The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(26)
She’d never known a river to hold so many secrets. Wedding rings and lockets with declarations of love on them, though now discarded. Mirrors and combs lovingly bought for a trousseau left tarnished and forgotten. A shoe worn by a medieval child. Gold coins once spent on amphorae of wine and tribute. Bottles filled with hair and nails meant to ward off witches. The river was the keeper of the island’s secrets, the guardian of time and history.
Ian watched a mother and daughter rinsing out buckets in a tide pool down shore. “But you sell your finds, too, do you not?”
“Yes, of course.” She thought about the distinction she meant to convey as she scanned the rocks, as much for treasure as to avoid twisting an ankle in her improper shoes. “I suppose the difference is we only sell our findings in our shop because otherwise we’d be buried up to our necks in all the bric-a-brac other people toss away or misplace.” She smiled and shrugged, hoping if she made light of it he’d get off the subject. “It’s a bit of a compulsion for us, really. My father is the one who came up with the idea of opening a shop. He was tired of all the clutter in the house.”
Ian walked with his hands clasped behind his back with the easy gait of a hill walker on an evening stroll, despite the rocky, uneven ground. Still, she could sense his mind whirring, somewhat like that odd watch of his, spinning his thoughts and observations into silent conclusions. He asked no more about the scavenging as he stopped to take inventory of the surroundings below the embankment. Edwina watched his face as he absorbed the view so familiar to her—the barges floating by with their heaps of coal, the clap of horse traffic on the embankment above, the whiff of fish and soot and rocks covered in algae still damp with river sludge. The tiny riverside oasis in the midst of the city had always made her yearn for home, for the mountains and rivers to the west. She wondered briefly if he felt the same, coming from the hills and dales up north.
He didn’t strike her as the type to chat about his past, so she leaned forward to inspect an unusual shape poking out of the mud instead. Curious, she bent to dig the object out of the muck with a stick. A flock of seagulls, their gray wings bent like arrowheads, circled and swooped overhead. Crying wolf, she thought, until the cranium emerged bone-white against the mud.
“What is it?” he asked.
Edwina pried the thing up, and even before she rinsed it off in the tidewater of a nearby shallow, she knew it was a bad sign. Bones found in water were always bad omens, but a skull could portend serious misfortune and sometimes death. The gulls screeched above her as she rinsed the enlarged eye sockets of their mud.
“A cormorant,” she said, holding the fragile skull in the palm of her hand. The hooked beak stood out against her chilled, pink skin.
“Do you often find such things?”
“Bones are common enough, but to find an intact skull is a little rarer.” The fragility of the bird’s remains sent a shudder of warning hollowing through her own bones, and she hugged her shawl tight around her, not knowing for whom the portent was meant.
Though she hadn’t explained the ominous nature of her find, Ian checked the shoreline in a way that made her think he understood the omen well enough. “We should keep walking,” he said with a hand at her elbow to move her along.
“It’s this way,” she said, still cradling her unlucky find in her hand, unsure what to do with it. To cast it away could bring misfortune for ignoring the message, but keeping the skull invited a connection to trouble she didn’t wish to attract.
They walked another hundred yards—the length Mary had run with her skirt hiked to her knees to share what she had found and what they had both presumed moments later was a dead man. And yet here he was standing beside her, his flesh robust with life, the eyes clear, and the wounds, both physical and metaphysical, presumably on the mend.
The stranded fishing boat that marked the spot where they’d found him had disappeared. Its owner was likely out on the water in search of a decent haul of eel or skate for market. Even without the boat, she knew the shore well enough to trust this was the place, and said as much. The scent of his blood had washed away, but she was certain he’d lain in the exact spot before their feet.
“This is the place. The star of Venus was angled just there.” Edwina pointed over the top of the railroad bridge above them.
Ian nudged his shoe at the rocks, but with little detectable evidence on the tide-washed ground, he turned his attention to the algae-covered embankment at their backs instead. The wall was a massive structure, faced in granite. The height of the waterline on the stone made plain the temporary nature of the ground they stood on before the tidewater filled back in to reclaim the rocks and mud. She knew from experience one had best be up the stairs by the time the water rose to meet the rocky ground at the base of the wall.
“Do you recall anything?” she asked, wondering if the musty air or the damp of the shore had the power to awaken some buried memory for him. “Any reason you might have been down on the foreshore that night?”
He pulled his watch out and took a reading before looking in the direction they’d come. “You say there was a fishing boat resting this way?” When she confirmed the hull had been tilted perpendicular to the water, he twisted around to view a weathered ladder on the wall behind them, where the vessel was presumably tethered during high tide. He took a moment, as if triangulating between the ladder, the location of the boat, and the steps they’d come down. “I might be getting a clearer picture,” he said, adding the view of the top of the embankment to his calculation.