House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(33)

But my mother gave me hopes, and like any jail-keeper, she was also the one who had to take them away from me. I disappointed her. At least, so I’ve always thought. Perhaps her hatred for me was just love turned into jealousy that I tried to take more than my lot when she never did. She was scared I was going to ruin myself, and so she tried to close the door, too late.

I want to be the mother who gives my children hope, and doesn’t snatch it away because of fear. I want girls who will grow strong and clever and braver than I have ever been, boys who will carry the Pelim name back to its rightful heights. I want to be a better mother than my own.

All these selfish little desires threading together. Are they the same reasons my mother had Owen? Me? Did we each think to improve on the generation that came before us, or did we just want to be certain that someone somewhere loved and needed us? I sniff. My mother discovered soon enough that a son’s love is only for the length of a childhood. A daughter’s is forever. It may be snarled up with resentment, but it goes deeper. Daughters will always eventually understand the mothers they thought they hated.

Except I’ll never know that truth for myself, not really. There will be no daughters, no faithless sons. I bite at my top lip to stop it trembling. “Idiot,” I whisper to myself. “Idiot.” The word calms me. It sets me back in place.

The sky is pinking outside the carriage. We are near one of the seven bridges that span the Casabi; this one arcs through the grey light, the far end lost in the haze. The unicorns are tired and Sallow hesitates to take them farther. At least, that’s the excuse he gives me. I know he’s afraid of going into the Hoblands, where the filth piles high in stinking heaps and feral children are armed with knives and sharpened sticks. There’s no name I can say here that would grant me safe passage through their world.

I step from the carriage, uncertain of what it is I want – perhaps to throw myself into the Casabi like some grieving lover from children’s stories and let the waters carry me back to Pelimburg. I laugh at my own streak of melodrama. Gris knows I thought I was over that.

“Wait for me here,” I say, and Sallow looks pained, nervous, but he listens. We’ve turned down a cul-de-sac some streets away from the bridge. There are no houses here – just small shops and cafés catering to workers, a few narrow warehouses. People will soon be arriving for work. Already I can hear the faint sound of morning traffic. If I wanted, I could walk away from this place and lose myself in the growing crowds and cross over the bridge.

The carriage falls away behind me as leave the road and clamber over a low stone wall that hasn’t been mended in years. As I draw closer to the river banks, the more it smells like an overflowing latrine. Drowning here wouldn’t be a particularly elegant end. The water stinks, the edges of it caught up in waste and clogged with litter and dead plants. Long reeds grow scraggle-headed on the banks, bowed over with the small woven balls of bird nests. The weaverbirds flitter between the reeds, shrilling at me to go away. There isn’t even a footpath here.

I could walk into the trash heaps and the plague bodies until I cough myself to death, just die in my traces like an animal. Die like my father did, of some disease he should never have caught.

There, Felicita, is that better?



The first rays of the rising sun scatter across the rippled surface of the river, almost blinding me. I shade my eyes with one hand. Marsh birds bark hidden in the reeds, and above me a long ribbon of ibises winds across the paling sky. The flock looks like a dragon curving its way toward the distant mountains.

My feet leave deep marks in the boggy ground. Poison-green grass sucks at my ankles as I draw closer to the river.

What is it I think to do here in this abandoned wasteland - cast myself into the water like one of the desperate and pathetic heroines of the epic poems I hate so much? Not even Jannik is worth that kind of ridiculous display. I pause, sinking a little, black mud oozing up over my pointed and embroidered boots. I’m ruining a perfectly good set of shoes over this.

Nearby, a crow caws harshly.

Felicita, pull yourself together. I lift my head and do just that. I don’t have time for my own drama. It’s wearying.

A black shape floats into view and descends, crackling the reeds. One of the pied crows that stalk MallenIve like tax-collector. It caws again, louder. A small flock of coots is flushed out, their wheezy barks indignant. Another crow circles above. Then another. They are not water fowl, these scavengers.

Something must have drowned here last night. Another plague death. With my sleeve held over my mouth and nose, I peer between the long golden reeds, expecting to see the corpse of a nilly, or one of the smaller goats the Hobs keep for meat and milk.

The stump of a wrist floats on the mud, surrounded by little skimming gnats. The arm is bloated and so white and spongy I cannot believe it once belonged to a person.

Without thinking I rush down the bank, my feet sinking deeper into the oozing black mud. I lose a shoe and kick the other one off into the rushes and the green pond weeds. From the carriage Sallow shouts my name. It’s a distant sound, a warning half-remembered from a dream.

The crows rise in a lazy circle at my intrusion and they drop black feathers over the white corpse. The vampire is long dead, his clothes sodden and torn away from his pale body. Across his skin is a fine blistering rash that I recognize as scriv-poisoning. Cuts run down his skinny chest, shallow and bloodless. His eyes are wide and the same startling indigo as Jannik’s. The white membrane of the third eyelid shows at the corner of his eyes, like a sick cat’s.