parts of the mussel into a sluice of running water on the back end of the trough, then scooping the meat into a flat wire cage called a sheave before dropping the shells into a bucket between her feet. She kept up a steady stream of chatter as she went, somehow managing to talk and keep from mixing up the shells and the guts and the mussel meat.

Within the first fifteen minutes I knew the foreman's name was Big Gam. He had gotten his job because he was married to the boss's cousin. He would forget his head if his wife didn't tie it on for him every morning, but he was nice enough.

The other Shuckers weren't being rude, they just couldn't hear much of anything over the racket, and there was a lyr extra in their pay if they got the most sheaves into the boiler by the end of shift. There was some stiff competition over that extra lyr. I'd be wise to learn to shuck fast, if I wanted any spending money.

Sambur, the coal man, was the fellow all the girls were after. Jarro was the skinny one down the end, loading the sheaves into the boiler vat. He was nice enough but got overly appreciative if he'd had too much at the pub. Thalomy was the big guy shucking at the last table, and his kids were the urchins slapping the gum labels on the jars at the other end of the boiler. He had lost his wife to consumption a year before, and the boss had allowed him to bring his oldest three in to work so they could keep the income.

There were ten other girls in the factory, but I could only keep a few of them straight. Rivany was the pretty one with the dark hair, who worked at the sorting table, picking through the incoming catch. She was a regular shecat, though, and liked to mark her territory with her claws. Tarris was the redhead two tables down. She was nice – too nice to be married to Jarro. Then there were Sharrin and Eman, and Avan, and Pellan, and Kay... I lost track after that. My back ached, my head ached, my left arm ached, the wire in the gloves was rubbing blisters on my palms, the salt stung my raw fingers, and when all was said and done, I didn't have the luxury of making any friends. Not really. Not here among normal people. I just had to hold onto this job.

I concentrated on learning how to do the work efficiently, and by the end of the day I could shuck almost as quickly and reliably as the others. When the shift klaxon finally started wailing I was only too glad to drop my knife into a slot, peel off my gloves, and follow Nalle and the others out the delivery door and into the street that ran up the hill toward the tenement district.

My gaze instantly picked out the tall, lanky figure leaning against the wall of the delivery dock overhang, his thumbs hooked casually in the front pockets of his denims.

Arramy was waiting. For me.

My heartbeat stumbled, my eyes disobediently noticing that deceptive grace that seemed to accompany every move he made as he saw me coming and pushed away from the wall.

I bit my lip, hoping like mad he wouldn't see the hot blush working its way up my face as I kept walking, closing the distance between us. He offered his arm and I took it, and then because Nalle and the other girls were elbowing each other and watching with pointed interest, I beamed up at him. "Hello, love."

There was a wry little hint of a grin lighting up his eyes as he looked down at me, taking in the sorry state of my clothes. "Long day?"

There was a teasing note in his voice, which was good. I could use that. I pulled a tragically grave face as he drew me in beside him. "I have something to tell you. Very important. These last few months have been pure marital bliss, don't misunderstand, but I'm afraid we will have to part. I have decided to become a mollusk."

That hint of a grin grew into a flash of teeth and a dimple. "So nothing new, then."

A sudden, very real laugh of surprise bubbled out of my throat, and I didn't hold it back. This was all part of the act. The lie that we were capable of being easy with each other and had no secrets to hide.

A small voice whispered that, just like on the Coralynne, this act was too easy, and that glow in my heart at the sight of his smile wasn't going to end well.

~~~

Arramy's shift had ended a little before mine. He had already been home, scrubbed himself up, and gone to the street vendor to buy dinner. He had also bought himself a new shirt from a patchy clothes seller. All in all, for a barbarian, he was turning out to be quite clean and thoughtful.

I ate my eel pie in silence, watching him from across the dingy little table. His hair was still dark as a raven's wing, but silver was beginning to show through at the temples, and the roots were fading to blond again. "I need to get some more goatswood dye," I said abruptly, more to break that odd tension rippling between us than to be useful.

He glanced at me for a moment, then nodded once. "I'll pick some up tomorrow morning." There was a long pause, then he added, "I got an extra shift. Night crew, loading until the wee hours..." he finished off his pie and ran a thumb along his lower lip in place of a napkin, then got to his feet, taking his plate to the sink. "I'll catch a few hours kip now and be back in time for breakfast. Will you be alright?"

"You mean, will I be alright if you leave me here on my own?" I lifted an eyebrow and let my voice go high and delicate. "I don't know. However will I manage?"

He finished washing up and turned to look at me, those grey eyes cool and appraising.

He was being serious. I blinked. "Yes. I'll be alright. I promise to behave."

He didn't say anything, though, just nodded again and left, walking into the sitting room.

The quiet was almost deafening. I pushed a chunk of eel meat around my plate, trying not to think about the fact that he was probably getting ready for bed on the other side of that wall. Thunk thunk. Boots. Swish, clink. Shirt, belt.

With a start, I got to my feet, then spent several minutes scouring my plate spotless, rinsing it off with a bit of water from the pitcher beside the sink.

I refilled the pitcher at the spigot in the yard. Took a small sponge bath while standing in the kitchen, trying to lessen the stink of brine that seemed to have become one with my skin. Unbraided and rebraided my hair. Then, finally, with nothing left to do and weariness tugging at me, I tiptoed through the sitting room and past Arramy, careful not to make any noise on my way up the stairs to the loft.

Something thick and dark lurked on the floor beneath the window, and for a split-second I froze, nerves on edge. In the next breath I calmed, that jangle of nerves replaced by understanding, and then a rush of gratitude.

Arramy had beaten the dead lice out of the mattress and dragged it back upstairs.

There were no words for how good itt felt, sinking into that bolster. It was lumpy and motheaten, and smelled faintly of lye and chalky earth, but it was so much better than the floor. Especially since my petticoat was still quite damp and reeked of fish.

In spite of how tired I was, though, I couldn't quite get my brain to stop working.

I lay there for quite a while, drifting.

Absurdly, the thing that kept popping up was that day we walked into the Iron Dragon Inn and staged a fake row. I remembered the way the sunlight slanted in through the tall windows above the front entrance of the Inn. The fire crackling in the fireplace. The slush soaking my boots.

That had been the first time I had been alone with Arramy. Or, not alone, really, since there had been other people there, but it had been the first time we had been paired up, shoved together out of necessity. We always seemed to wind up that way. Then, now, working together even when we didn't want to... The Iron Dragon had been the first time I had been kissed, too, and like magic, that moment began replaying through my head. That low, gravelly, "You're taking too long," and then those lean, strong fingers framing my jaw, tipping my head back. What would have happened if I hadn't been so shocked? If I had cradled his head in my hands and pressed my lips to his?

What was I doing? With a muffled curse, I flipped over and stared up at the ceiling. This was not helping. I needed to sleep. Instead, there I was, wide awake and thinking about —

As if some sort of unspoken signal had gone out, Arramy began to stir downstairs, pulling his boots back on before moving quietly about the apartment. He stoked the fire in the small stove in the sitting room. Did something in the kitchen. Then, after a moment, his footsteps sounded on the stairs, and I went perfectly, absolutely still, my heart pounding, my breath hitching in my chest.

He came all the way up to the top of the stairs and paused, little more than a shadow outlined against the dim light of the moon filtering through the ratty curtains.

Then, slowly, he moved toward me on eerily silent tread, unrolling something he had been holding. Something long and wide.

I stared up at him, but it wasn't fear holding me captive. He wasn't there to hurt me. I knew that bone-deep. I didn't make a sound, didn't shift a muscle, watching from between my lashes as he bent and draped that thing over me.

It was the blanket he had been using. The blanket I had found at the back of the little clothes bureau built into the loft wall. The only blanket currently in the apartment.

Then, just as stealthily as he had come up, he went back down. A minute later the door closed, and the latch turned, and he was gone.

I swallowed. The blanket was scratchy, but it was still warm from his body heat and held just the faintest suggestion of the lemon and hardsalt soap he must have used to wash up with. Heaving a gusty sigh, I pulled the blanket close, trying not to think about the fact that he had just been wrapped in it – and failing miserably.

He had turned my father in. I should have felt like a traitor, but all I could muster was a dull sort of acceptance. The monster who had torn everything to pieces was the same monster fighting to save me from the chaos, and the longer I knew that monster, the more glimpses I got of the man beneath the stony hide. And the more I saw of that man, the more I wanted to see. I wanted to make him laugh. I wanted to take away a little of that loneliness I could read in his eyes like a beacon. I wanted to give him a safe place where he didn't have to hide who he was or what he had done.

As if that would ever happen. Arramy owed my father a debt, saw helping me as his duty, and thought of me as a little sister.

There. Reality. Maybe that would squash the stupid ache in my throat.

This really was getting out of hand.