Maisie, fascinated and vaguely disconcerted, glanced quickly around the room to see if she ought to be worried somehow. At their posts by the sideboard, the Haypottens wore wary expressions, but everyone else seemed to be taking this strange possibility in stride, as if it were nothing more troubling than an awkward conversation they might have to redirect if it got too uncomfortable. Closest to her was Sorcha, her black eyes steady and her tiny wooden seabird hanging from the blue velvet ribbon around her neck. The maid’s round face held a fascinating, unfathomable expression. There was a secret there, for certain.
It was harder to draw secrets out of stillness, but Maisie tried anyway, seeking clues in the tiny uptilt at the corner of Sorcha’s mouth, the hardness of her eyes, the interlacing of her fingers. She held her hands that way a lot, but already Maisie understood that there were volumes to be read in the gesture, if you knew what to look for. How tight was the clasp? How white the knuckles? Were her hands clasped behind her or in front, and if in front, did her arms hang long and loose, or were her elbows bent so that they seemed to rest on her hips? Which thumb was uppermost, the left or the right, and was her middle right finger twitchy or still? How did her shoulders and chin tilt?
No, right now, Sorcha was placid, confident, even defiant. Whatever the others in the room were thinking or feeling or guessing, Sorcha knew, and Sorcha was not afraid. And with that realization, Maisie decided she needn’t be afraid either.
Now Sullivan’s changeable eyes flicked up at Captain Frost. “And you thought I was going to tell a seiche tale. Should we take that to mean you think there’s a seiche in Nagspeake who hasn’t found her sacrifice?” Sullivan smiled. His straight white teeth shone in the firelight. “If there is, you must hope she finds someone soon, or we shall all be washed away.” His grin faded. “I confess I would find that supremely unfair.”
“I don’t suppose it isn’t a she, but a he?” Frost asked harshly.
“He?” Sullivan grinned again. “What say you, Mr. Amalgam? What’s the lore tell about that?”
The old folklorist shrugged. “Can’t say I’ve encountered that variant in the tales I’ve come across, but logic says it must be possible.”
Despite Sullivan’s grin, a palpable tension had filled the space between the captain and the river-eyed man with the scar. “You came here looking for something, didn’t you?” the captain asked.
“Of course I did. Why else does anyone go anywhere?”
“Did you find it?”
Sullivan leaned his elbows on his knees, his whiskey glass clasped in both hands between them. “Landsman, what I came looking for isn’t here to find.”
“Landsman?” Frost glared at him. “Captain for twenty years, commodore for ten, and you call me a landsman?”
“I do.” The young man’s teeth flashed again in what was just barely a smile and not a snarl. “You are. And if you really believe what you’re hinting at, then you know that I, of anyone, have the right to say it.”
Captain Frost shoved out of his chair, crossed the parlor in two strides, and yanked Sullivan to his feet, sloshing whiskey onto the younger man’s battered leather shoes and his own old boots—otterskin boots, had anyone happened to looked closely at them. “Make it stop,” he snarled into the young man’s face. “You’ll make it stop now, if I have to throw you into the maw of the river myself!”
The hot water coils in their iron case above the sideboard gave a sudden thudding rattle, and the room broke into commotion, but with a strange, reluctant delay, as if somehow everyone present had to remind themselves that this lurch from charged words into the physical wasn’t just another bit of storytelling. The innkeeper was fastest. “Belay, there, Captain,” Mr. Haypotten said quickly, hurrying forward with his hands fluttering in rapid and distressed gestures.
But the young man merely shook his head, and something about the motion was enough to halt Mr. Haypotten in his tracks. Sullivan passed his empty glass to Petra, then took hold of Frost’s hands and pried his fingers from his lapels as easily as if he were peeling back the skin of an orange. “The water wants nothing from me, Captain,” he said softly. “Nor has it these twenty years.”
Ignoring the eyes staring at him, Sullivan turned and looked darkly out at the rain pelting the riverward windows. “My sacrifice was made.”
When he turned back to the room, it was not Captain Frost to whom he spoke, but to the upraised face of Petra, who was still seated at the other end of the sofa.
“Once upon a time, I stood before a girl,” he said, “and I told her, ‘I don’t want you to do that for me’ and ‘I can’t ask that of you’ and ‘I can’t let you.’ And she answered ‘But I want to do this for you’ and ‘You don’t have to ask,’ and then, finally, because we both knew I couldn’t stop her—or rather, because she thought I couldn’t stop her and I knew I wouldn’t really try—she walked into the river. And it took her the way the river does. And here I am. I am this.” He took a breath with a catch in it, and when he spoke again, though his eyes stayed on Petra, his voice was pitched to address the whole room. “No, Captain. That water is rising in the wake of some other, or perhaps for another reason entirely. And the river will not be fooled by a false sacrifice, so let’s have no one in this room start thinking of walking out into the flood. It would do no good.”
He turned to stare at Captain Frost, who glared back, clenching and unclenching his fists. Then Frost glanced at his half-hour glass, remembered that he had turned
