“Nearly,” she agreed. “But not.”
They stared at each other.
“How?” he asked again.
“Work,” she spat. “Years of it. Years, training myself to see the patterns. Years, learning the mathematics, the probabilities and all the potential interactions and fluctuations of time and space, all the millions of variables that affect it all.” She sat back, folding her arms across her chest. “And that’s why we’re here. This is the kairos moment, Mr. Masseter. For me. For you.”
“For what?” he asked softly, dangerously.
“My turn to tell a tale, is it? Fine, then.” Petra matched his tone to the precise murderous pitch. “Listen.”
SEVENTEEN
THE SUMMONS OF THE BONE
The Orphan’s Tale
LISTEN.
The last time the waters began to rise, the first to die was Nell’s father. The rain that had been falling for weeks made the bank slick, and Nell saw him go. She saw him lose his footing, saw him grasp for something, anything to hold to keep from plunging into the river Skidwrack. By the time she reached the embankment, he was gone, carried away by waters that just kept rising.
The waters took her sisters, too: the eldest in a sudden flood that caught her as she was chasing the family dog across a field, the youngest when lightning struck the tree the girl was sheltering beneath. Their mother was last and hardest, because when the waters of the river came lapping at the house and Nell knew they had to flee or be drowned, there was still time, plenty of time to leave. But Nell’s mother refused, because she couldn’t bear to leave the place where her eldest and youngest daughters were buried, even if it meant losing her middle child, too. She would not abandon the house, not even when the waters came rushing across the floor and drove them to the roof; not even when the waters filled the house like a bucket and the only thing left to do was grasp a piece of driftwood and hope safety still existed to be found somewhere.
When that happened, even then, Nell’s mother would not go from the house. And when Nell finally dragged herself onto dry ground, she was alone. And still the waters kept rising.
She was fifteen, and she had nothing but her older sister’s blue coat, which she had found caught on the branch of a drowned tree, for protection from the rain. As she hunted for the safety of higher ground, she encountered others like herself, set adrift by the waters, alone and afraid. Each time, they wondered what it would take to stop the floods. The rains kept coming; the waters kept rising. Soon, it seemed, the entire town—whatever was left of it—must drown.
One night, alone in a cave, Nell thought about an old bit of folklore she’d once heard. She was hungry and thirsty and had been awake for days, so perhaps it was delirium that made her decide to try it.
It took her a few days more to find a black cat, another few after that to find enough dry wood to boil water. When all that was left of the cat were its bones, she made her way to the river’s swollen edge and set the bones on the surface. The frothing Skidwrack took all but one. The remaining bone spun gently, as if it were caught in the mildest of eddies. Then it slid against the plunging flow, upriver and out of sight.
A moment later, the figure of a tall man appeared at the bend in the river around which the single bone had disappeared. He strode upon the surface of the water as if it were a road, with a long, dark overcoat wrapped around him and a gray fedora keeping the rain from his head.
Nell watched with her heart in her throat, wiping drops from her eyes over and over as the strange figure approached. At last he stood before her with his coat whipping about his ankles and rain dripping from his hat. “I received your message,” he said in a voice like thunder rolling far, far away. In the shadows under the hat’s brim, a pair of searching eyes considered her curiously. “Put forth your question.”
She folded her shaking hands and cleared her throat, and she saw the dark man smile very slightly, as if there was something endearing about her fear. “I want you to stop the water rising.”
The man put his hands into the pockets of his coat. “That isn’t a question.”
“Please stop the water rising?”
“That is still not a question. It’s a request with a question mark at the end of it.”
“Well—can you stop the water rising?”
He smiled more. “You called me all this way to ask me a question I can answer with a single word?”
The girl realized her mistake and raised her hands quickly. “Wait. No. Let me think.” And as she thought about her question, she realized she had a problem. She had expected to be allowed to make a request, but what the dark man had offered was something different. She could perhaps ask, Will you stop the water rising?—but even if he answered yes, that didn’t mean he would stop it now, or at any time before her town would be wiped off the coast. She could not think of any way to ask him to solve the problem of the rising water.
At last she asked the only question she’d come up with. It didn’t accomplish what she’d wanted to accomplish from this meeting, but it was the best she could think of. “How can I stop the water rising?”
“Ah. Now, that is a good question. Before I can answer it properly, you must tell me why it falls to you to ask this thing.”
He listened as she told him about how the water had taken her family, one by one. She told him how, as she had sought a way to stop the flood, she had seen other parts of
