Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(8)

I was not the sister she had been waiting for. I never was.

“Pass me that towel,” said Florihn, the midwife. I squatted beside her, but kept my eyes on the wall. “About time you were having one of these yourself,” the woman added.

I had seen her around the camps for years, coming and going with bloodstained napkins and buckets of water. She lost no more babies than was usual, and had birthed me seventeen years ago, but I had never taken to her. I suppose I imagined the midwife’s disappointed announcement of what I was when I had first emerged bawling from my mother. Another girl. I could not, of course, actually remember the moment, but I was sure it had happened, and a small and spiteful part of me hated her for it.

And there was one thing more: My mother had not survived my birth. She had heard me cry, I was told, had held me for a while, but she had lost too much blood, and nothing Florihn had been able to do could save her.

Third daughter, a curse.

So, yes, though the idea made my stomach writhe with the injustice of it, when I looked at Florihn, I could not stifle a pang of guilt.

“Any word from Vestris?” asked Rahvey.

Our idolized elder sister.

My heart skipped a beat at the thought of seeing her.

“We sent to her,” said Florihn, not looking up, “but haven’t heard back yet.”

“She’ll come,” said Rahvey, lying back. “For the naming, if not before. She’ll come.”

It was a statement not of hope, but of faith.

I was not so sure. Vestris was twenty-five, eight years my senior, which was enough to mean that we had barely grown up together at all, though my earliest memories were of her—not Rahvey, and certainly not my devoted but illiterate father—reading to me. She had found work at an ambassador’s residence while I was still small. There she had attracted the interest of men far beyond our family’s caste or social station. Our mother had been, I was told, a beautiful woman, and while both Rahvey and I had inherited something of her looks, it was Vestris who drew people’s eyes. In my childish recollections, our eldest sister had been a figure of exquisite and mysterious appeal, and as her social setting improved, so did the wealth of her clothes. She was a society lady now, and her appearance in the Drowning was greeted with the kind of reverent excitement people normally reserved for comets. Rahvey worshipped her.

“Look at this,” said Florihn to me, pointing between Rahvey’s legs. I forced myself to look, though I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.

“Is that right?” I managed.

Florihn gave me a smug smile and seemed to wait on purpose, as if driving home my ignorance. “I guess books don’t teach you everything,” she said.

The learning my eldest sister had passed on to me had always been something of a local joke, especially considering what I had opted to do with my life.

Florihn was giving me an inquisitorial stare, and eventually I shrugged.

“Yes, it’s fine,” she said at last. “But there’ll be no baby today.”

“I came because I thought it was happening now.”

Rahvey said nothing, but gave me a defiant look.

“This is a time for family,” said Florihn piously. “You’d know that if you spent more time here.”

I blinked. They didn’t want me around. Not really. They just wanted me to feel bad for not being like them. I felt the certainty of it like a stone in my boot that I couldn’t shake out, a constant irritant that might one day make me lame.

No wonder I preferred life up on the chimneys, alone in the sky.

“I have to go back to work,” I said, rising. “Has anyone…?”

I hesitated, and Rahvey gave me a blank look this time.

“Has anyone been to the cemetery?” I asked, my voice carefully neutral.

Rahvey turned away. “We’ve been a little busy,” she said, her voice managing to suggest an outrage she didn’t really feel.

I nodded. “I’ll go,” I said.

“Of course you will,” said Rahvey. And this time the bitterness was real.





CHAPTER

3

ON THE EAST SIDE of the Drowning was an ancient, weather-beaten temple teeming with vervet monkeys and fire-eyed grackles. It was as close to leaving the city as I ever got, a kind of halfway house between the urban sprawl of Bar-Selehm and the wilderness beyond. By day, an elderly priest burned incense and chanted among the weed-choked altars for whoever put a copper coin in his bowl, but by night, the little shrines and funerary markers were haunted by baboons and hyenas. For a city girl like me, it was unnerving, but I had no choice. Two years ago, my father’s remains were buried here.

Papa.

He was a good Lani, a good father, a kindly, brown-eyed giant of a man, quick to grin, to play, to tease. I had loved him with all my heart, and I missed him every day.

“I’ll always keep you safe, Anglet,” he had said. “I’ll always be there to look after you.”

The only lie he ever told me.

I was already grown up when he died, already working, but till then and in spite of everything I went through in the Seventh Street gang, I had never felt truly alone. Papa had always been there, a buffer between me and my sisters, my work, the world in general, ready with a touch, a word, a smile that calmed my raging blood, dried my tears, and told me that all would yet be well. Always. He was my rock, my consolation, and my joy. When Papa looked at me, the universe made sense, and all the words the others hurled at me fell harmless at my feet or blew away like smoke.