Steph Swainston - Dangerous Offspring

‘Did Daddy send you?’ she repeated.

‘As a matter of fact I suggested it to him. Are you all right?’

‘I’m having a great time!’

‘Do you have lodgings?’

‘Yes.’

‘And money?’

‘Yes, of course. Daddy gave me pocket money for the tour, and I can always draw on my account. He fills it up now and again. He’s loaded.’

‘In that case I’ll have a double whisky,’ I said.

‘Fine.’ Cyan shook a five-pound coin from her purse.

‘Ask him to fetch them.’ I nodded and smiled at Rawney, and pushed the coin towards him.

‘Rawney, go and bring some whisky, another wallop for me and get yourself a jug of beer. They don’t take orders at your table here,’ she added to me. ‘It isn’t that Awian.’

Rawney lumbered off to the bar. I called after him, ‘And a couple of baskets of chips!’

‘I wonder where you put it all, you’re so thin.’

‘I fly,’ I said shortly. ‘Cyan, why did you run away? Lightning’s worried sick. And don’t you know it’s illegal to carry bows in the city?’ I took it off the chair arm and slipped it under the couch. ‘What are you doing here? You have to come home.’

She looked me over. ‘There’s no such thing as “have to”. I am not going back to Micawater or Awndyn. Not ever. No way. You can’t make me.’

‘Yes, I can, actually. What are you doing with that hulk?’

‘Rawney? He’s gorgeous.’

‘He’s dim. Lightning wants you to come to the front. We’re about to advance at Frost’s lake.’

‘That old eel-eater. I don’t want to go to the damn dam. I want to stay here.’

‘You’re not lodging with that Morenzian meathead, are you?’

‘That’s none of your business! Hmm…I don’t think I’ll tell you, because you’ll just flutter off back to Daddy and spill the beans. I know what I’m doing.’

‘Do you really?’

‘I was fed up with dull old Awndyn.’ She sighed. ‘I had to get away. Away from obligation! I want to stay here and live it up for a few months. I have a freedom here I never had with Swallow, with Daddy; they’re all living in a dream world. They have no idea how the real world works. This is the real world-’ Her gesture took in the bar and what little of East Bank was visible through the window ‘-This is where the real people are.’ She lit a cigarette and narrowed her eyes against the smoke. ‘I know I’m lucky and I can do anything, but I just haven’t made my mind up yet.’

‘Please come back.’

‘Don’t be crap, goat-breath. You do what you want, you always told me that. Why shouldn’t I?’

I was frustrated that I had to spell this out: ‘Hacilith is dangerous.’

‘Yeah!’

‘You can’t be Rawney’s girlfriend. You might pretend but you’ll never really understand him.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘I can play him along for kicks. He worships the ground I walk on.’

I hissed, ‘No. You might think that, but he reckons you’re his girl. If you try to leave him, he might hurt you.’

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ she said, shocked.

‘Oh, Cyan. Please be careful. You might find it hard to get rid of the likes of him. He knows he can’t really have you, so instead he could try to make your life misery. He could blame you for the fact that he’s Insect fodder and you’re glittering with rubies.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh, yes. Worse still, if he believes you’re something you’re not, he could chase you unto the last of his energy and be prepared to die for what his imagination makes you into. He’d love to marry the heir to Peregrine.’

I glanced over to the bar but fortunately Rawney was taking a long time. He was chatting with a skinny, wasted-looking guy. I took a sip of Cyan’s ‘wallop’-ginger beer that was more beer than it was ginger-and went on; ‘You’ll never understand what Hacilith is like under the surface. It’s impossible, but try to grasp that I’m telling you this from my own experience. My image isn’t just an image, Cyan; I witnessed the last days of the East Bank gangs.’ I pushed my coat off my shoulder so she could see the circle with six spokes that our gang leader had carved there. ‘The other gang, the Bowyers, had arrowheads scarred on their forearms. We used to flay them off and stick them to the door of our warehouse.’

‘Wow.’

‘Yes. Well, I suppose I should never have tried to encroach on their patch. When they caught any of us, they dumped us in the canal lock. When we caught any of them, we nailed them to the struts of a waterwheel. Hence the Wheel.’ I took her hand and traced the furrows of my scar with her finger.

‘I can feel it.’

‘That’s right.’

She didn’t know whether to believe me or not. ‘Didn’t the constables do anything?’

‘Oh, I always tipped off the constables. But they left them revolving round and round for a few hours before they took them down…The Bowyers eventually traced where I lived. I came home one night and found my shop on fire. I ran in, trying to find my master…’ I continued sadly as I put my coat back on. ‘He was called Dotterel. I tried to run upstairs but the steps were burning through. I expect-I hope-he died of smoke suffocation long before the flames reached the second floor…’

Cyan said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I couldn’t feel grief back then, only despair. It was the next inevitable avalanche to happen to me. What sort of life was Hacilith, anyway? My girlfriend pulled me out of the shop as it rose in flames about me and, right then, we determined to leave Galt. We took the road that went left over Pityme Bridge and we realised that even the Castle was possible.’

I never tell Zascai that I used to be a drug dealer, but I let them know my unfortunate adventures. It makes me seem so much more talented for having escaped them.

Cyan said, ‘Hacilith must have changed.’

‘Yes, it’s different now. The underworld is more inconspicuous and a damn sight more complicated, but it hasn’t gone away.’

She took a sip of her drink and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh god. If that’s your advice, I don’t need it. I don’t want Daddy’s advice either, and I certainly don’t want Swallow the mad diva’s homespun instruction. I thought better of you. Let me make my own mistakes!’

‘You don’t want Lightning’s advice? Fourteen hundred years of it?’

‘Fourteen hundred years of boredom, more like!’

‘You’ll inherit Peregrine when you’re twenty-one,’ I said.

‘That’s what I’m running away from! My true place in life, huh. How can I be an Awian lady when I don’t feel Awian at all? Not that being wingless matters; Awians will accept me and anyway, they don’t have a choice. But I don’t feel I belong anywhere. Daddy gave me this-’ She hooked her fingers under the chain of her ruby pendant as if she was about to rip it off and throw it away. ‘He says it’s an heirloom. But I don’t belong in Micawater either. “Come home,” you tell me, but just where home is, I can’t say. Morenzia is the only country that’s free.’

‘Don’t say that in front of Lightning.’

‘Just five families in Awia own eighty per cent of the land. Morenzians don’t have such a silly aristocracy. They don’t have to bow and scrape. You don’t know what it’s like to be a girl stuck in Awndyn.’

I nodded. That much was true.

‘Hacilith is so big! There are so many people my age! I never had friends in Awndyn. But, god, Jant, what does that mean to you? You’re bloody ancient. The Castle protects you, just like Daddy.’

‘You should have seen me at Slake Cross trying to hold my guts in with one hand.’

‘Oh, yeah. Sorry.’ She pinched her cheek and wiggled it. ‘You think you see a girl but looking out of these eyes is a very experienced woman, in experience terms at least as old as you are. Well, nearly. I’ve travelled all over the place.’